Rob McCallum chats with Dan Snaith on the first date of Caribou's much anticipated European tour
Could the 17th April have been a more perfect day? The sun beat down over East London’s Rough Trade Records, as new material from Blur was being sold from its shelves for the first time in over 7 years. After a topless Pulled Apart by Horses did exactly that to the small stage in the store at 11am, Caribou came to play a warm-up show to his mammoth European tour, starting that very day.
Check out the video for the opening track of ‘Swim’ (yes, this opens the record) below.
Even at this early stage of the year, it seems hard to imagine an electronic record – if at all any record – that could better it before the close of 2010. It’s one that reeks of the range in music available to artists today, with a hugely broad cross section of the past, present and on the merits of it, future. Following on from ‘Odessa’, it stands out as Daniel Snaith’s most important release of his career, either as Caribou or as Manitoba. We find out more.
Rob: You've just finished rehearsing for the tour – how do you feel it’s all gone?
Dan: Good, really good actually. I'm kind of excited to start doing lots of gigs because the show feels really good, but I think it will only get more and more exciting the more we do it.
The reception to the record couldn't really have been any better.
Yeah, it’s been amazing. I kind of thought people would hate this record – it would be too weird for them, or I don’t know, it would be too confusing given how different it is from the last one.
It sounds kind of like a more mature return to your Manitoba work.
Yeah, it feels quite comprehensive for me, like it covers lots different things, rather than focusing on one thing that I'm interested in musically. It covers a lot of ground, which is nice for me because I guess I listen to so much music I want it all to be kind of represented in one place.
What have you been listening to in between 'Andorra' and 'Swim'?
Lots of dance music I guess. I don’t know how much it’s directly influenced the album. A lot of young dubsteppy kind of people like James Blake, Ikonika, the weirder stuff Villalobos does, and Theo Parrish has been playing at Plastic People every month, so I've been going down to that. This seems like a really exciting time for dance music, it didn’t directly influence the music, it just got me excited about the idea of club-based music again.
The structures of your tracks seem to get increasingly complex – how do you begin to sketch such a thing?
It really varies. The Andorra stuff was really song-written compositionally, in the way it was put together, whereas some of the earlier stuff was just loops on top of loops. This album's really a bit of both, like a loop that will kind of evolve into a verse or chorus. It really varies and I think that’s good, it means that I can have lots of different ways into making music, it's not like I always do the same thing.
You write the records on your own then play with the band – what's the thinking behind doing it this way?
I guess the recording of the record is such a slow, almost laborious process, but there's no pressure when I record it at home – its just me. I wake up, start working on stuff and its not like I'm in a studio with a deadline or anything. I just like that, working at my own pace. Whereas with the live show, I can't imagine how else I'd do it. It’s so nice to have these guys – it’s a real collaborative thing when we put the show together and we all decide together how it’s going to work. It gives me a balance of the very solitary music making to then playing it live.
It almost seems to me you have like a Caribou live show then a Caribou record sound?
Yeah, I kind of like that, that they're two different things because they're two very different parts of my life. It makes sense that they're not trying to do exactly the same thing.
You've been in the game a relatively long time now, making you're first release 'People Eating Fruit' on Leaf in 2000. How do you think things have changed?
I'm just so excited about the state of music at the moment, the amount of different music being made and how diverse it all is. It’s not like everything has to follow one trend. And access to different music is so much better than even when I started making music. You can hear about some amazing record from twenty years ago that you've never heard, look it up and you're listening to it five minutes later. It's unbelievable.
You studied mathematics at university; do you think this affects your approach to music?
Not in the way people imagine. To me music is a really emotive thing; it’s about being intuitive, unpredictable and emotional. People kind of think about mathematics quite inaccurately as being very sterile and rational, but that’s the furthest thing from the way that I think about music.
Caribou plays a sold out show at Corsica Studios on 20th April, before returning to the capital to play Heaven on 16th June. He is also set for a slot on the Eat Your Own Ears stage at this years Field Day festival.
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