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Uptown Magazine - Winnipeg's Online Source for Arts, Entertainment & News

June 3, 2010


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2010-06-03

The evolution continues...

Caribou — aka Dan Snaith — reinvents himself again on his latest album, Swim

Anthony Augustine

Over the past nine years, Dundas, Ont., native Dan Snaith — aka Caribou — has reinvented himself a number of time, but also managed to avoid alienating his growing fanbase.

While 2001’s Start Breaking My Heart (released when he was known as Manitoba, before legal problems forced him to change his name to Caribou) was rooted in sample-based, laptop pop and his Polaris Music Prize-winning album from 2007, Andorra, was an exploration of shoegaze-influenced German psychedelia, his latest album, Swim, channels his love of dance music through a filter that infuses a human element with technology —without losing the forward momentum that is at the heart of electronic music.

“I feel I set that up for myself kind of by accident,” says Snaith over the phone on his way to a tour stop in San Diego. “My second album was very different than my first and similarly, each one has been different than the next. That’s set up the expectation that it isn’t going to be the same thing every time.

“That suits me fine, as I have tended to be schizophrenic in the music I make. I just want to make the music I am most excited about and hopefully people will like it as well. I just can’t imagine wanting to do the same thing over again.”

While the PhD-holding producer has always been influenced by electronic music, the fluid, sonic undertones evident on Swim were actually hinted at on the closing track of Andorra. Snaith was trying to deconstruct how eclectic British producer James Holden approached his tracks.

“The idea for Swim really came from listening to Niobe again and thinking that there are a lot of different ways to push the ideas that were in that track forward,” Snaith says. “It started at the end of Andorra, which is funny because it is such a different-sounding record. I have been interested in dance music in the past, but I revitalized that interest in the last couple years. I have been DJing more and going to see DJs more than bands, and thinking more about the ideas that underlie dance music. It stems from being excited by the state of contemporary dance music, but isn’t necessarily influenced by those trends.”

In the past, Snaith has been more of an architect of sound, someone more focused on coaxing the most out of the machines he was using than writing lyrics.

That’s changed with Swim.

“With previous albums, the lyrics were almost there to mirror the melody,” Snaith says. “They have been fictional setups. If the melody evokes a particular theme to me, I write lyrics based around that. This is the first record where the lyrics are personal, and are about things going on in my life and/or the people close to me. I felt for the first time that I had things to write about.”

Download

Caribou – Sun (Altrice Remix)
http://bit..ly/caribou_remix — Tucson-based producer Altrice’s winning submission to Caribou’s remix competition.

CARIBOU
June 3, 9 p.m., Pyramid Cabaret
w/ Toro Y Moi

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