We have two ways of thinking about the sublime. One is the revelation of regularity and harmony underpinning the bizarro phenomena of the world around us, the other is an appreciation of the brute chaos of the universe. With his Caribou project, Dan Snaith somehow captures both.
A title as sweeping as that of his new album, Our Love, indicates that Snaith doesn’t shy away from life’s universals. We know that we can never have a vocabulary that truly describes love, whether it be between father and daughter, girlfriend and boyfriend, or man and sandwich. Our Love does not get lost in the hyperbole native to this effort, but instead finds that love, like the best music, is strongest when distilled down to its simplest, purest form.
And there are, of course, the bangers.
When we talked before, you mentioned that, while it was a coincidence that Swim was coming out on 4/20, a listener might perhaps benefit from having smoked a little something before listening to it. I think that while Swim was club-informed it was still largely heady or meditative. Do you think this record, even given its title, speaks to a different drug one might benefit from being under the influence of?
This is definitely less of a headspace record – I don’t do drugs now, but my impression is that this record would be less rewarding when you’re stoned. It has more direct club influence, which probably comes out of doing the Daphni thing for the last few years. The focus was on doing something more personal, more direct-sounding, less miasmic, choosing the key elements to keep and clearing out space in the mix for the most important parts.
Repetition, mantra and trance is really key in your music – do you meditate?
I do not. Loads of people I know swear by it, but I have a hard time just clearing my mind, it’s always racing. In some ways my life has slowed down, having a daughter – not that that’s meditative, far from it – but it’s meant I’ve had to stop being quite so much of a monomaniac. I think the change in my priorities have resulted in this record in many ways.
Is there a sort of mindful (or mindless) place that you get into when making music? The ‘zone’, in other words.
My wife studied cultural theory and anthropology, and a trendy way of referring to this is ‘flow’, musicians are in states of flow. It’s true to a certain extent, but I find it more playing live or DJing. When I’m making music it’s more the sense of ideas coming thick and fast and trying to capture them before they disappear. It’s an exhilarating thing.
You must be one of the first people to remix their own track.
It’s a particularly schizophrenic pursuit, I guess. It came out of the same impulse that all the Daphni tracks have, really. For me, when I listen to the Caribou album, even though people say it’s made for the dancefloor, I don’t think there are actually more than a couple of songs that you could actually play in a club. They have parts that are too long, or too mellow. I made all this new music and I want to play it out at DJ sets, so that’s why I spent time making different mixes of it. I used to be much more precious about the music that I made, the perspective shifted though, and the title itself reflects that. I realise that it’s about sharing the music, it travelling and taking on different forms for different people. When I find the music in different shapes than how I intended, I find that exciting. People have started remixing the songs without even having stems, which I think is a good sign.
I read somewhere before that you’d written like 600 tracks leading up to Swim, did you have a similar amount of work to pull from this time?
It was worse, actually. Worse or better, I’m not sure. Worse for my state of confusion. There were like 900 tracks, or parts of tracks. It’s the only was I seem to be able to do it, hacking things down like you’re coming through a jungle until you figure out where you’re supposed to be going. My closest musical friend and ally Kieran [Hebden, Four Tet] just has an idea before recording, you know, ‘What happens if I put this, this and this together?’ and then realises it. In a lot of ways I’m jealous of that, I take months and months hacking through. On the other hand, I enjoy that sense of journey and discovery, the clearing of the mist. That gradual thing works for me, I rarely have an idea of what I’m doing in advance.
Maybe you can start another side-project for the rest of the stuff.
Might have to.
There’s a real focus on clarity in club music production right now, stuff like Night Slugs, Luckyme and PC Music records are clean, sharp-edged. But Caribou and Daphni is always rich and liquid, acoustic sounding. Does that kind of more obviously synthesised stuff appeal to you too?
It’s funny you mention that. Those guys, particularly Night Slugs, feed off that state of contemporary hip-hop and R&B production in the mainstream and the underground. That was actually my starting point for this record, I was going to try sound something like that. You can hear that influence in tracks like Dive, I think. I liked the way that if you have a vocal on those tracks it allows you to frame the vocal in this holographic, glassy, 2D way. My favourite track isn’t a particularly cool or secret one, it’s Climax by Usher. It’s a perfect piece of pop production, the melody, the writing, and it feels totally transparent like you could just reach straight through it. I found it really hard when I started making tracks like that to make it resonate emotionally. And I feel that tracks like Climax do both of those well. It was only later in the process of making the record that I was listening to more classic soul records, because my newborn daughter likes listening to Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, stuff like that…
…I don’t know how much babies would get into Egyptrixx.
Maybe though! She loves Kraftwerk, I guess those neon textures are appealing. But yeah, it was only when the soul records began informing what I was doing that everything started to make sense to me. This is my least-textured record, the least sloppy record I’ve made. But it was still hard for me to go to that opposite pole. I think that because that style of production is so ubiquitous right now, it’s good that I didn’t chase that idea.
What’s the last sweet record you came across?
It’s right on my desk here: it’s a disco edits 12’’ called Underdog Edits. It has this fantastic James Brown edit on it that I really wanted to play out.
Caribou plays Vicar Street on the 5th November (tickets here), supported by the excellent Jessy Lanza. New album Our Love is released on Friday 3rd October on City Slang.
Words: Daniel Gray / Photo: Thomas Neukum
