Caribou

Last month, Caribou mastermind Dan Snaith sat down with CMG's Matt Stephens at the end of the band's whirilwind North American tour (this night on a quintuple bill also featuring Four Tet, The Junior Boys, The Russian Futurists and Sunburned Hand of the Man) to discuss his creative process, his influences, his one-time affinity for Yes, and much more.

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CMG's Matt Stephens (MS): So how’s the tour been going so far?

Dan Snaith (DS): It’s been good; this is our last date in North America. It’s been good, but it’s been fucking long. Seven weeks is a lot longer than I imagined it would be, but it’s been lots of fun.

CMG: Do you find the audiences in Europe as receptive as they are here?

DS: Yeah it really differs, and it differs from town to town. You know, some towns here in North America just won’t do anything, and sometimes they just freak out. It kind of depends, because at festivals in Europe people are on a lot more drugs, so they dance around more.

CMG: For some reason I imagine in that in the U.K. your music would be kind of foreign to that audience…

DS: No, not really. The U.K.’s a pretty open music market, and they’re drunk and on five E’s all the time, so you know.

CMG: This is a really interesting line-up you’ve got here. I like how with you, The Futurists, The Junior Boys and Four Tet, you’re each four distinct artists, but you probably share a lot of the same fanbase. Did you orchestrate the line-up? Were you the one who made all the calls?

DS: Yeah, but they’re actually all just friends of mine. I’ve known the Junior Boys since high school, we actually played in a high school battle of the bands together. Our guitarist used to play in the Russian Futurists, and they’ve been friends with my girlfriend since they were kids, so it just totally made sense.

CMG: And Four Tet?

DS: He’s actually the reason my music is released. I met him like a year before I made my first album, and he passed my stuff along to a label. I just came up to him at a festival and started talking to him. We now live five minutes away from one another. This show and this tour in general has just been like hanging out with friends.

CMG: Is orchestrating a two-kit set-up onstage as complicated as I imagine it being?

DS: Yeah, we have to use cues to keep us in time with the two drum kits, because otherwise it would just be impossible.

CMG: I’m curious as to what the process of writing and recording your music is like. Are there demos, or do you work from samples?

DS: There’s no demos, there’s no writing of any kind. I just sit down and start putting samples in, start playing instruments, and just build loops, and build tracks out of those loops.

CMG: Yeah, I was wondering, because “Hello Hammerheads” off the new album seems a lot more minimal than your other stuff. I mean, you’re generally known as a producer, but do you want to be known as a songwriter as well?

DS: I’d rather be known as a producer, definitely. You know, I really really love melodies, and that’s always gonna be a big part of it. That track’s totally an anomaly in that I recorded it in forty minutes, and it’s not at all what I was thinking I wanted to do with this record. But I was so happy with it and it sounded so different from anything I’ve done, it was a real surprise. A fortunate surprise, I guess.

CMG: There was a total shift in sound from your first record to you second one. Was that a conscious move?

DS: I kind of got bored of all that bedroom-y sounding electronic music that came out not because of my album, but just shortly after it, and I was just hearing those same sounds over and over again, just with shit drum programming, crappily put together. It all sounds so twee, like the Postal Service, you know, just really, really polite. Even though I’m making this all on a home computer with no microphones to speak of, I wanted to make something that sounded really big, so that was why Up in Flames had as much shit as I could cram into it.

CMG: This new one kind of resembles its predecessor, but it seems a lot more adventurous and intense. Was there anything that motivated you to branch out, or was it unconscious?

DS: I knew I wanted to work in the same neighbourhood of sound as Up in Flames, you know, big and psychedelic sounding, but I wanted to focus the ideas more, I guess. I think I wanted a record that was more dynamic and mad, maybe from playing live, and because of bands like Animal Collective and Lightning Bolt, and Seventies Kraut-rock bands. You know, have little tracks of just insane noise and then the most stripped down acoustic track I’ve ever done. Toward the next album I want to make music that retains melody and rhythm but is more primal.

CMG: Did you grow up around music as a kid?

DS: To a certain extent. My parents are into old English folk music, so my dad was always playing weird button boxes and violins and stuff. We had a piano, and I started playing that when I was really young, I guess. I didn’t really get into it until I was twelve or thirteen when we moved into the country and that was all I had to do. That’s when I started getting into music, into nasty progressive rock like Yes.

CMG: That’s interesting to hear, because I sure don’t hear a lot of Yes in your music.

DS: I listen to those records now and go “wow, what the fuck was I thinking?”