Interview: Caribou on getting turned back onto dance music

Ragged Words is starting to wish it had paid a visit to East London electro haunt Plastic People during the past year. Not just because the Shoreditch club, currently under threat of closure, gets name-checked with every Gold Panda, Joy Orbison or James Blake that comes along to push electronic music in an exciting new direction; but because we might have had the privilege of watching a pair of (relatively) old masters at work. Kieran Hebden told Ragged Words in January that he used a residency at the club to try out mixes for There Is Love In You his first Four Tet LP in four years. Indeed the album, deemed a "total joy from beginning to end" by our good selves, even boasts a track named after the venue. Anyone lucky enough to catch one of Hebden’s Plastic People sets might now recognise whole chunks of Swim, the fantastic new record from Canadian Dan Snaith, better known to us as Caribou. Eagle-eyed clubbers might even have spotted Snaith on the edge of the dancefloor, taking notes.

"Kieran's one of my closest friends. He lives just down the street," Snaith tells Ragged Words, reminding us just how mundane our own address is by comparison. "One thing that happened in the last year was that every month Theo Parrish would come and DJ at Plastic People, and we'd both be down there whenever we weren't away. And we kind of fed off the excitement of each other getting into it. Kieran was DJing a lot there too, and I'd give him one of the tracks I was working on, saying ‘Can you try this tonight and see if it works?' And that's how it went really." 
 
Both men's work reflects the environment in which it was birthed. Like There Is Love In You, Swim is a far dancier, harsher and more claustrophobic record than its predecessor. The ‘60s-inspired melodious pop samples of 2007's Polaris Prize-winning Andorra are notable by their complete absence. But they're not missed. The changing sonic landscape of London has certainly played its part in this shift; Snaith says he found dance music really tedious a few years ago - all macho basslines and dark sounds - but then the likes of Blake, Ikonika, Dark Star and, yes, Burial began using "much broader palettes", to quite thrilling effect. But then again, regardless of what his contemporaries have been up to, he's never really been one to stand still.

"It's definitely always the case that I want to do something that doesn't feel like I'm repeating what I've done before. I don't know how you'd keep the motivation going otherwise. The whole thing that motivates me to make music is the excitement of making something that feels new. I can't imagine wanting to go back and say 'Oh, let's do that again'. But over the last couple of years - even when I was finishing off Andorra - I started getting back into dance music, something I hadn't paid much attention to in the years prior to that. In the last year I've been DJing more often, as well as going to more clubs and gigs, and I've just been more excited by the dance music I've heard, so it was a natural thing to have the music go in that direction."

That change of direction was even a little evident on Andorra, Snaith says – most notably on the album's final number 'Niobe'. A turning-point of sorts, the Canadian says the nine-minute track was essentially his attempt to rip off James Holden's take on dance music - albeit with some very different sounds - aping Holden's signature twist that always makes tracks feels like they're on the verge of collapsing. He points to 'Kaili', Swim's third track, as the most obvious example of this, with the same synthesizer sound layered and delayed over and over to achieve a wafting effect, as the music passes from left ear to right and back again. Synthesizers, specifically those of the boutique modular variety, would have played a larger part in the album had it not taken a full year for them to be assembled and arrive through Snaith's door. By which time he had simply forged ahead with computerized instruments instead:

"The synthesizers I ended up using on the album were all software synthesizers, which these days sound incredibly good. There are certainly purists among my friends who would say it's not going to sound the same, and they're probably right, but maybe that's a good thing... Whereas Andorra had instruments being recorded and looped or whatever, for this record there's very little of that characteristic you’ll often find in my music of this big, sampled acoustic drum kit kind of sound all over it. There's more drum machines this time, and it took place inside the computer much more than with previous records. There's no bass guitar for example; a lot of the bass sounds and synthesizer sounds were made in the computer."

So swapping clunky instruments for laptops must save time and toil, right? Wrong. Snaith apparently demoed upwards of 600 tracks while writing Swim, before whittling that number down to just nine! Firstly, is that somewhat incredible figure accurate? And, more pertinently, does such an obese amount of fat usually need to be trimmed when making a Caribou album?

"It's always the case that I make way too many (tracks), but those aren't finished songs. When I'm working on a record, I want to work on it every day. All day, every day, and so over the course of a year and a bit that easily turns into 600 different ideas, particularly if you want to try something new each time. I'm receptive enough to know what I want, so it's about a process of kind of puking up these ideas, and then sifting through them to figure it out. But that's always what I enjoy. There's a lot of drudgery while you're making the 590 mediocre tracks (laughs), but then on the other ten you get that feeling of 'Wait a minute, something happened there that's really exciting!' and you follow that."

Surely this must get frustrating, though? When, say, 50 ideas in-a-row hit a cul de sac and aren't deemed good enough? 

"(It's) constantly (frustrating). It’s all about trade-off, and the worst thing is in fact that a lot of the times, while you're making those 50 mediocre tracks, at that moment in time you think they're fantastic, only to come back again the next day and realise 'Oh, man…'. It's such a deflating experience when you wake up thinking what you did was great, and then listen back and it's garbage. Every record that I've made, I've always had that sense that I'm never going to finish it, that I'm never going to make another record I'm happy with again. And yeah, that's very frustrating and difficult, but I guess after a few years now I know enough to say 'Yeah, sure it's going to happen. Just keep at it'.”

If the early reviews of Swim are anything to go by (watch this space for Ragged Words’ own verdict) that patience has again paid dividends. Before parting company, we asked Snaith whether, on the back of bands like Vampire Weekend recently topping the charts and Wild Beasts selling-out large venues, does he agree that 2010 is a very exciting time to be releasing his kind of interesting music? 

"I do actually. Just rewind a few years and Animal Collective were playing tiny shows, and now their world-conquering album... It's one of those crazy moments in music. People will look back and think ‘How did that weird music suddenly become so popular?’ Maybe it will continue to be that way, I don't know; but just the way music is distributed, and the way people's musical tastes are so diverse now because they have so much access to so much music, means there is an opportunity for that. Within reason, obviously – I mean, the first time I heard Lightning Bolt I thought, ‘Man, this band are going to be top of the charts, fucking HUGE!’ And obviously they have a massive cult following and everything, but maybe I missed the ball on that one! But I do think it's a great time in general."

Expect it to be a time that sees Caribou come more and more into his own.