Caribou Interview



Canadian Dan Snaith’s project, Caribou, is an interesting journey through musical landscapes. It began with his early work, Start Breaking My Heart, which delves into the world of softly perpetuated electronica. From there, with 2003's Up In Flames, Snaith began looking down into the valley of psychedelia from atop the mountain of big beat he had crafted. With his two latest musical endeavors (2005's Milk of Human Kindness and this year’s Andorra) Snaith has embraced the psychedelic and sunny day classic pop that crept in the shadows of his creative mind. Listening to Caribou can bring to mind the influences of anyone from The Mama’s and the Papa’s to Aphex Twin. Snaith and company will be dropping by The Opolis in Norman on October 21 with Born Ruffians opening.


I read an interview where you described your songwriting process as "Just throwing everything in and sorting it out later on, which is definitely the approach I take to it." Could you elaborate on what it's like when you write your music?

that sentence is made in reference to the way that I just constantly record and record and record when I'm making a record and then use my favorite bits. I know some people can just make 10 tracks and those are the tracks that end up on their album but for me the best way of working is to write tonnes of music and then pick the best elements and put them together into an album. it's so hard to get distance from what you're working on that I find that recording a lot and then letting it sit for a while is the best way to get an objective view of it.

You incorporate a lot of samples in your music. Where do they come from? Are there specific musicians you like to sample from?

actually on this record there are hardly any samples at all... i play almost everything on the record apart from a few string parts which i stitched together out of little bits of strings from old records (and of course Jeremy Greenspan's vocal on She's The One). regarding the samples on my old records though... i just buy tonnes and tonnes of vinyl and dig through it to find good snippets that are useful or sound good. i buy the records to listen to (anything from old jazz, psych rock, avant composers, disco, music from around the world, etc) but end up finding tiny pieces that i want to use on my records. almost all the artists i've sampled are long forgotten i guess...

Since you grew up in the country side of Canada, how where you introduced to music, and how did you get started making it?

i started playing piano when i was about 5 years old but didn't really get into it until later on i had a teacher who taught me about pop music and how music fits together. after that i spent most of my teenage years playing piano... jazz, classical, pop... anything i could get my hands on. the other big change was when a friend played me electronic dance music that was coming out of the UK at the time (Warp-y stuff, rave-y techno) and i realised that i could very easily get a hold of enough shitty gear to record like they did - all of a sudden recording was something feasible and not something that had to take place in a million dollar studio.

I sense a lot of classic psychedelic rock influence in your songs. Was the psychedelic era in classic rock heavily indelible on you?

i think i like psychedelic music in general... from 60s psych, to 70s free jazz, to my bloody valentine and early mercury rev to animal collective and gang gang dance, to james holden... it's the idea of using non-musical sounds and effects to create a real auditory world that appeals to me... my music is very much headspace music that i get lost in when i'm recording and so all those kind of ideas about recording that first surfaced in the 60s like using tape loops, effects etc appeal to me immediately.

What recently released albums are you currently listening too?

animal collective, james holden, panda bear, koushik 'out my window' (soon to be released).

What old albums do you like?

that's too open ended a question! i don't really look at music as being new or old. i'm just interested in hearing the musical ideas that are in the music and not so much the context of when or where it was recorded or even by whom. we're selling a tour cd with a dj mix of mine (and some other tracks) on it on tour and it has a good sample of some of the music that's caught my ears over the last while... disco, free jazz, 70s rock, etc. etc.

What is your songwriting process like?

this was the first album where i actually wrote songs before recording them. always before it's been the same process - improvising over top of a loop and building up layers on top of one another to make a track. this time i actually sat down with a piano or a bass or whatever and wrote the songs out and worked out the arrangements before i started recording. this was something totally new for me... it was all about squeezing as many compositional ideas (melodies, harmonies, countermelodies, chord sequences, arrangements) into the tracks so that the album is as dense and succinct as possible. in short it's my pop album.

Has the creative process changed since your first album Start Breaking My Heart was made?

only really in the songwriting changed described in the last answer and the fact that there are less samples in this record. the way i record is generally extremely flexible - i don't feel it really limits me.

How many different instruments can you play?

i play a lot of instruments in a half-assed mediocre fasion. i still think of everything in terms of a piano and if i practiced a bit i'd probably still be decent at playing piano. i play drums and guitar in a very functional fashion and lots of others poorly... to be honest spending a lot of time becoming a virtuoso on a particular instrument would be a waste of time for me. i'm much more interested in the writing and the production than in playing instruments. that being said... playing live is a great opportunity to get back to playing live music and getting better at doing that a again and it's something i really enjoy when we're touring.

You're a doctor of mathematics. Does math theory come into play when you are creating a song's structure?

i'm afraid not. i haven't looked at any mathematics since i got my degree 2 years ago. they're both solitary, absorbing mental occupations but that's where the parallels end. i'm low on concept when i'm recording... i'm a musical aesthete through and through.