May. 26, 2010 - Issue #762: Timeland

Prevue

Waves of delight

Caribou goes for liquid pleasures on Swim

'It's encouraging to me that I've just become more and more excited over the years I've been making music," muses Dan Snaith, aka Caribou. "The nightmare scenario is that you lose that thrill you initially had for music, that feeling when you were doing it as a teenager or whatever; that you become embittered or it just becomes normalized. But I've had exactly the opposite experience. I'm more excited about the music that I'm making now than ever, I'm enjoying playing live more than ever. It just seems to be growing, which is great."

What a delight to hear an artist confess to being exhilarated rather than exhausted by the whirligig exertions of creation—especially after delivering four full-lengths and a handful of singles and EPs over the past decade and supporting major releases with fairly relentless touring. (It's an even more impressive output when you discover Snaith also spent that time completing a mathematics PhD at a prestigious British institution and building towards and sustaining a marriage.)

Exhilaration is indeed a defining emotion of Snaith's latest album, Swim, a buoyant celebration of sonic texture, construction and rhythmic possibility. Swim has the hallmarks of the Caribou canon: carefully considered architectural presence, shifting relationships between space and sound, seemingly organic suppleness and warmth mysteriously exuding from electronic manipulations. Even Snaith's first couple records, made under the moniker "Manitoba" before bizarre legal threats forced him off that particular nomenclatural real estate, displayed a facility with expressing musical ideas in ways that were investigative and inventive without becoming alienating, tiresome or clunky. Despite being solely instrumental, they were as defined and cogent as any decent lyrical songwriter's product.

Snaith's "Manitoba" albums were well received by tastemakers, but 2007's Andorra really broke through, swelling his audience and garnering him 2008's Polaris Prize. Andorra built on earlier work but added a blurry vintage California pop esthetic, deeper sonic layering, and tracks with recognizable vocals and lyrics, bringing Caribou closer to the fold of traditional popular musical forms.

The pressure to multiply the crowd-pleasing hooks of Andorra must have been intense, but Snaith took another route with Swim, abstracting pop and dance music concepts with meticulous clarity and without compromising accessibility.

"After Andorra we toured for a year," Snaith recounts. "It was nice to have time and some space from recording and kind of come back fresh. I felt like I'd pushed the ideas on Andorra as far as possible, so I knew I wanted to do something different. When I got back home and started tinkering around, I was listening to much more dance music than I had previously, so it was kind of a natural thing to follow."

Snaith rejects much of the genre on the grounds of it being "rigid and metallic sounding", but admires British DJ/producer/artist James Holden. "It's dance music, but it ebbs and flows and breathes. The last track on Andorra was an attempt to capture that feeling, figure out how he got that in the music he made, and in a sense, that was the starting point for Swim: going back and listening to that track and thinking that there were lots of different ways to extend those ideas and think more in terms of making music that sounds fluid."

The seed was planted, but water made it grow: Snaith was taking swimming lessons, and his regular immersions "reinforced all those ideas of making it sound kind of liquid", thus giving the album both an organizing principle and title.
"It's just a different sense of dynamic, a different perspective on how you maintain the energy of the song, a different way of thinking about the sonic space of the track, and a way to the openness of the track, the way that it evolves," he explains. "Dance music has a particular kind of architecture, and that's part of the exciting thing about it for me. So long as you have a kind of foundation—the rhythmic propulsive parameters of dance music—then it allows for almost any other kind of instrumentation or esthetic overtop. It's a very all-embracing genre, to the extent that it is a genre, in that once you satisfy a certain kind of foundational base, then the bells and whistles you put above that are up for grabs." V

Tue, Jun 1 (8:30 pm)
Caribou
With Toro Y Moi
Starlite Room, $18

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