We took a vote, and the results confirmed suspicions: the new Caribou album is the best thing ever. Infectious, viscous dance music with an unprecedented emotional depth, Swim is impressive in its self-contained otherworldliness – the minor flaws in certain songs do not deny the album’s status as a work of genius whose influence is bound to leave a volcanic ash cloud over the flight paths of the rest of 2010’s home-produced records. Daniel Snaith, the Caribou daddy, gave us fifteen minutes of tour-van goodness.
Hello Dan. It’s Dan.
Hey Dan.
We talked to Kieran Hebden [Four Tet] recently and he talked about how DJing in Plastic People, the London club, had the biggest influence on his new album – are the club music flourishes on Swim sourced from your experience of clubbing, or are you very much at the headphone appreciation end of the dance music scale?
Definitely from clubbing, and DJing a lot in the last year. Myself and Kieran are really good friends, we actually live right beside each other, so we’re the first people to hear what each other do. We’ll play each other’s songs while DJing. If I’m trying to bash out a track I’m working on, he’ll play it while he DJs and sees how it fits. Club music has definitely had an influence. We’ve both been to Theo Parrish at his residency in Plastic People, I think certainly our two albums are aligned because of that.
Definitely. They’re not structurally similar, or even overly aesthetically similar, but they’re both more soulful than your average laptop record.
I totally agree, for me it comes from listening to…
[5 minutes later]
Oh shit, sorry, we went under a tunnel. We’re driving through industrial France, and they really like tunnels. But yeah, I’m really interested in DJs lwho present dance music that’s very much sourced in soul music, this more human sort of dance music.
I’m actually recording this interview on Ableton because a banana exploded on my dictaphone. It’s funny how Ableton is seen as this tool for sparse, bleak minimal techno, but when applied in a different way it can make something as warm and weathered sounding as Swim, or [Four Tet album] There Is Love In You.
I hear people use the term ‘Ableton record’, which I think means you’re not using it as a tool very well. It’s something that’s really accessible, but really powerful, and I think its capabilities should be pushed a lot more.
The remix competition for Sun has entirely taken up by my weekend, and I still haven’t come up with anything a tenth as interesting as the actual song…
Oh come on, man. You’ve got to send it in. Did you send it in?
Maybe. Have you, say, had any particularly interesting remixes since 11.35am on Monday morning?
Well the few I’ve heard have been really surprisingly inventive. We’re a little overwhelmed, we’ve already got 70 or 80 remixes, and we’ve been on the road, but it’s going to be fun to go through them all when we get some free time.
James Holden’s remixing one of your tracks, right?
He is, he’s remixing Bowls. He hasn’t finished it yet, but he said he thinks it’s ‘quite good’ so far. And ‘quite good’ by his standards… well, it’s pretty promising.
Is Swim a drug record?
It is in a sense. It’s not anything to do with me making it under the influence of drugs, the whole thing was recorded, you know, totally sober… Actually, this is quite funny, there’s been a lot of speculation about me releasing it on April 20th, i.e. 4/20. I don’t know, does that have any significance in Ireland?
Let’s say it doesn’t.
OK, well for the uninitiated, 4.20pm is like the international time to smoke a joint, as the sort of midpoint between morning and evening, and 20th April is like Cannabis Day. So, if you consider that my record could… arguably… be enjoyed a little more having done smoked some…
…And with that psychedelic album cover…
You can see why people thought it was not a coincidence. But it was definitely a coincidence. I don’t think those rules even make sense!
It’s stoner mythology. When you’re stoned all rules make sense. Andorra was almost entirely made without samples, and would I be right in saying a lot of Swim is sample-based? I heard you visited Africa for some record shopping?
Yeah, that’s totally true. I went to Ethiopia for a couple of weeks. Ethiopian records are incredibly hard to find, they don’t really make too many of them. I think one of the best things to happen to music in the last few years was the release of those Ethiopiques compilations. I managed to track down some records despite the potential case of rabies I almost came down with. There’s a sound from this one record on the album, though you couldn’t pick it out. Back to Ableton, I took this one particular note and expanded it into an instrument, which I liked the feel of.
What was being in Ethiopia like aside from record-hunting? It must’ve been a total culture-shock?
Totally, totally. It’s criminally misunderstood. People think Ethiopia, they think famine, famine, famine, but it’s got one of the richest cultures in the world. It has all these different eras of history… well, I mean, it’s the cradle of civilization! But then, you know, there’s the period of intense Orthodox Christianity, so there are all these amazing churches, and their music and food is just fantastic, but nobody knows anything about it.
It makes industrial France sound boring.
There are a lot of tunnels.
What are you listening to at the moment?
A proviso that I see a really, really big tunnel coming up. Oh Jesus. Well, I’ve been fascinated lately by a lot of different dance music. Young London producers, post-dubstep stuff like James Blake…
He’s playing here this month.
He’s wicked. There’s loads of exciting stuff, even classic producers like Theo Parrish are bringing out their best stuff. It’s such a fertile time for music. It’s interesting, a few years ago I would just listen to bands all the time, and Brooklyn was this centre of independent and forward-thinking music for me, but it’s a really exciting time in London for me now.
And finally, I can’t swim. At all. Will the new Caribou record help me?
Well, man, you and me were in the same trouble up until about a year ago. I couldn’t swim at all. Tell me your history.
I semi-drowned as a child in the local college swimming pool. Went to secondary school. Everybody else could swim so nobody bothered teaching me. So I paddled around thinking about life while everybody else played polo. And then I became a journalist and everybody else became successful businessmen and sportspeople.
You’ve got a good narrative arc right there. The thing for me was holding in breath and being really uncomfortable, and wanting air. But I started doing it so much and spending so much time in water I started liking it, and… you know, you can get these iPods that play underwater now. Put the album on one of those, climb in the pool…
Stoned, at 4.20 in the afternoon…
Exactly, and everything will suddenly make sense.
Caribou’s sweet sweetback badass album Swim is out right now. His full-band rendering of the album hits this year’s Electric Picnic, on the 4th September.
Words: Daniel Gray
