Album of the Week: Caribou ‘Swim’

Album of the Week: Caribou ‘Swim’

23 April, 2010 | 4.00AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: album of the week, caribou

Dan Snaith has spent the last decade exploring the space between psychedelic pop, sample-based collage, and playful, analog electronica — first under the name Manitoba and, since the self-important punk dinosaur Handsome Dick Manitoba threatened legal action in 2003, as Caribou.

Caribou’s new album, ‘Swim’, feels like a culmination of everything that he’s done so far, pulling together lilting pop, chunky percussive fills and bright, shivering synthesizer lines into something liquid and vibrant. Moving away from the ‘60s influenced sound of 2007’s ‘Andorra’, ‘Swim’ marks a return to Snaith’s interest in dance music, with 4/4 pulses and familiar rhythmic tropes channeling the music into a form loosely approximating house and techno; like his friend Kieran Hebden (Four Tet), however, Snaith keeps his rendering deliberately abstract, like a blotchy watercolor.

Caribou’s sweet spot is that delicate marginal ground: too idiosyncratic to be pop, too cavalier in its focus to be “real” club music. If you’re predisposed to this kind of sound – hybrid, mutable, unabashedly euphoric – ‘Swim’ offers wonderfully rich, immersive listening. (As far as I’m concerned, it’s a Top 10 contender for 2010.)

Snaith and his bandmates in the live version of Caribou – which is more like a traditional rock band than a laptop act – are currently on tour; I caught up with him on the road to ask about his synthesizers, his swimming habits, and Plastic People.

To start off, what can you tell me about the making of the album?

This is the first album in a while that has actually been influenced by the technology I used. On ‘Andorra’, I just used the computer as a multi-track recording device, in a pretty generic way. But this time, I moved over to the ubiquitous Ableton, and being able to perform all the parameters in a very easy, obvious way has changed the sound of the record. So being able to perform a mix, bringing in effects or playing with the way that tracks pan around, anything like that – being able not just to program them, but perform them. And the same with drums: performing rather than programming the drum beat, but also changing the envelopes while I’m playing along. I wanted the music to sound really fluid, like everything was coming and going.

I know this is certainly nothing new for dance music producers. In the last 10 or 15 years, all those parameters have been up for grabs. But for me, it’s something I hadn’t done before, and I guess I felt like I could do it with a different perspective, because some of the tracks aren’t dance music at all, they’re something else, but I could use those same techniques in a different situation.

‘Odessa’

It doesn’t sound like a record made with Ableton.

I hear that sometimes. I hear people talk about Ableton-sounding records. But it’s capable of doing so many things. I guess what people associate with an Ableton record is that certain things are easy to do immediately. And I guess lots of people make records using the techniques that would be easy to access right from the go. But the more I found my way around it, I didn’t see any limitations that other software could have done better.

You said elsewhere you were doing drums differently this time, playing less and sampling more. How are you doing them? Because I get a real sense of atmosphere, of room tone, from your drums.

There’s very little of me playing drums or of any drum kit sounds I’ve created on there. You’re right, something that’s important to me is—being a fan of lots of old music—sounds having a sense of space associated with them. Not only the sound of the instrument, but the space the instrument was recorded in is an essential part of what I like about the way a lot of things sound.

The individual drum hits on this record, some of them are straight-up drum machines. But a lot of them, I’d listen to an old musique concrete record, and there’d be some blip kind of sound, whether from a synthesizer, or somebody striking something and effecting it in some way, and I’d think, that could be an interesting percussive thing. So a lot of them are samples, in a sense, but just a tiny little sample that would be played to get it to sound the way I wanted in the specific track.

‘Sun’

When you sit down to work, are you beginning with samples and collaging around those until the groove suggests itself?

In the past, over the years, I’ve worked in lots of different ways — start with a rhythm, start with a melody, start with an idea for a combination of a couple different instruments. And then ‘Andorra’ was really, start with writing a whole song, and then record it. Start with compositions and record afterwards. This album really feels like a summation of all those things. There are tracks that started in each of those different ways. It’s nice that it feels diverse and represents a lot of different things that I’ve done, a lot of different ways of working. I had a lot of different ways of making the tracks, so they probably ended up differently than if I’d just started each one with a rhythmic loop.

How long were you actively at work on it? I read that you had whittled it down from 600 tracks—were those just drafts, or full-fledged songs?

Just drafts. I guess I was working on the album for a little over a year and a few months. But if I’m at home, I’m just recording every day. I would be doing that by preference, or necessity, even if I wasn’t trying to finish an album. So I just generate loads of material. Also, that’s the only way I really figure out the specifics of the way I want the record the sound, or what I want the record to sonically be all about, is just by doing it. Keeping the ideas that strike a chord, and working through the rest.

‘Kaili’

And then some of the unreleased material will be on the tour CD, right?

Yeah, that’s right. There are some tracks that I made near the beginning, when I didn’t yet have the idea that the album was going to be more dance-music-influenced. They’re tracks that I like, but they didn’t seem to fit the tone of the album in some way.

I’m eager to hear that; I’m interested to hear what the other possible futures of the album could have been.

It’s funny, though. It sounds ridiculous that it’s whittled down from 600 tracks to nine, it seems like there would be lots of different albums to choose in there. But I never get that sensation at all. I only ever feel like there’s only the nine that should be on the album. All the other dead ends run out quite quickly.

I feel like you’re very conscious of not doing anything extraneous here—you could have gone in so many different directions, but you don’t get distracted. Sure, I would love to hear more of the ‘60s vibe of ‘Andorra’, but it didn’t fit here, and I appreciate that you stuck to one direction.

That’s good to hear. This is the first time I’ve had an idea that preceded making any of the music on the album—the idea of making fluid or liquid-sounding dance music was there before starting recording. I think maybe that’s part of what unified the whole thing: I had this template in my head. I still feel the album is quite diverse, but it ties the album together.

‘Found Out’

I was also really struck by the pacing of the record—you really know how to hold back. Some of your best sounds or ideas don’t appear until towards the end of the track, and then only briefly.

I guess there’s a lot of music I love where my favorite part of the song is the last 10 seconds, or a 20-second break in the middle of the song where something weird happens. The classic example for me is Timbaland: he always seemed to save the most amazing idea for the fading-out part of the song. That’s such a cool thing to be able to do, to have so much stuff that you can save the best part for the very last. I like to make the music surprising. When you think you’ve got the idea of where the song’s going, and then something happens for just a short period, or the second half of the song is totally different than the first.

To ask a really geeky question, what sort of synthesizers are you using? They sound so rich and dynamic; do you have a modular setup?

It’s funny, actually. Through people like Jeremy and Matt from the Junior Boys, and James Holden and various other synth-obsessed friends of mine, I thought, I’m going to put together a modular this year, and it’ll be a big part of the album. But those boutique modular things are made in such limited numbers, and the backlog is so long, by the time it arrived — it arrived literally two days before we left on tour. I haven’t even been able to turn it on yet!

It’s all software synthesizers on the album. The initial idea was that they would be placeholders, and when I got a proper synthesizer, I’d do them over. But I couldn’t just use a generic sound and let it sit there, it didn’t give me the ideas I needed. So I really learned to work with the software synthesizers to get the sounds that I wanted. In retrospect, it colored the album in a huge way. So it’s funny, my expectation was that it would be made on one instrument, but then the temporary instrument did something that was perhaps even more exciting than I’d imagined.

This is an odd question, but what are your thoughts on bliss, ecstasy, euphoria, etc.? All of your music has such a full-on emotional drive to it.

Essentially, the process of making music has always been exciting to me for that reason. The process itself, when you’re working on a track that seems to be working, you get that sense of euphoria, of getting wrapped up in the music and carried away by it. People have always said that to me, that there’s always a kind of joyous thread in my music. I have a happy life, but I don’t think it’s because of that; I think it’s because I just love making music so much, and I get so absorbed by the process, and that blissed-out, euphoric feeling comes from that. It’s like an addiction to the sounds themselves.

Are you synaesthetic?

No, I’m not at all. People often say to me, “When I listen to this track, I picture this or that” — not synaesthetic people, even, but they represent the music visually in one way or another. I don’t do that at all. I only think in sonic terms when I’m making the music.

That’s interesting, given the record cover, which is so colorful and visually vibrant.

Things like the record cover or the music video or the visuals for our live show, those are great opportunities for people who do things visually to have their take on it. So the artwork, for example, is done by a photographer friend named Jason Evans; he does all my artwork and all Kieran’s artwork. What an exciting thing, since I don’t have any visual picture of the music, to see what he would associate with it.

‘Bowls’

I was listening to ‘Bowls’, and it reminded me a bit of Four Tet’s recent material. I understand that you two are friends?

We’re very close friends. He lives just down the street from me. A lot of people have said that there’s kind of a congruence between our two albums. It’s for the totally natural reason that we spend all our time hanging out, talking about music together. He was playing at Plastic People a lot and I’d be like, “Hey Kieran, can you play this track?” So he played ‘Bowls’ pretty much every time he played at Plastic People. Likewise I was playing ‘Love Cry’ when I was DJing.

It feels like your careers have sort of evolved in parallel.

Kieran’s the first person who got my music released. He’s the person I gave a demo to initially, and who got it to the Leaf Label, which started releasing my music. When we first met, it was kind of uncanny, how close our musical tastes were and how well we got along; we immediately felt like we’d found musical kindred spirits.

How explicitly were you engaging with dance music on this record? Part of the album’s success, I think, is that it doesn’t try too hard to be a dance record — it pulls elements from it, but it’s still eccentric.

I guess the people that I love in dance music are the people who do just that, they make dance music at the periphery. A track like Villalobos’ ‘Enfants’, the fact that it’s just a Christian Vander loop for 25 minutes, and yet it’s a huge club anthem in some sense, that’s so exciting to me, that such a strange piece of music can connect with people. The people that I love—people like James Holden, Carl Craig—the influence for them isn’t from hearing something that works well in a club, it’s because they listen to a bunch of weird music, and it all seeps into the music that they make.

Theo Parrish DJ’d every month in London last year, and I was down there whenever I was in town. It was so amazing — the music he makes can be so strange. There was this track, ‘Going Downstairs’, from 2008, I remember hearing that for the first time in Plastic People and thinking, For the last 30 minutes people have been dancing to a track that’s just a tambourine and a guy repeating the words, “I’m going downstairs”, over and over again! That’s the dance music that appeals to me most, that’s danceable by accident, almost, rather than using all the tropes of dance music.

‘Hannibal’

That really comes across. Like ‘Bowls’, you could have thrown in a big 909 hi-hat, and in fact there is a track with something like a 909 hi-hat, but it’s sort of willfully perverse.

I feel that’s one of the strengths of dance music, talking about these tracks that are exceptions, but are still accepted — it can absorb lots of eccentric things, as long as it fulfills some sort of rhythmic requirement. It can be quite accepting of weird influences and inputs.

‘Lalibela’

You’re lucky to have a place like Plastic People where you can get that.

I guess I see a very small slice of dance-music culture, but whatever music I’m interested in, I’m always interested in a small little niche.

Making this album, I stayed at home and made music all the time, went swimming every day or two, and went to Plastic People every couple weeks, and that’s pretty much all I did for the last year and a half.

When I interviewed Matthew Hawtin recently, he associated swimming with his fondness for repetition.

It’s definitely part of what I like about swimming: the repetition. It’s meditative, unconscious activity. You just do this repetitive thing that allows your mind to wander. But as far as the music that I make, I don’t think it’s ever been accused of being minimal! That’s probably my worst flaw, I fill up every single space in all the songs I make.

For me swimming was something in opposition to making the music — I needed some space, some activity, where I could go away from the music for a couple of hours, and let the ideas percolate around without them being right in front of my face. Also, with the whole watery aesthetic, it did seep into the music as well.

‘Jamelia’

The vocals are very different here than on ‘Andorra’. Was that intentional?

My history with using my own voice is that I’m not a singer. I started barely being able to hit a pitch, even. It’s been a process of growing confidence and growing my understanding of what I can do with my voice and the way that I like it to sound. Even with ‘Andorra’, I sang on every track—and it’s kind of a pop album, as far as I’m ever going to make a pop album – but I still disguised my voice. There were lots of different layers of my voice on top of one another. This is the first album, a lot of the songs, I just turned on a microphone and sung the song all the way through, just one take, not layered. For better or worse, this is the sound of my voice, rather than being disguised or produced too much. It feels really good. In many ways this feels like the most personal, the most “me” record that I’ve made.

How are you translating the album to a live setting?

I like the idea that it’s quite a different thing from what’s on the record. When I’m making the record, I quite consciously don’t think, How are we going to play these songs live? I don’t want that to affect what ends up on the record. When, as a band, we started discussing how we’re going to play these songs, initially it seemed like it would be quite a challenge, because it’s more overtly electronic, so how are we going to do it in an interesting, spontaneous way? Maybe five years ago it would have been impossible or very difficult to do it the way we wanted to, but actually we’ve been able to realize all the ideas. I think the impression that people will get is that they’re just watching a normal band. The electronic stuff is so well integrated, whether it’s drums triggering something or keyboards triggering something, or microphonic inputs triggering something, anything can be interacting with anything else. Electronic music can be played just as spontaneously, just as “live,” as a band in a conventional sense these days.

• (6) Comments
• (4107) Views
• Get Caribou on Beatport