In 2007 Caribou mastermind Dan Snaith released Andorra, a critically acclaimed album that certainly deserved even more recognition than it received. Some believed Andorra was so excellent a second copy was purchased to replace the disc that deteriorated after multiple weeks on repeat. Gaze into the future and know that by summer’s end, similar circumstances will surely reoccur and magnify, as Caribou’s new album Swim becomes available at retail outlets across North America April 19 on Merge Records.

Dan Snaith: …sounded like a band. So a lot of it was recording a guitar part, or recording a vocal part. This time there was a lot of using technology in different kinds of ways to get the blend of acoustic and electronic sounds I suppose.

REAX: I read that with Andorra you had gone into the recording studio with a bunch of songs. Was it like that this time with Swim?
DS: It was the same thing. I just work for a year or so, for both of them, recording everyday, wake up and start working on different bits and pieces. So there’s like for each album there’s between 600 or 700 rough tracks that I made for each one. They’re not finished or anything, but the beginnings of ideas, then I followed the ones that seem the most interesting.

REAX: There’s a lot of stuff left on the cutting room floor?
DS: Like 99% of the stuff I suppose.

REAX: Do you ever think you could cull through that and form a different album? like a variant? Or are you going toward a singular point and it’s left behind for a reason?
DS: It’s a bit of both, each time we tour I make a tour CD as well, which are tracks that I really liked and I want people to hear them, they just don’t fit for whatever reason with the direction that the album has gone. There’re five or six tracks on the tour CD this time. And exactly that, I really liked the tracks but didn’t think they fit on the record. A lot of the stuff that gets left behind is just somehow heading toward the stuff that makes it on the album but doesn’t get the melody quite right, or doesn’t get the sound of the sonic effect I’m trying to produce just right. They’re just building blocks along the way.

REAX: What’s the significance of the album’s title Swim?
DS: It’s two different things. I wanted this record to sound, I got excited by this idea of making dance music that sounded fluid and sounded like all the components for the music were washing around from one side to the other, and appearing and disappearing, and blending with each other in a way that waves or liquid elements would. That’s part of the reason. The other reason is that I learned to swim in the past year. I started from scratch with swimming lessons and became obsessed with swimming. So apart form recording and going out DJing, going to clubs, pretty much the only time I left the house was to go swimming.

REAX: Where were you swimming?
DS: Just at the local community pool.

REAX: It wasn’t the ocean?
DS: I got obsessed with swimming lengths. Not swimming as a relaxing experience, but a form of exercise, a routine thing.

REAX: In Canada, did you never have an opportunity to swim growing up?
DS: That’s not true at all. We had a pool in our backyard the whole time as I was growing up. I could get from one end of the pool to other. I wasn’t afraid of water. I didn’t have a phobia of water. I just never had swimming lessons so I was never a very good swimmer so I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t learn to do the proper breathing when doing the front crawl, doing the strokes properly. I never enjoyed it because it was kind of awkward. I never learned to do it in a fluid fashion.

REAX: Is the activity of swimming a touchstone for this new album as much as any artist is?
DS: Definitely yes, because one of the things I explicitly wanted to do this time was not have any artist or particular musical influence inform the record too much. Musical ideas, like the idea of making music that sounded like water, but I definitely didn’t want to have any, “Oh you know I really love the sound of this guitar on this record, let’s replicate the sound.” And as a music fan that kind of thing is exciting and tempting to me. I always hear something and I think “Oh wow, how did they do that?” and I do my own take on it. But this time the whole point for me was finding my own vocabulary of sounds and sonic palette to draw from rather than relying on other musical influences.

REAX: Have you been swimming lately?
DS: I haven’t actually because we’re rehearsing all day everyday. I don’t even have time, which is one unfortunate thing about getting ready for this album is I’m really busy. But I’m sure I’ll find time again.

REAX: Do you have plans to go to the ocean? or is the activity of laps and doing the act of swimming more interesting to you?
DS: That’s the thing I got obsessed with, the act of swimming, definitely, kind of perfecting a technique and learning how to do this properly. I was thinking about this the other day, there aren’t too many spot on our tour where we’re going to be next to a beach in the near future. Like anybody I’d love to have some time there, but not for a while.

REAX: Do think swimming will be a necessity for future recordings?
DS: I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see. I feel it’ll be something that will stick, but I kind of cycle through interest in things pretty quickly some times, but I feel it’ll be something that’ll stick.

REAX: Swim is a lot different from Andorra. You mentioned before attempted to have no musical influences. Are there any other beginning themes you held onto throughout its creation?
DS: One obvious influence of a genre of music, although not very specific, is the influence of dance music on this record, which was not there on Andorra. Over the past year I’ve been listening to lots more dance music and Djing more and being excited by lots of new dance music I’ve been hearing and old and various different things, but aside from hearing records I was interested in, I was interested in the idea of the club as sonic space, making music that sounds really good at a really loud volume on a really good PA system. So it’s designed to be played in a place where the frequencies are very physical and people respond in a physical way, you feel the music in a physical way. And also another theme of this record, I’d be making tracks, some of the tracks on this record, because I knew that I’d be DJing that weekend, and I wanted to have something of my own, some new thing to play. I’d be making my tracks for fun that I was going to play that weekend and they’d turn into something that ended up on the album. The influence is not a particular dance artist but the idea of dance music and the immediacy of being able to play music at a DJ set, and having a very physical reaction from people to something I’ve just made was something very exciting.

REAX: I had a question about a specific lyric on Swim. On “Kaili,” there’s ‘Save the ocean’ repeated over and over again. Where did the idea for that come from? if it was well into recording process, or if it was an early idea?
DS: What’s the lyric?

REAX: It’s ‘Save the ocean.’ It’s repeated many times on “Kaili.”
DS: Wow that’s not what I’m saying at all.

REAX: What are you saying?
DS: To be honest with you I don’t’ know what I’m saying. It’s the repeated part, I just recorded me singing… something, not even words really, with the intention of going back and changing it later to some kind of lyric, but this often happens to me, I go back to replace some lyrics and I just realize I like the wordlessness of the first take that I did and I just keep it. In fact I don’t think I’m saying anything at all. I also like the fact that people just hear things in it that isn’t there, it reflects different things for other people that listen to it.

REAX: That’s really interesting because I swear to god it says ‘Save the ocean.’ So when you play that song live what do you sing there?
DS: It becomes, we’ve been rehearsing that song. There are two of us singing the part, and we’ve talked about different things that we can sing. And in the end I just kind of sing and whatever comes out, comes out, and I think that’s the most faithful thing to what was on the album. The reason that it came out like that was that feeling, that melody, that urge to want to sing that melody in that part. It just came out as it came out, I suppose that’s what I’ll continue to do when I play it live.

REAX: The album cover, with its series of circles that hides the flowers beneath, when was that chosen?
DS: The album covers for the last few albums have all been done by my friend Jason Evans. I always give him the album and he gives me the cover. Luckily enough he likes the music I make as well. What do you make of this music? What does it make you think? What kind of visual ideas does it stimulate? For me I don’t think in those terms at all. When I make music it doesn’t evoke some kind of image. It was his idea. He thought the music sounded complex, like there were lots of different layers. He can take different images and impressions from it. The idea of layering in this case, on the album cover, it’s circles but inside the album artwork it’s different geometric shapes and things was his idea. He has a real knack, when I see the image and he says “This is the album cover” it really always strikes me as reflecting the music in some way even if it’s not in a way I can articulate.

Photo by: Nitasha Kapoor