Jun. 23, 2004 - Issue #453: Jazz City

Snaith-based community initiative

Dan Snaith brings Manitoba to Edmonton for Jazz City

“I’ve always liked psychedelic bands like My Bloody Valentine, but it all was filtered through listening to hip-hop when I was a kid. Sample-based music like dance music, stuff like that, resulted in my music.” You’d think that music created by a Ph.D. student in number theory would be as much fun as reading the collected blog entries of an overweight goth, but Dan Snaith—better known in musical circles as Manitoba—continues to blow music nerds and critics away with each release. His last album, 2003’s acclaimed Up in Flames, was a mash of ’60s psychedelia and post-millennium glitch with a couple of guitars and vocals thrown in the mix. “I wasn’t really thinking too much at all about how people would think about it,” Snaith says over the phone from Toronto. “I was just making music for the sake of enjoying the music. There wasn’t any perverse [attempt] to annoy or do something that people weren’t expecting, but at the same time, I’m really happy how Up in Flames moved on and did something different than the first record, because I didn’t want to end up treading over the same ground.” Up in Flames was a huge departure from 2001’s glitch-pop Start Breaking My Heart. Praised for its organic-sounding psychedelia, Snaith didn’t have any preconceptions about how listeners and critics would receive the album. “I heard something interesting about other artists,” Snaith says, “and how people always say that they wish they would write another album that’s kind of the same as their last or their best but actually, they want a progression. I think if I just came back and made the same album over again, people would’ve said that it was a waste of time. And that’s what I want for bands: I want them to have a bunch of new ideas to blow me away.” Snaith’s habit of digging through record shops around the world, coupled with a few advances in sampling technology, allowed him to go back to his early influences in psychedelic rock to make an album that doesn’t sound as though it were programmed through knobs and switches. From his own guitar riffs to drum loops, Up in Flames was part of a wave of indie rockers—the Postal Service, the Rapture among them—whose dabblings in electronics would flip every hipster’s world on their collective multi-pierced ear. “An artist always wants to make a departure instead of running over the same ground,” Snaith says. “You want to take music into another direction. Although the live-sounding drums are deceptive, I had no manifesto to fool anyone. Electronic music still sounds very electronic and there’s no real reason for it not to have more influence from live-sounding music.” After a year of worldwide touring in support of Up in Flames, Snaith has ditched his solo laptop scene and brought upon a live band, who are starting their first cross-Canada tour. Now accompanying Snaith are two fellow bandmates, as well as two drum kits, guitars, keyboards, samplers and a video show. Meanwhile, Snaith is finding a new world of commercial acceptance opening up for his music. Recently, he licensed his first song to mobile telephone giant T-Mobile for an ad campaign in England. It’s highly unlikely that he’ll go all Moby on us and allow every company in the Fortune 500 access to his songs, but he’s finding that there’s ways to control how his music gets used. “It’s something you have to think about,” Snaith says. “It’s not like I’m an anarchist or anti-establishmentarian. I wouldn’t allow a corporation with massive human rights abuses to use my work. And these days, realistically, a lot of the way musicians make a living is through these things, and if you’re careful and responsible about it, it makes the difference between living as a musician and not living as one, which makes a massive difference with me.” V Manitoba With Jaga Jazzist • The Starlite Room • Tue, June 29 (10pm)

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