For Dan Snaith, a.k.a. electronic musician Caribou, winning the Polaris Prize for his fourth album, 2007s Andorra, was vindication for seven years of hard work. The award, given annually to the best Canadian album, was an odd nod considering the solitary nature of his bedroom recording and the cultish appeal of his prior releases. Snaith suddenly found himself held up as an example of great Canadian music. It was a surreal surprise. Of course, creating an album with mass appeal was the very idea of the 60s psych-pop inflected effort.
Id made music up to that point by starting with a loop and putting another loop on top of that and layering things up, Snaith says on the road between tour stops in Toronto and Ottawa. I made a lot of music that I was happy with and really liked, but I was never going to write a pop song in that way. So I took that as a challenge and something Id never done or thought about doing before learning how to compose, arrange, be concise and put things into a pop song format.
Indeed, Snaith completed a PhD in Mathematics because he couldnt conceive of wringing a career from making music. One of the primary things that drew him to electronic music was the idea of breaking through its usually icy, sterile veneer and making something that mixed organic elements with cracks in electro-pops steely precision. He got his first break around the millennium when he encountered Keiran Hebden, whod already found success in a similar vein with his project Four Tet. Hebden passed Snaiths music along to a label, helping make his dreams possible.
After the success of Andorra, Snaith was concerned hed be pigeonholed as a bell-bottomed nostalgic. Personally, hed always enjoyed dissecting music and felt perhaps Andorras lilting harmony-enriched, electronics-infused pop was too easy to unlock. So he sought to find my own voice, that isnt in response to another kind of music, but a collection of sounds and aesthetic production qualities of my own.
That intent, and a variety of new professional occurrences coalesced into Snaiths new album, Swim, a surprisingly funky, otherwordly dance-inspired blend. It germinated out of an increased presence in the DJ booth, and more frequent trips down to the local dance club where Hebden and other friends were spinning. It was abetted by his recent embrace of Ableton Live, a nearly limitless track-manipulating software program that replaced his antiquated Acid, opening up a wealth of new sonic possibilities.
He recorded some tracks with a horn section after a couple concerts with a 15-piece band, overlaying his bustling electro-pop on songs like Kaili, with a late-60s free jazz element thats always been a bedrock of my music taste. Lyrics, which were previously something of an afterthought, became more personal and central to the idea and execution of individual tracks. Snaith also took his bedroom roughs into a studio to be mixed adding depth and size to the sound, while involving outside individuals (engineer David French and Junior Boys musician Jeremy Greenspan) in the final process for the first time.
Thats part of the Polaris Prize money thing, I was thinking about doing things differently, says Snaith. Being more influenced by dance music, which is such audiophile genre, youre thinking about this being played really loud over a really hi-fi PA system. I wanted to capture that clarity and also get somebody elses take on it.
Though concerned that fans of Andorra might be confused and possibly alienated by the new albums approach (which isnt too far removed from efforts prior to his breakthrough release), he felt impelled to follow his muse and remain steadfast to his musical ethos.
Itd be unfortunate if nobody liked it, but I feel like I have to release the music that Im most excited about making, he says. It seems to have turned out quite to the contrary. I expected more people to be confused by this record than seem to be. Theyre happy, and the response has been really great.
Tue., May 18, 8 p.m., 2010