Week of May 26, 2005, Issue #501
COVER
Tracking the wild Caribou
By PAUL MATWYCHUK
“The last thing a creative person wants is litigation, which is anti-creative.”
—director David Cronenberg, explaining why he chose not to launch a lawsuit
against the producers of the current film Crash, even though he made a film
with the exact same title back in 1996
Dan Snaith is a creative person. He started playing piano at the age of five,
lost interest for a spell and then found it again in a big way five or six years
later, sitting at the keyboard for hours at a stretch, noodling around with
the pedals, exploring the sounds he could make, gradually improving his playing
and soon, inevitably, composing his own songs.
“And then, at around 13,” he says, “I got this shitty little
sampler that I stole from my high school and got some software and a keyboard
and started using my dad’s computer to start putting music together. This
would be about ’92. I guess I’d heard some electronic music around
that time—some early U.K. techno, early Warp stuff, bands like the Orb,
that kind of stuff—and kind of realized, ‘This music sounds exciting.
I want to make music that sounds this exciting!’”
Adopting the alias Manitoba, he released his first full-length album in 2001—the
sparse, intimate Start Breaking My Heart—to encouraging reviews. He made
a quantum leap forward with his 2003 sophomore effort Up in Flames, whose lush
melodies and gorgeous, densely layered sound was at once adventurous and yet
accessible—this was electronic music with a beating, human heart, and
Snaith seemed poised on the verge of a commercial and creative breakthrough.
That is, until late 2004, when he crossed paths with an anti-creative person:
a veteran rock star with an unfortunate last name and a taste for litigation.
The man was Handsome Dick Manitoba. As the equipment-destroying lead singer
for the ’70s surf/punk/metal band the Dictators, he gained a reputation
as one of the New York music scene’s rowdiest denizens, and was probably
more famous for the time he got clonked over the head with a mic stand by transvestite
rocker Jayne Wayne County than for his songs. (His hits include “I Live
for Cars and Girls” and “Sleeping With the TV On.” Actually,
they’re not bad.) These days, Manitoba makes his living as a radio DJ
and running his own bar in New York’s East Village, not as a musician,
but that didn’t stop him from contacting Snaith through his website and
warning him to stop calling himself Manitoba—or face the consequences.
“It may be the most surreal experience I’ve ever had,” says
Snaith. “We just didn’t take it very seriously at first. And then
the next I heard from him was when I was served with a subpoena at our show
in L.A.—he’d hired a private investigator to track me down and serve
me. And then we had to run onstage and play.”
Handsome Dick’s claims seem dubious at best—were people really buying
Up in Flames and going to Snaith’s concerts under the mistaken belief
that they were going to hear the Dictators, a band that disbanded in 1981?—but
an astonished Snaith quickly learned that if he took the case to court, he would
be taking an enormous, potentially devastating financial risk. “I consulted
several U.S. trademark lawyers,” he says, “and they said, ‘You
just never know. If you get a wingding judge who doesn’t know anything
about music and sees this word ‘Manitoba’ that they’ve never
seen before, even though it’s obviously a province in Canada.... This
isn’t a 100 per cent winnable case.’ It would have cost me half
a million dollars in legal fees just to fight it, and I’d be gambling
that on a really unpredictable outcome.”
And so Snaith let Handsome Dick have his way, but he’s chosen to be philosophical
about the incident rather than bitter. “Once I realized that I was just
going to have to accept it and move on,” he says, “all that headache
disappeared and I was able to get back to making music again. It was actually
quite liberating.”
You can pick up on that sense of freedom as you listen to Snaith’s new
disc, The Milk of Human Kindness. Snaith is calling himself Caribou these days
(and let’s hope there aren’t any disgruntled death metal singers
named Comely James Caribou out there looking for trouble), but the music on
it has the same unmistakable spirit of discovery as any of his Manitoba material.
The album opener, “Yeti,” and the closer, “Barnowl,”
both hark back to the starry-eyed sound of Up in Flames, but the disc as a whole
is a little more introspective and a little more unpredictable in its musical
impulses, especially for an artist who usually gets filed in the electronic
section of the record store. “Hello Hammerheads,” for instance,
owes more to Nick Drake than to Aphex Twin. And while rock-snob critics have
detected a strong Krautrock influence on tracks like “Bees,” the
laid-back guitar groove that propels it forward suggests the California highway
as much as it does the Autobahn.
“It’s not about genre for me,” Snaith says. “It’s
not about making music that fits into the electronica scene or the rock scene
or whatever. Actually, I think of myself mostly as a producer than as a songwriter;
what interests me is controlling things and arranging things and orchestrating
things, not so much dragging people out to practice every week and playing the
same songs over and over, which is very much what being in a band is all about.
I could make a new song every single day—or 10 songs every single day!—and
control every single instrument that goes in there. And with sampling from old
records, there’s just no limit to the number of different sounds and arrangements
I can do, and I can do it differently every day.”
Which, of course, begs the question: how does he know when to stop? What kept
him from spending month after month second-guessing and tinkering around with
dozens of alternate versions of “Pelican Narrows” before he finally
settled on the one that appears on the album? “Well, it’s just using
your ears,” he shrugs. “The thing is, I like to work by trial and
error and I don’t like to plan things out in advance. I’m not always
totally happy with the results—that’s why I’ll make 1,000
tracks and put only 10 on the album. But there’s an actual buzz to making
music that’s working really well. I’ll have my headphones on, I’ll
be recording late at night in my room, and if something is really coming together,
there’s a palpable, physical excitement that I feel.
“And I think that if all you do is just execute a piece of music exactly
the way you planned, it loses that element of excitement,” Snaith continues.
“That’s often one of my complaints when people give me demos or
when people just ask me what I think could be improved in electronic music in
general: it’s a very controlled atmosphere that people make electronic
music in, and they often make everything just too perfect and too clean and
they lose the unexpectedness or the uniqueness of something sounding a little
bit off or a little bit out of time.”
Snaith is a mathematician as well as a musician—he’s a Ph.D. student
at the University of Toronto and he spent much of the downtime during his world
tour for Up in Flames working on his thesis. He’s reluctant to draw simplistic
parallels between music and math, but he does say there’s something about
being challenged to think his way creatively through an idea that makes him
feel like the two pursuits are using the same parts of his brain. Just don’t
fall for the cliché of the egghead musician who’s drawn to synthesizers
because the sounds they make are as cold and emotionally remote as he is.
“I feel a very personal and emotional connection to the music I make,”
Snaith says. “Maybe not lyrically, but these are melodies that came out
of me; it’s not just a technical exercise. People always think of emotional
music as being narrative, and that’s not the case for me. For me, the
most emotionally charged music has always been, like, spiritual free jazz—John
Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders and stuff like that, which just exudes emotion
but has no lyrics. I’ve always listened to a lot of instrumental music
alongside vocal music and so I’ve always focused more on the emotions
of the actual melodies and the actual sounds than the words.”
Luckily, music matters more to Snaith’s fans than words do: even under
a different name, they’re still buying his album, and his classy, grin-and-bear-it
response to his legal ordeal has inspired the critics to rally behind him more
than ever. “Releasing records is sometimes a pretty remote process,”
he says. “You don’t see the people buying the CDs and you don’t
see them going home and listening to it. But this whole experience has really
drilled it home for me that people are behind me and behind the music. It’s
made me realize just how lucky I am that people are even interested in my music
at all. It’s been very affirming.” V
Caribou
With Junior Boys and Russian Futurists • New City Likwid Lounge •
Thu, June 2