Music

It adds up for Caribou: A mathematician who inhabits two different Londons

John Rogers | Tuesday 1 June, 2010 21:48

Caribou’s Daniel Snaith is on the California leg of his current U.S. tour, and he’s losing his voice. “I might be more concise than I normally would be,” he laughs, “which is probably a good thing.”

But there’s no need for brevity; famously academic, Snaith makes an engaging interviewee. He was born in Canada to English émigré parents, trading London, Ontario for London, England ten years ago to undertake a mathematics PhD. A decade later, he’s not trading in his passport any time soon. “I’m definitely Canadian – my parents were English and emigrated to Canada. I’m not very much of a nationalist of anything I definitely like the sense that I’m living somewhere that doesn’t feel like home. London is more of a home than anywhere apart from Canada.”

Since then, he’s been making music full time, first under the banner of Manitoba and then when legal action forced him to drop that name, as Caribou. “I was a student, I kind of studied and finished my PhD and by that time music took over,” he recalls. “I never had a mathematical job, but that’s what I was thinking I was going to do I guess.”

The new Caribou album, Swim, was released in April via City Slang, his first in three years. The title came partly from Snaith’s new found love of the activity of swimming itself. “That’s one half of the reason for the title, the naïve reason,” he explains. “The other being that I had this idea of making music that sounded fluid or sounded liquid in its characteristics.”

It’s easy to see why swimming is an appealing activity in London, offering some much needed space and escape from the heat and bustle of the city. Snaith swims up in Stoke Newington; we compare notes about my local pool in Hackney. “I like London a lot, it’s a difficult city but it has a lot to offer,” he says. “It’s not particularly musical things that attract me to the city, more it being a hub and a metropolis kind of thing, but in the last couple of years I’ve been listening to a lot of young dance music producers, and that’s definitely part of what ended up on the new record.”

The rippling electronica of Swim is a definite departure from the lush chamber-pop sound of his previous album Andorra, taking its cues from various sub-genres of dance music. But it still has a hazy, psychedelic edge that bears the hallmark of Caribou. Minimal electronics are punctuated by dynamic interventions, be it looped bell sounds, groaning brass or violent, tumbling string arrangements that are gone as soon as they appear. It’s a meticulous record in many ways; a producer friend of mine notes that the production work sounds detailed and “pored over.”

“The process that seems to work for me is just to make a lot of music,” explains Snaith. “I made between 600 and 700 half finished tracks for this album and whittled it down to nine. I’m not very good at making nine tracks and them all going on the record.” And what will become of the rest? “There’s a two hour CD that has some of the other ones I like that don’t fit the overall aesthetic of the album or go off on different tangents. But trust me nobody wants to listen to all of those! They’re more like intermediate steps on the way to making the album rather than being fully formed distinct things.”

I wonder if Snaith’s relationship with Fuck Buttons, with whom he went on an epic U.S. tour in 2009, has rubbed off on him. “Andy, Ben and I have become really good friends,” he says. “Andy came around to my place during the recording of this record – he was one of the first people to hear this track, and we were talking about dance music we were excited by. Him and a few other close friends – that was an important part of it I think, sharing the excitement about new dance music.”

The recent wave of bedroom producers and remixers was part of the inspiration behind the new record. “It seems like a much more interesting time for that kind of music than it was a few years ago. There seems to be more idiosyncratic people doing their own thing James White and Iconica, in the wake of Burial things seem to have diversified a lot, which is exciting for me.”

Caribou has more of a connection to the Burial method of working than it might seem upon first glance, working in a home studio. “I record and produce everything myself, but I mixed half of it with David Wrench in Wales and half of it with Jeremy from Junior Boys in Canada.”

All of which suggests that Snaith’s production talents could be used on other bands. “I would be kind of interested – it’s not something I’ve ever done, it’s something that people have approached me about doing,” he says, carefully. “But I work very slowly, and this sounds kind of horrible, but I’m more interested in making my own music than anybody else’s, so more out of a lack of time I’ve always turned that kind of stuff down.”

The Caribou live show has evolved to present the new record. “It actually looks pretty similar – two drum kits and various other instruments and four of us onstage,” he explains. “But inevitably we’ve had to learn how to integrate the technological aspects into the show and it’s worked really really well. In the last few years the technology has improved to the point that all the things that we wanted to do are completely possible. It’s augmented what we wanted to whereas in the past I’ve found technology has inhibited us.”

Snaith’s considered creativity and purposeful approach to making music is one that’s borne fruit again on his new record. Swim melds together the organised, minimal structures of techno with an organic, fluid sound, making dance music that can move more than just feet.

---