CARIBOU: "MONTREAL WAS ALWAYS THE OTHER CITY"

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Before electronic musician Caribou aka Dan Snaith, touches down at The National on September 16th, he took a minute to talk to the Montreal Buzz from his home in London, England.

Montreal Buzz: Given that you’ve been living in England for a while, do you still consider yourself a Canadian musician?

Caribou: I’ve lived in London a fair number of years now- I moved here for school (completing a PhD in mathematics) and just stayed. But I also feel like I’m definitely not English and my wife and I do wonder about sticking around here or moving back to Canada.

Montreal Buzz: Given the name of this blog, I have to ask if Montreal is on the list of places you’d consider coming home to?

Caribou: Once I got to adulthood, Toronto was my home in Canada, so Montreal was always the other city, a quick road trip away. Like many people, I have kind of always wished I lived there.

Montreal Buzz: Your latest album, Swim, is something of a departure from the sunny psychedelia of Andorra. Did you purposefully set to make a very different record this time around?

Caribou: I did consciously want to make a very different album. Andorra was sort of the end of a trajectory of psychedelic-sounding records, a kind of a logical conclusion. I wanted this record to sound like me now. This was also the first time that any of my lyrics have been personal to me, about things that were happening to people close to me, instead of just fictional scenarios that made sense with the music.

Montreal Buzz: For Mutek we spoke to Ben Frost, who, like you, is an electronic musician who often operates in a very different world than the more club-oriented (and wildly popular) end of electronic music. How do you reconcile the two?

Caribou: There would have been a time where I just sneered at it, but I’ve come to think that something like, for example, Eric Prydz’ sugary pop dance music, is the essence of the genre. It does what it’s supposed to. Here in London, I’ve been going to see Theo Parrish, who is sort the perfect hybrid, play every month. He’ll be  playing something that has everyone, including him, losing their mind, then he’ll play some record that you’d never expected, something very obscure, but that still makes people dance. I like the idea of a bit of both.

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