Caribou mastermind Dan Snaith demonstrates the model-making skills that earned him his PhD in mathematics
DETAILS
Warehouse Nightclub
Saturday, November 3 - Saturday, November 3
More in: Rock / Pop
In an age where everything needs to be categorized, compared and tagged for description, the ever-expanding musical dictionary available to listeners is starting to become a problem. No longer are people able to drop artists into simple categories like pop, rock, reggae and electronic. Instead, the hype stickers garnishing the plastic wrap in your local CD shop sell terms like “acid folk,” “neurofunk” and my new favourite, “indietronica.”
Whether this is due to the vast sea of music available at listener’s fingertips on the Internet, home studios allowing mass sound experimentation on the cheap or simply the progression of popular music, I can’t be sure. What I can say is that when you strip away all the ridiculous tags and just listen to the wide landscape of music available, it’s a pretty exciting time to be a fan.
“I feel like it’s a really good time to be making music that isn’t genre specific,” says Dan Snaith, the man behind “indietronica” act Caribou. “With people’s music tastes crossing over into all sorts of different places, they're not too surprised to hear a band make a record that sounds one way and then make another that sounds somewhat different.”
This is a good thing for Snaith, as the music he creates under his Caribou moniker has taken more than the usual number of turns over his four-album career. In fact, if you were to listen to the electronic sampling of his debut Start Breaking My Heart back-to-back with the classic psychedelic rock sound of his latest release, Andorra, you might be hard-pressed to draw any ties between the two other than the fact that they’re both music and they both sound awesome.
“I hope the albums are coherent and have some sort of me-ness in them,” remarks Snaith. “It’s hard for me to judge how my albums will strike other people who aren't listening to the same music that I’m listening to and making the same music that I’m making from day to day.
“If people have followed me from record to record, I feel very lucky for it,” he adds. “The most important thing for me is making sure I’m making something new and always staying excited about making music, so I end up doing whatever I feel like when I’m recording.”
Pair this mentality with the way Snaith has circumvented the restrictions of traditional recording by using a mixture of looped samples and live instrumentation, and the exciting cross-genre sounds of Caribou start to make a little more sense. In the past, his use of samples has tied down the live version of Caribou to playing songs the same way night after night. However, with the recent addition of a fourth member to the live band, Snaith has been able to achieve what he’s been trying for all along.
“We still use samples for a lot of the flutes, strings, harps and things like that,” he says. “We make the decision beforehand whether we want to keep certain things from the record in the live setting that we might not be able to play live. Now those samples are triggered, so we're able to change the songs more as we go and adapt them to a very live sound.”
“We're more of a band than ever before,” he continues. “A lot of the songs have two guitars, bass, drums and vocals. It's not necessarily that I want to go for that rock sound or anything like that, but being able to play and interact with the other musicians is definitely the key thing this time. It’s a halfway point, which I’m really happy with and excited about.”
