Dan Snaith has water on the brain.
No, the electronica artist who records under the name Caribou hasn’t come down with a bizarre medical condition. Lately, he’s just a bit fixated on water. Literally and musically.
Ever since his wife got him swimming lessons for Christmas, the 32-year-old composer and performer has spent a lot of time in the pool — as reflected in the title and watery aesthetic of his highly anticipated fifth album Swim, which came out on Tuesday.
“Actually, the idea of wanting to make an album that sounded like the elements were liquid or fluid in some way came before I got into swimming,” explains Snaith, who was born in London, Ont., but has lived in London, England since moving there to get his PhD in math in 2001. “Getting into swimming probably just compounded the fact. I’m such a hermit when I record. I was working on music all day, and the only time I would leave would be to go for a swim in the middle of the day. I’d be in this liquid environment thinking about music, so I assume that had some impact.”
Yeah, maybe. Swim is awash with aquatic sonics, from dripping synthesizers and flowing arrangements to swirling production that washes from side to side. Artistically, it may be his most coherent and consistent work to date. But paradoxically, it’s also his most danceable disc, with strong anchoring grooves and prominent percussion floating atop the waves.
“Over the past year, along with swimming, I’ve been going out to clubs and concerts more often at night. I’ve been DJing more. And I’ve been buying loads of dance music,” says Snaith, who used to be called Manitoba until faced with a lawsuit from Dictators frontman Handsome Dick Manitoba. “Lots of people are doing interesting things in dance music right now, and getting away with them. People think of dance music as being very formulaic, and I suppose in some ways it is a very rigid genre. But you can also make a song like Bowls on this record, that has a harp and Tibetan bowls as the main instruments. And you can play it in a club if it’s got a rhythmic groove. So there’s no taboo about doing strange things. So I found that kind of liberating and exciting.”
And inspiring. The nine songs that ended up on Swim are just a drop in the ocean of music he recorded.
“I made between 600 and 700 basic tracks — either a loop or a verse and a chorus or whatever. I’m incredibly jealous of people like my friends the Junior Boys. They can make 15 tracks and nine will go on a record. I can’t understand how they do that. It’s incredible. For me, the process is as mysterious and opaque as it was 10 years ago. It’s a matter of generating as many ideas as possible and then sifting through them to find one that still seems interesting a week later.”
As for the rest of them — well, let’s say they went to a watery grave.
“I never go back to them, even though there are 590 tracks just sitting there. One might think it would be hard to choose, but it’s always totally obvious to me. After letting them sit for a while, I know which tracks should go on the album and which ones don’t need to be finished. That’s not the point of them; the point of them is to be part of the process of making the record.”
Another thing that went into the process: The $20,000 that came with the Polaris Music Prize he won for his 2007 CD Andorra (full disclosure: I was on the Polaris Grand Jury that year). After donating some of his windfall to the Stephen Lewis Foundation and Ecojustice — “I felt quite responsible getting a big whack of money” — he spent the rest on Swim. “This is the first record that’s been mixed professionally and properly. And I think that made a huge difference.”
But one thing he’ll never change is his approach to vocals. While other electronica artists utilize samples or recruit professional divas, Snaith sticks with his own breathy, idiosyncratic and — as he openly admits — untrained voice.
“My music is a very personal thing that reflects me,” says Snaith. “It would seem like a very strange idea for me to get a professional singer. That’s not what my music is about at all,
creating a polished thing. It’s about creating something about me.”
And something that he and his trio — who hit the road in Canada early next month — may or not be able to perform live.
“Even though it would be an obvious thing to do and make our lives easier as a band, I usually avoid thinking about whether we can play a track live when I’m making it. That might close some kind of avenues that might be interesting. But making this record, there were times when I thought, ‘How are we going to play this? Have I gone too far?’ ”
Even for a beginning swimmer, Snaith isn’t afraid to get in over his head.
darryl.sterdan@sunmedia.ca
