If you’ve been keeping up with the stream of Tiga’s excellent bi-monthly residency at BBC 6Music, you’ll know the Canadian tastemaker is enthused about a lot of different music right now.

While some might associate the name Tiga with high-sheen electro-pop or the more heavy-duty gear he champions through Turbo Recordings, his current tastes reach to moody UK bass music, purist techno, deep house and beyond. The tracklistings for the My Name Is Tiga show in 2011 range from Untold and Zomby to Regis and Joey Beltram to Mr Oizo and Boys Noize.

All this adds up to a fascinating DJ who can’t easily be pinned down, and inthemix got Tiga on the phone recently to find out what side of his musical personality we’ll be seeing at Field Day, Summadayze and Summafieldayze this summer. Will it be the brash, noisy direction he’s forged with Zombie Nation as ZZT or sets filled with festival curveballs?

“Truthfully it’s not so easy,” he mused on the festival brief. “I feel there’s a certain expectation when crowds reach a certain size. Times are short and people want to go crazy – not all the people, but enough of them to make it difficult to experiment. I feel the range of what you can play gets narrower and narrower.

“There are a lot of people who are very courageous and say, ‘Fuck it, I’m just going to play exactly what I want’. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

“For me, I’m kinda in the middle,” he went on. “I’m an old-school DJ. I want to entertain. I want people to have a good time – I’m not trying to educate, I want it to be fun, especially in Australia where they love having fun!”

As for what he’s packing for the trip: “The short answer is it’ll be a new kind of set: techno-oriented, going a little deeper, focusing on new stuff that people probably haven’t heard. I’d go crazy playing the same stuff all the time.”