>>PREVIEW
CARIBOU
Sunday, December 4
Broken City
Somebody should make a low-key, low-budget, quirky movie about Dan Snaith. Lately, his life has all the elements of an indie flick. For instance, the cult-fave electronica musician-producer just got his PhD in July, from his home base in London, England. In algebraic number theory, to be precise.
"The topic was overconvergent Siegel modular forms," says Snaith.
Yes, indeed. Pretty self-explanatory stuff. ‘Nuff said there.
"Yeah, it’s best if I don’t explain it," he says laughing. "It wouldn’t be very satisfying for the time it would take me."
Not that there aren’t many people out there fascinated by algebraic number theory, but how many of them are successful DJs? At last count, it’s a party of one.
Dan Snaith, a.k.a. Caribou, (formerly Manitoba) is not your average DJ, or your average mathematician. Born and bred in the small-town wilderness outside Hamilton, Ontario, Snaith started playing in indie rock bands at the age of 13.
"Even when I was in Toronto doing my undergrad degree, I was still in indie rock bands," Snaith says. "I ended up doing electronica sort of by accident. I’d be in these bands, trying to make these recordings that were ludicrously terrible. After awhile, I realized that I could record all the parts myself with some pretty basic equipment, and end up with a much better sounding end product.
"I don’t think of the music I make as specifically or overtly electronic," Snaith continues. "It’s just music, and the equipment I use is a means of making it."
So, no possible connection between the potentially solitary obsessive nature of career mathematicians, and the love of making music that doesn’t require anyone else?
Snaith admits to being busted.
"Yeah, the solitariness definitely appeals to me, I have to admit. Both the things I love best have this element of obsessive isolation. Plus, I am definitely a control freak."
The obsessiveness is, ironically, balanced by Snaith’s musical popularity and the attendant pressure to tour with a band.
"I think it’s starting to become a bit of a rhythm for a lot of electronic musicians," he muses. "It’s nice, you get to focus on making the music, and then you get to go out and actually connect with people and play for them. That back and forth keeps me balanced."
That balance was rocked about a year and a half ago when Snaith’s musical persona – then known as Manitoba – was subpoenaed by veteran punkster Handsome Dick Manitoba (front man for ’70s band The Dictators).
Handsome Dick apparently thought there was danger of his career being confused with the soft-spoken Canadian electro-mathematician, and rather than argue the point, Manitoba simply changed his name to Caribou and continued down the highway without so much as a gear shift. So much so that all sorts of musical pundits have taken to saying that the name change was almost cosmically symbolic of the shift in musical direction Snaith had already undertaken. Snaith snorts at this thought.
"The biggest change happened musically a year before the name change happened," he says. "They’re not connected at all. But that’s fine. The name change wasn’t as big a deal as I thought it was going to be. The thing that amazed me was how quickly people picked up on the name change," Snaith marvels. "I thought we’d have years of people being confused, but nobody missed a beat. As much as it was annoying and costly and frustrating, I didn’t have a lot of attachment to the name.
"It’s like, if you look at my song titles or my lyrics – they’re mostly gibberish," he says baldly. "For me, music has nothing to do with words or lyrics, and when I use them it’s strictly about the esthetic that they create. A band name is the same thing. The name isn’t really intrinsically connected to the music I make, it’s just the marker that identifies it. As long as the name has a kind of Canadian implication to it, that’s all that matters to me.
"I’m just glad I didn’t spend a year arguing with an idiot." |
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