BOTH SIDES NOW

Together, math whiz Dan Snaith and his electronic music alter ego Caribou make sweet pop harmony

By Chris Bilton

CARIBOU
With Born Ruffians. Sat, Nov 10. The Opera House (735 Queen E). $15 from Ticketmaster, Rotate This, Soundscapes. Doors 8pm.

There are two Dan Snaiths. I meet the first one mid-afternoon in The Rivoli's restaurant section back in late September. Wearing wire-rimmed glasses, unassuming and soft-spoken – I almost don't recognize him checking his Blackberry in the doorway – Snaith is soon breaking down his musical process for me in a manner befitting an algebraic number theory PhD.

The other Dan Snaith I meet in the Riv's back room about eight hours later. Onstage for a “secret” Caribou performance, sans specs and sporting a plain white t-shirt, he's hunched over a drum kit feverishly pounding away, doubling up on the massive beat of “Sandy” from Caribou's latest album, the psychedelic pop explosion that is Andorra. Dan Snaith is Caribou and Caribou is Dan Snaith; that much is clear. But they're not always the same person.

Snaith seems to feed off of this duality, and duality in general for that matter. He idolizes the collective improvisation of artists such as Sun Ra and Can while creating Caribou's music almost exclusively on his own. While I like to imagine that the inside of Snaith's head resembles something out of a Monty Python animation – full of mutant orchestras playing surrealistic instruments – seeing the music performed by Caribou's live incarnation (featuring long-time guitarist Ryan Smith, along with drummer Brad Weber and bassist Andy Lloyd) assures me that it is very much of this world.

Though his bandmates are normal enough, Snaith's method of putting the band together is oddly impulsive. “I'd only met Brad for like a couple hours. His band actually opened for us in Hamilton two years ago,” Snaith says, “but Andy I'd never met before he got off the plane and showed up at my apartment in London. But he came highly recommended.”

The band helped deliver Caribou's latest album Andorra, Snaith's follow-up to the wildly popular and Wayne Coyne-approved album The Milk of Human Kindness. Snaith may still make the music by himself, but he needs a few extra hands to bring it to life. “That process of letting go of the songs a little bit and playing with other musicians, I really enjoy it and I think it's good for me,” he says. “If I only ever worked by myself I would probably start to spiral out of control.”

Snaith's process is relatively unchanged since he made his breakthrough electronica releases under his former moniker Manitoba. But Andorra is a departure from anything he's produced thus far. Simply put, it's a straight-up pop album.

“It was the first time that I ever wrote the songs before recording them,” he says of the modified approach. “[In the past] it's always been: start up a loop, build up a couple of layers on top of it, and then kind of spread it out into a track. This time it was actually writing music rather than just recording music.” It seems like a simple enough deviation, but the effect it's had on the music is staggering. Andorra cascades with lush orchestration and '60s-sounding melodies, yet it retains a distinctly dancefloor-driven pulse.

Lyrically, though, Snaith stuck pretty close to a tried and true tradition: “What are pop songs about?” he asks. “They're about people falling in and out of love with one another.” A quick scan of the song titles alone (“Irene,” “Sandy,” Desiree,” “She's the One”) reveals Snaith's apparent emotional focus.

“It's funny because that's not where the emotion came from,” he admits. “The emotions were kind of generated by making the music itself and playing and getting into a state of being euphoric about the music or melancholy about it. There's not a trail of broken hearts behind this album or anything.”

While writing love songs without breaking actual hearts sounds a bit like something a math genius might be able to pull off, the calculated-yet-mystical approach is where the two Dan Snaiths begin to converge. “The one thing that I like about both [music and math] is that mathematics becomes very abstract and creative, more like a philosophy or something,” says Snaith. “And it's more like taking these ideas and puzzling around with them in your head and fitting them together in different ways and making something out of these abstract concepts. And sometimes I feel the way I approach music is like that – just taking different aesthetic and melodic ideas and puzzling things together.”

But unlike math, Snaith doesn't have any pop proofs just yet. “What I really like about this whole process is that it's such a nebulous thing to pin down how to get a song that has a real emotion in the melody and all that stuff. I thought about it for a year every single day, and I still have no plan of how to do it. It's still as mysterious as it ever was.”

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