Dan Snaith is like this Super Canadian: when he had to change his Manitoba moniker because an angry has-been was threatening to sue, namely punk rocker Dick Manitoba (‘‘the equivalent of John Smith suing the Smiths’’), he went for one of the most Canuck of all animals, right there next to the beaver.
Then Caribou won the Polaris prize, the most highly regarded 20 000$ to be handed out in the Canadian music industry, for his 2007 sixties pop opus Andorra. And although Snaith has been living in London for many years, where we caught up with him on the phone, he admits that he’s jonesing to be playing here again. ‘‘We’re in a rush, you know. Gotta get home.’’
We talked about the already very praised new album, Swim, as well as math and music, his two callings.
When Andorra came out, the expression ‘‘solar pop’’ came about a lot. Where were you going with Swim? Aquatic dance music?
The most important thing for me – because I’m such a huge obsessive music fan – was to borrow large chunks of aesthetics from all over. With Andorra, I was obviously borrowing from the sixties style of production and sound. And then I thought I’d made it too easy for myself. I didn’t want to have crutches anymore. With this album, I wanted to make my own sonic fingerprint and palette of sounds, and push those ideas as far as possible.
Did you record in the same small room you did for Andorra, playing all the instruments yourself?
Yeah. All my records were done the same way. It’s all me in a small room. But that doesn’t really place much of a limitation on the sound. The last thing I want any of my albums to sound like is like they’re the product of working in a small, lo-fi environment. Especially with this record, I was pretty evidently influenced by dance music, club music. 
Not by a particular artist or genre, even though there is tons of exciting stuff coming out these days, but more of the general idea, the propulsiveness, the repetitiveness… The idea of a club as a interesting sonic space where people listen to music in a really audiophile environment was very exciting to me.
Did living in Europe ignite that interest in you? Because club music is much more developed and present there than in North America…
This is true. But I’ve been living here since I finished my PhD, so a lot of my albums were made here. I’ve always thought that I could make there anywhere. I make them in such an insular way, it’s just me disappearing into my head making the music. But at the same time, it is kind of an exciting time in London for dance music at the moment. I actually rarely leave the house when I’m recording, I’m kind of a hermit, but the majority of the things I wanted to do when leaving the house were to go to a club instead of going to see bands for example. Which is pretty much the opposite of what it’s been so far for me.
Do you have a pretty good idea of what you’re going for from the very start, or do you plunge into things, making it up as you go?
Generally, that’s the case, I have literally no idea. And that’s kind of the excitement, figuring it out and messing around until it appears. But this record is somewhat of an exception. I wanted music that sounded like dance music specifically, but constituted of liquid elements. All the elements in the mix are kind of washing from one ear to another, washing towards you and disappearing, behaving like a wave, a fluid. I guess that’s the overarching aesthetic of the record. Every other time I’ve had a concept that I’ve tried to realize, it’s always come out as forced and contrived. I had to stitch the ideas together, because it’s always better in theory than practice. Music needs that emotional element to make it thrive.
Andorra shimmered with melodies on one side, and rhythms on another. Would it be safe to say that Swim meshes percussion and melody a lot more?
In the past, the percussive elements on the records came from me using a sampler, or playing the drums with all big, ostentatious drum fills… And I wanted to get away from that, but still wanted my music to be very rhythmic. And yes, some of the instruments I used on this record are kind of a hybrid of being percussive and melodic. Say, on the track Bowls, I used the sound of Tibetan bowls that I picked up when I was in southwest China last year, and they carry the rhythm with the melody and harmony of the song.
You are two things that are very mysterious to people: you’re a music writer, and you’re also a mathematician. You say you like to fumble around to find your way through music, do you find it’s the same with math? I’m sure you get that question all the time…
Always! But I like the way you put it. The thing that I like about both of them is that they’re opaque. When you start trying to understand a math problem on a research level, or make music from scratch, there’s no systematic way of doing things. And I know people think the opposite about mathematics, but it is a game of intuition, and yeah, fumbling your way towards an understanding of something, and see a glimpse until things fit together at the last minute. 
Do you feel like having that level of education is something you can bounce back on eventually, or sets you apart from other musicians or bands?
I don’t think about it that way. I guess if I needed to do something other than music in order to cover the bills, I would be a math teacher, but mathematical research is such a race! It consumes your whole life. It’s extremely competitive, and a) that’s not an environment that I like particularly and b), having taken out 10 years out of it for music, I wouldn’t be able to go back and do research. But teaching would be something I would love to do. I’ve always viewed music as a dream, dreaming to do what I’m doing right now. I always thought of it as a hobby, and if no one would be releasing my music or listening to it, I’d probably be spending just as much time on it.
Caribou will be playing with Toro Y Moi at La Tulipe on May 5th, after stopping by the Toronto Phoenix on the 3rd and Ottawa’s Babylon on the 4th.
by Evelyne Côté
