Caribou

Egon

Hello again, everybody. It’s been a while. I’ve missed you all so very, very much. We have in front of me and all of you, a very wonderful musical genius of sorts. I gave him a brief introduction a while back. His name is Dan Snaith, he was once called Manitoba and now he is called?

Caribou

Caribou.

Egon

For reasons that we can get into at some point during this lecture, but we wanted to start by playing a track. Dan?

Caribou

OK, I’ll play it now and then talk about it afterwards.

(music: Can - unknown)

Egon

Does anybody recognize that? The German rock band Can from Cologne. Not the song you might play to start off a conversation with a guy who had the Electronica Album of the Year verified by Canada’s Independent Music Awards in 2002, but that’s probably the reason that I’m sitting here talking with him because, as you guys know, the only people I’ve spoken to this term have been Bernard Purdie and David Matthews. When I was introduced to Dan it was not in the context of what music he created. I was in Canada DJing and I met some friends – everybody’s a record collector, right? – and he gave me a CD. I think you gave me a couple of CDs because I remember giving one to Madlib, a guy who produces music on the label [Stones Throw] I run in Los Angeles. And we put it on and we were blown away, like, “What the fuck is this guy doing?” He’s created this amazing album. No one could put a finger on it. We certainly couldn’t, coming from the background that we all come from, but we all loved it. And then we started figuring out that people were going to call it “wondrous electronic folk” [laughing], and stuff like that. You’ve gone through tons of transformations in a short time but I’d like to start by just asking you a little bit about where you grew up?

Caribou

I grew up in a very small town – even outside of a very small town – in Ontario, which is a province in Canada. Which, although it’s only an hour away from Toronto and only an hour and a half away from Detroit and various places, I definitely grew up musically in isolation except for a few friends. At an early age, I’m sure a lot of people here if not everybody here realized that music was something very special to them and got into it, but growing up in an isolated pace like that, you kind of don’t know where to start. So you just have to discover your own way of going about things, whereas if you grow up in a big city, it’s easy. You read all the magazines and you listen to all the records that are hot that week or whatever. I think that’s really colored the way I’ve come at music, I’ve really had to look for things myself.

Egon

And what was the first kind of music that you fell in love with?

Caribou

The first music I fell in love with – I started taking piano lessons and did classical music, I was into classical music, but I wanted something more that I could do my own music and express myself a bit more. So I started taking more pop-based lessons and jazz-based lessons. And the first teacher I had, he was kind of a progressive rock casualty from the ’70s. So I got into really, really horrendous progressive rock. I was well into Yes and I had a big mullet. I was from a little town where everybody was like, “Yeah, man. Yes, that’s great!” Guys with fairy suits on doing big organ solos. I was like, “Yeah, that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.” But I think later on I kind of reconsidered my position on that. But it was good in that growing up in this weird place, there was nobody to tell me, “You shouldn’t be listening to progressive rock because it’s not cool,” or whatever. That was the first music I got into, and I just knew it was weird. Since then I’ve listened to a lot of different types of music and I guess the weirdness of music has always stuck with me.

Egon

When did you start collecting records?

Caribou

Really late, actually. I moved to Toronto, which is a bigger city, and went to university there. I’d been playing jazz and getting into lots of free jazz, lots of stranger sounding jazz – later John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders – and I started seeing their records in record stores and I didn’t even have any turntables, but I was like, “I kind of want to own this because it’s a piece of history.” The guys on the front cover looked like the coolest dudes you’ve ever seen in your life. They’re wearing dashikis and they’re holding these crazy instruments.

Egon

A far cry from fairy suits and mullets.

Caribou

[laughing] Well, yeah. Still decadent costumes, but yeah, in spirit.

Egon

So, you’re 26, right?

Caribou

That’s right, yeah.

Egon

So, this was about seven, eight years ago, something like that?

Caribou

Seven years ago, that’s about right.

Egon

Were you producing music at that point or were you just actually playing music?

Caribou

Even when I was into the guys in the wizard suits and stuff like that, I was already producing music and I quickly realized, an important step for me was playing jazz piano, I guess, because the whole focus was about improvising and making your own music. And I was like, “That’s what I really want to do.” Playing some Chopin is great and I really like his music, but that was a bit too similar to just listening to his music. I wanted to do my own thing and jazz was the first thing that allowed me to improvise and express myself that way. And then I realized I want to record music. I was listening to all these records and they had all weird sounds and I wanted to record music and this is really how I got into electronic music. I got into electronic music before I’d heard any electronic music, but I just knew that you could use computers and programs and synthesizers to sync up a lot of different instruments. Because I was literally living – this was before I could drive – I was living in the middle of nowhere. And I was like, I could play one instrument at a time, but I couldn’t really be a band by myself. Later on I got into bands with friends in town, but I didn’t have a car so I was kind of stuck out there.

Egon

What instruments do you play or did you play?

Caribou

I definitely started out on piano. That was a big thing, and then I got a synthesizer and that allowed me to make cheesy flute sounds and stuff like that. And then I also picked up drums and guitar and just whatever I could. And the whole recording onto a computer, all of a sudden I could – as you guys well know – put a million parts in, hear harmonies and put instruments against one another to interesting effect. That’s where it all started, and since then I’ve changed my set up very little. I’m still using a computer as a studio and some instruments to supplement that and some samples to supplement that.

Egon

So by the time that you were getting ready to produce this record – [to audience] do you guys know this record? Some of you do. Shall we play a track from it maybe? Dan, you want to pick a track?

Caribou

OK.

(music: Caribou – “Dundas, Ontario” / applause)

Egon

You can see what I was saying when I met this guy? And I put this on, I think I was on an airplane when I heard it, I felt so close to death when I was on the plane. This is something I was talking about with Aiden, I’m scared to death of flying. You can see how moving an experience it was to be listening to this music. What went into the creation of this album? I mean, did you have a record deal?

Caribou

I mean, no. Maybe I can just talk musically about what went into that.

Egon

Sure.

Caribou

So, I was into progressive rock in high school and then actually a guy who’s signed to Egon’s label, Stones Throw, a guy called Koushik, who sings on my second album, we were friends from high school. He’s always really the sneakiest guy about music, he’ll play you a little bit, but then won’t tell you what it is. So he slipped me a Walkman in class and I was listening to it and he introduced me to early ambient techno and Detroit techno and bands coming out of the UK in the early ’90s. So, throughout high school there was one show on the community radio station at like four until six in the morning that I’d stay up for every night to listen to it and it just really started to expand what I was listening to.

By the time I got to this point – the kinds of things that appeared in that track were definitely that kind of electronic music tradition up to people like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. But also there’s an instrument called a thumb piano, an African instrument that I’d ordered over the internet to get my hands on. I’d got all of these Nonesuch field recording records and this instrument sounded like nothing else, it was the kind of plucking-sounding instrument. There was that and the beat. The skipping beat was also influenced by a lot of things going on in the UK, or the UK garage and also the West London broken beat kind of sound. A lot of jittery beats, and also dance music by this point was a big influence on me. All of these things were coming together in this weird mixture of influences piling on top of one another.

Egon

Is that you playing on top of that, playing the keyboard or is that sampled?

Caribou

Actually, apart from all the squiggly sounds, which are probably off a Morton Subotnick record, just like some musique concrète kinda record, that’s all from a keyboard or me recording from a Radio Shack crappy microphone recording thumb piano and stuff like that. And then drum samples, probably drum samples that I stole from a Basement Jaxx record or a Daft Punk record or something like that. I was just like, “Everybody’s snares sound really bad except for these guys, and they’re never going to know.” A lot of the reason I was working in this way was that I didn’t have any contract or really contacts with anybody. I was just making this music totally by myself, literally in my bedroom. And when the record came out and people in Toronto where I was living were like, “Who is this guy? There’s this guy releasing records.” You know, there’s this community of electronic musicians. I didn’t really talk to anybody apart from a few close friends, just because I’ve always done it as quite a solitary pastime, I guess.

Egon

So when did you record that track, when were you making that?

Caribou

Uh, 1999, I guess. Something like that.

Egon

In the collection of tracks that made this album, how long did it take for you to put them together?

Caribou

Probably a year or something like that. A real turning point for me was, I went over to the UK to work for the summer, just to work over there and move around a little bit. I went to a festival, it was quite a small festival and I met up with this guy Kieran Hebden, who releases music under the name Four Tet, and again he was making music. People may know his stuff from his later albums, but his first album was made up of samples from weird European free jazz records and American free jazz records and I was listening to it. It was kind of like that and listening to the first DJ Shadow album were two really big influences because here were people who weren’t sampling… They weren’t sampling James Brown over again, they were sampling Czechoslovakian prog rock records and weird Eastern-European or American free jazz records and making music that just sounded like nothing else. Didn’t sound like the things they were sampling, but also didn’t sound like anything else and that just really appealed to me. It was a totally unique approach. And I just walked up to him after he played at the festival and we kept in touch because I hung out with him. I was just some guy, I was surprised he wasn’t like, “Get outta here!” I just hung out with him because I’d gone to this festival just to check out the music or whatever. And then I sent him music because I was finishing it. He passed it on to Leaf, which is the small label that put out my music and that was it. It was really as simple as that. It was straight from my bedroom, sent one CD to him and then he was like, “I think I know somebody who would wants to put this out.”

Egon

And what was the response after this album came out? I mean, obviously we see all these glorious quotes on this sticker, but this sticker wasn’t around when I first got this CD.

Caribou

Yeah, that’s just propaganda that’s been added later on.

Egon

[laughing] Yeah, but how did people react to the record?

Caribou

It was really strange again because I was making the music in Toronto and then they’d be like, “Yeah, you got to do an interview with the NME or some magazine in the States or England or Japan or wherever,” and it was kind of a really disconnected thing. People started being interested in various places, but still it was tough to tell if anybody had bought the record, if anybody liked the record. And it was really kinda surreal. Well, it still is very surreal. And only kind of a lot later, when I started doing shows and meeting people and being like, “What, you like this record?!” You know what I mean? It was tough to make a connection because it’s just kind of happening out there. “Yeah, we sold another this many copies of the record.” I’m just like, “Well, what does that mean?”

Egon

What did you make of those terms that were bantered throughout different media like “folktronica,” “laptoptronica,” stuff like that?

Caribou

I think people ask that question expecting me to say, “Yeah, that’s ridiculous. Don’t call it that.” At the end of the day, journalists have to come up with terms to describe the music. Often the comparisons they make are way off or they’re very accurate. As soon as somebody listens to the music, they’re probably going to get a good feel of what it’s all about and I don’t think those terms matter so much. They can call it whatever they want, I suppose.

Egon

When the record came out, did you think that there was anybody else putting out music that was in the same vein as what you were doing?

Caribou

Immediately, when I met Kieran Hebden – this guy Four Tet – I definitely felt this. We talked about music and I didn’t know people were listening to that same kind of stuff. There were a few friends in Toronto and him and it just felt that we were moving in the same sort of direction. There’s been a lot of dance music that’s been influenced by jazz, been influenced by Kraftwerk or by krautrock, like that band Can or whatever. There’s obviously a long legacy that’s influenced a lot of dance music. But I kind of felt that a lot of them were influenced by light-sounding jazz and not the weirder stuff and I really felt that he was making weirder kind of stuff, too.

Egon

Besides the Four Tet record, this [gesturing to Caribou’s first album Start Breaking My Heart] and the Koushik 7” – [speaking to the audience, motioning to Caribou], he briefly mentioned the artist Koushik, who only had a 7” out at the time when this record came out, also released by Kieran Hebden. I couldn’t put a finger on anything that I thought sounded remotely like this end. It just struck me that all this was coming out of Dundas, Ontario, which I had never given a second thought to.

Caribou

Quite rightly, probably.

Egon

How about this second record that you made, which is your most recent record obviously, Up in Flames.

Caribou

I guess I’ve gone some way to describing the influences in my musical taste weren’t just… The first album was influenced by a lot of dance music and a lot of electronic music, that kind of Aphex Twin tradition and also 2-step music and that kind of stuff, UK garage. But my listening taste represented a lot more things than that. That was just kind of what was happening or what I was into at the time. So the second record came around and there was a lot more sort of chilled-out electronica kind of music and it all started sounding to me like very humble music and I definitely didn’t want to make the first record as some sort of big – it was a very humble record, I was just making it in my bedroom, it sounded very small. It would be interesting sitting in this bedroom, no equipment whatsoever to try and make a record that sounded really, really big, like psychedelic music or like that Can track. It’s just all sorts of different sounds coming from all over the place sounding really large. My Bloody Valentine sounds like a massive wall of noise and I was like, there’s no reason just because you use a computer that it has to sound very digital or use the kind of smaller synthy sounds, I guess.

Egon

Can we play a track?

Caribou

Uh, sure. How do you open this thing? First one?

Egon

I think so, if you have to ask me.

(music: Caribou – “I’ve Lived On a Dirt Road All My Life”)

Egon

And that – for anybody keeping score – features a sample from Bernard Purdie’s arch rival when it comes to funkiest session drummers of the early 1970s, Idris Muhammad, who we spoke about a little while back when we spoke to Bernard Purdie. Obviously, a totally different sound than the first record.

Caribou

Yeah, a lot of people were like, “You made this electronic record and now you’ve made a record with a band, you’ve done this totally different thing.” And I was just like, “No, I made the records in exactly the same way.” Some samples and some instruments and the methodology hadn’t changed at all. It was just a different kind of feel or idea that I wanted to get across, I guess.

Egon

What kind of gear are you using to make this? You said you do it all on your computer but you didn’t go any further than that.

Caribou

That’s the number one question I still get asked, “What software do you use?” And I’m one of those people that says, they all do basically the same thing. There’s plug-ins that do different effects and do them to various degrees poorly or better. But they all allow you to sequence samples and chop them up and effect them. And I just use Acid. And in fact I made both these albums on Acid. It’s like a demo program for kids. I’d used other software before, so it wasn’t such a big deal learning different softwar. But you turn it on and immediately know how to use it. So you get all that kind of technical business out of the way and then you can just get on with expressing your ideas in it. So, really basic software and then obviously samples from records and guitars and cheap, like… We set up shows and set up our keyboards and people are like, “What’s this? Where do you plug it in?” And we’re like, “Oh, that one’s on batteries.” They’re Yamaha kids keyboards or whatever that made all the sounds on both those albums.

Egon

You said when you set up to play live – has anybody seen his band play live in support of this record? I did when I was in Los Angeles. I cracked open the LA Weekly, which is the weekly in Los Angeles. One of the picks of the week was Manitoba at a club called the Echo, a very cool club in a part of Los Angeles called Echo Park. I was like, “Fuck! Pick of the week! It’s going to be rammed, I don’t know how to get in.” I’ve been at the Echo when it’s been like that, it’s like a line down the block. So I thought to myself I better get there early and I got there late because I’m always late and there was no line and I’m like, “This can’t be true.” And I come in there and there’s like seventy or eighty people and you guys were getting ready to open a tour with Stereolab, weren’t you?

Caribou

Yep.

Egon

And I went in there and it was him and two other guys on stage with more drumkits and gizmos and I couldn’t even figure out. And I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, it was a spectacle along the lines of… Man, it was instantly my favorite concert of the past five years and I couldn’t believe that there was only seventy people there witnessing it. Now, obviously that was just a small show, but going from making an album like this [motions to CDs of Start Breaking My Heart] to making an album like that [Up In Flames] and then going on the road with a band, there’s some technical limitations that you must have had to see through?

Caribou

The first thing was, that album’s made mainly out of samples or a lot of it like you were saying. That’s Idris Muhammad on the drums and I couldn’t really get him on the phone and get him to come down and play to 70 people in Echo Park, you know what I mean? We basically learned a lot of the samples, re-learned them onto instruments again; kind of undid the process and figured out how to put together with only three people, because we couldn’t afford to take more than that number of people on the road. So we had two drum kits, three people with two people playing drums, one guy running around doing stuff. One guy would stop playing drums and then run around and do something else and just trying to interpret this music that’s is still really sample-based electronic music in a live setting.

In the end I was really happy with it and we toured all over the world and I’ve done more than 100 shows in the past year or whatever. And some of them have been empty and some of them have been full. But it’s been a really good experience because, like I said, finally getting to connect with the people who like the music, people coming out to shows. People say this all the time and I think this really is a chronic problem not so much with dance music because obviously people are there to... But sometimes with superstar DJs I’m like, “Wait a minute, that guy’s playing the same record as like Joe Schmo two doors down the street and there’s 50,000 people here like, ‘Oh man, he just faded that thing and then cut out the BASS!’” or whatever. And I’m just like, “Uhh, what are you talking about?” But I feel that it’s a really difficult thing to convey music that’s made predominantly on machines or by machines in a live context. Having done some tours playing from my laptop, sequencing things live and not in Acid.

Audience Member

Did you find it rewarding to actually play live as a personal thing? You’ve done your studio work but to actually get that relationship with the audience, to get that feedback, did you find that quite rewarding?

Caribou

Yeah, massively, massively rewarding. There really isn’t a comparison from my perspective of the shows that I did with a laptop or not doing shows at all to playing in front of people and having quite a physical contact with people and quite a full-on, aggressive kind of show.

Audience Member

Did you get more ideas? For example, for new albums or for playing together do you become more compact as a unit?

Caribou

It’s funny because people always ask. Having seen the band show, they kind of expect that the next album will just be recorded by a band. I’m playing lots of instruments and stuff but I still don’t just want to make an indie-rock record or a band record. I still think all the tools of sampling and doing things digitally in conjunction with playing live makes for something that obviously in the last few years has been something that’s kind of new.

Audience Member

And the people in your band, are they like you? Are they classically-trained or are they people coming from other types of fields?

Caribou

No, they’re actually just friends of mine. And I knew they were both good musicians but I didn’t even know the other drummer played drums. I was just like, “Can you play drums?” He’s like, “Yeah, I used to play drums in high school.” Turns out this guy is like a man mountain. He just sits there like... [imitates swinging his arms around] We had to work out how to put things together on the fly and cross our fingers and it kind of worked out how we hoped.

Audience Member

I know you may not be able to round it up into a quintessential tip, but what I love about the songs of yours that I really love, is this great drum programming, particularly in songs like “Cherrybomb” and a couple of the songs off the first record. If you can tell us a little bit about what you might do to those drum samples?

Caribou

I think a lot of the time, the whole drum programming and break aspect obviously comes from... Koushik was a big influence in introducing me to a lot of hip-hop music and then to a lot of breakbeat, kind of funk, soul and rock and jazz. And it’s just kind of looking for a distinct sound. Either the way you chop them up or just the break itself having some kind of interesting sound, a different quality or whatever. And sometimes, I think, the simplest drum programming is the best and sometimes chopping things up too much just muddies the ideas. And sometimes by chopping things up, leaving it the way a drummer would never play, adds to it, gives it an interesting quality. And I think you just do things by ear. That’s the beauty of removing the layer of technology. Acid’s so simple to use, you literally just chop things up, on a sampler or whatever, and you just become really familiar with doing it and then it’s just all about your ears, it’s not about the technique of doing it so much. You just fiddle around and find something that sounds interesting, that sounds different I guess.

Egon

Any other questions? I really don’t have anything else to say.

Audience Member

Can we put another track on?

Caribou

Yeah, I also have to talk about the title of this.

Egon

Oh yeah, yeah do your thing.

Caribou

The title of this seminar is “The Artist Formerly Known As Manitoba.” Now I don’t know, this may be something that interests you or I can definitely act as a warning signal for people about to release music or whatever. I released both these records under the name Manitoba and Manitoba’s a province in Canada. Like Ontario, it’s another province. And then I received a letter through the record label and an email saying “cease and desist.” A cease and desist order from a lawyer for this client, who is a guy – a musician – that calls himself Handsome Dick Manitoba. And actually, when I chose my name, I looked at interesting words and things that had some connection to me, and I looked on the Internet, “Does anybody else have a kind of similarly related name?” And there’s this guy Handsome Dick Manitoba. First of all, what’s that all about? [laughter] And then it’s like, obviously he’s not going to sue me. It’s like the Smiths suing John Smith or something, you know what I mean? We have a word in common or whatever but he’s obviously not going to sue me. And then once the ball was rolling, it’s very difficult to... Now people know my music under the name Manitoba and they see a listing for Manitoba and they go out to the show or whatever. So it was a lawsuit in the US saying that he’d used the name Manitoba in the context Handsome Dick Manitoba for the past 30 years. And it was a real lesson in the practicalities of music law, which wasn’t something I was interested in at all, but got forced into this situation where – even though it sounds ridiculous to music lovers, he makes Ramones-esque punk rock and I make electronic music. He’s never released anything under the name Manitoba, the closest he’s come was Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom. And I was just like, “This is a joke.” Then I called up a bunch of lawyers in the States and they were like, “Actually it’s not a joke.” The main reason being it’s too expensive, I couldn’t afford to go to court. I was like, “How much would it cost to fight this?” And they said, “Well, maybe 200,000 US dollars in lawyers fees, just paying the lawyer to fight it.” I was like, “Are you kidding me? That’s ridiculous.” It turned out he doesn’t have any money either but he had a friend who was a lawyer, quite a reputable lawyer, working for free. So everything was kind of stacked against me. Well, obviously I’d say that because that’s my perspective, but I kind of felt that was the real nail in my coffin.

Audience Member

So what happened, he didn’t release the name?

Caribou

No. I’m now going to be known as Caribou and those albums both have to be re-released worldwide under the name Caribou. I don’t know if I can even say the word Manitoba within a month from now. And it sounds totally ridiculous and I would just laugh it off, and then you actually talk to lawyers and people and they’re like, “Actually, the precedent in court and the amount of money it would cost to fight this,” is the ridiculous thing and that was the deciding factor really.

Audience Member

How long had you been using that name?

Caribou

I’d been using it for three years.

Audience Member

So, what’s going to be now?

Caribou

So, now I’m recording another album and it’s going to come out as Caribou and these albums are going to be re-released as Caribou.

Audience Member

[unintelligible question]

Caribou

Potentially. Song titles you don’t have to be so worried about, I don’t think. But just a word of caution when you’re releasing music to be careful because it’s just a massive disruption to be making music, something you’re really into and then all of a sudden what you have to think about is lawyers and trademark and all of these things that seem irrelevant. But the name you’re actually going under, that’s how people associate with your music so it is kind of important. Don’t call yourself Arrowsmith or something. [laughter]

Tony Nwachukwu

Have you had to trademark your new name?

Caribou

Yeah, so I’ve... I don’t know whether or not I’d recommend people to [do that]. But the thing is trademarking a name costs $1,500 and you have to actually do it in every single territory. You take your chances, maybe you don’t trademark it in Romania or somewhere. But that cost when you’re just a dude in his bedroom making music is too much when you’re starting out and it’s not what you’re thinking about. So it is a tricky thing to advise on. I guess just be careful and choose a name that’s hopefully unique like I thought I’d done.

Audience Member

What happened with your label when you had to change your name? Did your label inform you about this or you found out through the internet or what happened there?

Caribou

He emailed my website and he emailed the label. He emailed everyone simultaneously.

Audience Member

In a threatening way?

Caribou

Actually, the funniest part of it was, that night that Egon came to the show in LA, it was my birthday the next day and I was playing with Stereolab, a band that I’ve loved since I was in high school. I was just like, “Yeah man, this is great!” And then, just before we were about to go on stage, one of the people from the club was like, “There’s somebody at the door, he knows your brother.” And I was like, “I don’t have a brother but maybe he knows me somehow…” [laughter] So I go to the door and he was like, “Sorry, you’ve been served.” And he was a private investigator subpoening me to court. It’s like a summons to go to court. You’ve had a lawsuit filed against you and you have to actually find the person – in person – to deliver this to them. So the guy had hired a private investigator and at this point I’d heard from the guy, but I still thought, “C’mon, he must be kidding. Maybe he’s just after money or something like that. I don’t know what he’s looking for but he can’t be serious.” And then this was just like, “Oh my goodness!” Totally insane. That’s why I forgot to put Egon on the guest list that night, that’s why he ended up [paying his ticket]. [laughter]

Egon

I didn’t mind at all.

Caribou

I’m surprised he still invited me here.

Egon

I’m glad I bought a t-shirt that said Manitoba on it, that’s going to be like Star Wars merchandise in 20 years. [laughter]

Audience Member

Could you tell a little bit about the collaboration with Ninja Tune, did they contact you?

Caribou

I always felt really disconnected, but once you start releasing music you realize that there aren’t that many independent labels doing interesting things and odds are that somebody you talk to knows somebody or whatever. And they got in touch to say, “We’re really into your music, would you like to do a remix?” That’s how I ended up doing a remix for Mr. Scruff for them. The world of independent music isn’t as big as you think it is at first. And also, I’ve recently moved to London to go to school there and that’s where they’re based.

Audience Member

Could you talk a little bit more about taking bedroom studio music live and what that’s changed in the process along the way?

Caribou

The immediate motivation to do it was out of necessity, I had to do some shows and it didn’t make sense to do this kind of music – the way that track sounds, for example – to play that off a laptop. There’s vocals and stuff. So I was like, “I’ve got to turn this into some kind of live show.” And the kind of live shows I like have some kind of dynamic effect and people playing real instruments, hitting things and getting really into it. Practicing the songs it kind of does and doesn’t inform the way I work in the studio because I always thought about trying to make things sound live anyway. I like dance music or electronic music that has some feel of being a little off time or having some feeling of human contact, so I kind of always aimed to make music that sounded a bit live anyway. But it added a whole other element to the musical process. Now, instead of just making an album and sitting there in a void, you get to go out and perform the music and the songs take on a different tone, sound different, a different character live. And I think that’s been really useful. And also you kind of get a sense – different things work, you get the same sense when you’re DJing, things work differently when people are listening to music at home than [in a club]. You know, you might get a song that does the same thing for 30 minutes, it’s really repetitive, you put that on at home and you’d be like, “What’s the point of this?” But play it in a club, whether you’re DJing it or whatever, and something that’s really loud and repetitive can have exactly the effect you want, whether it’s playing bands like Can, who play one chord for 50 minutes and it would be stunning. It’s a different atmosphere live, I suppose.

Audience Member

Is there a sequence or a click track going on when you play live?

Caribou

Yeah, there is for most of the tracks that we play live. Another thing that I wanted to incorporate in was video. And there are various reasons that made me think that that was definitely the way to go. Having seen bands like the Flaming Lips and you see like, “What’s that guy wearing in the back and you see he’s got something in his ear?” And the more you pay attention, a lot of bands use click tracks. But also I wanted to do something with video; video that synced up and made sense with the music. And actually how we worked out to do everything was, we have a DVD with the video on it and it’s also sending the click track signal, so we’re playing to that click track, which is very easily and cheaply syncing us up. It’s just a normal DVD player syncing us up with the video. The only problem with that is once you’ve burned the DVD with the clicks on it, you’re kind of tied to how long the songs can be. And so next time around I think I’m going to return to using a computer and to using software that can do the video but can also change things on the fly, put in different bits of video and be a bit more flexible.

Audience Member

Excuse me but what is a click track?

Caribou

A click track is something that the audience doesn’t hear that we just hear in our headphones, like “click-click-click,” to keep us in time with samples that are coming. There’s too many things going on in the album to be able to play all the parts live so some things are coming as samples and obviously to sync us up with the video, we have a click just to keep us in time with those elements.

Audience Member

You said you did most of the stuff on the CD just in Acid?

Caribou

Uh huh.

Audience Member

And how much gets done to that after you’re done with it? Does it go out to the studio to get mixed or is it just straight to the mastering house and that’s it?

Caribou

It’s just the mastering house. I mix everything at home just on the same computer, in Acid, exactly the same way. I don’t know, I’m sure people have been given a lot of different messages and obviously there’s a lot of different results you could want to get out of your music. But, for example, Madlib, who is on Stones Throw, is one of my big influences because his music always sounds really raw. The character of having the bass too muggy-sounding can sometimes be exactly what you like out of the music. If everybody had the perfect, clean sounds and recorded the drums in exactly the same way, it would be really boring to listen to records. And I kind of feel like adding that element of, just, interesting things can happen because I don’t have exactly the right tools to do this, that and the other. Or I don’t have someone totally professional being like, “Wait a minute, we got to get the 15K out of that zanzithophone man, we got to get that out.” There’s just a bit more of a random element to it.

Audience Member

Don’t you have problems with the sound of the samples being too high for the PA sometimes, or too low? Because you play two drumkits and many other instruments and then you’ve got a CD player running or samplers, so isn’t that a problem?

Caribou

We definitely realized that we were going to have to have a sound engineer that knows our material and travels with us all the time. So we have a sound engineer with us all the time and he’s able to make adjustments for those kind of things. That isn’t something I had to worry about before when everything was coming out of the laptop. There’s no mixing of anything, but it’s definitely a necessity at this point and a good thing because they can tune things to the room and make adjustments like that.

Audience Member

If you’re synced with a DVD isn’t it like every show is more or less the same?

Caribou

Yes, and this is another element. Bands that write verse chorus kind of songs go out and play their songs like they are on the record. People are like, “Hey I like that song!” And it doesn’t sound the same cause it’s in a live context. But I’d be going out and playing live shows where I didn’t play any music that I released. I didn’t play anything that sounded like any of the music, and I could imagine people coming out after a show like that and being like, “Hey, I liked that one track.” I was being Mr. Obtuse but they were probably like, “I liked that one track on the album, why didn’t you play that one?” So there was also that element. I kind of wanted to return to playing music – obviously arranged differently – but music that people knew, and that’s really quite an important thing. Even if you’re trying to do experimental music, to have some kind of connection with the people who come out to the show. But in response to your question, next time around, that’s why I’m moving from the DVD player back to the laptop to be able to do an extended version on the fly or cut bits out and put new samples in on the fly, change the video kinda thing.

Tony Nwachukwu

Does that mean the video will be synced in a different way when you return back to sequencing live?

Caribou

Yeah, it’ll mean that we could have prepared bits of video, like a loop that goes in time with the video but we can have five of them and I can just drop in a different one each time I guess and have the people who do the video do different bits or just have random bits of video to mix in. I think that’s something that I’m really excited to enter into.

Egon

I think it’s interesting what you said about experimental music, one of the things that David Matthews said to us when we were all sitting here was, “It’s fine to make experimental music but one thing to keep in the back of your head” – and this is a guy that obviously did a whole bunch of experimental music himself – “is that a lot of it’s going to be gone.” Not in 20 years, in five years. And you played Can and in a lot of ways the production values that those guys [had] in the early 1970s Holger Czukay, the bass player and engineer from the group recording hours of music and cutting and splicing tape, having primitive drum machines playing along with one of the greatest rock drummers Jaki Liebezeit who ever lived probably. That’s experimental music that returned to something, that’s returned again. And your music as we hear, when you explain the process that goes into making it and the actual mechanics of it, it sounds bizarre to a person like me who’s used to an SP-1200 or something in front of him, and then a mixing board and all that kind of stuff. But it’s just great music that you hear now and it could be as experimental as you want it to be but it’s going to return not now but sometime from now, I would reckon.

Caribou

It’s always been really, really important to me just because of what I grew up listening to. Melody has always been a really key thing. And at the end of the day it’s either really good production or really good melodies and harmonies that are going to differentiate your music from everybody else. It’s either going to be like, “I’ve never heard anything that sound like that before,” or “That’s an amazing song.” So it’s going to be one of those two things, and the optimal thing obviously then would be – seeing that I’m interested in music that has both of those elements – would be to try and combine that. A band like Can, they managed to do it all. They studied with Stockhausen and were totally weird, experimental and, like Egon was saying, chopping up tape and collaging sounds like that but also has a melody that will get stuck in your head. Maybe it’s not as poppy as Britney Spears or whatever, but it’s got elements of melody that will stay with you and that’s always been important.

Tony Nwachukwu

Would you do a track for Britney Spears?

Caribou

Would I do a track for Britney Spears? If I had carte blanche of what I was allowed to do, then I would for sure. Actually, I probably definitely would because it’d just be like, “There goes my rent for the next couple of years,” or whatever. [laughter]

Audience Member

You were talking before about your background as a pianist and your interest in free jazz and improvisation. I was just wondering if you incorporate any of that into your live show. And because it’s all sequenced whether you have 32-bar formula or you’ve got a break where you do something different every night or do you even have any improvisational elements in your live show?

Caribou

We definitely do. You’re kind of right in that we’re tied to the structure of the music – this part will last 32-bars or whatever and in that way we’re tied down. But it’s not like the majority of the sounds are coming from samples. We’re running around doing all sorts of stuff and I definitely didn’t want it to seem like a puppet show where we were smiling and playing the keyboard like this. [imitates goofy limp-handed playing style] But we’re doing as much as we possibly can, which ends up being playing quite a lot of instruments and whatever we do, we could do differently every night if we wanted, so it definitely has that freedom.

Audience Member

How do you mic up on the stage? You have lots of different elements for example, how do you mic those thumb pianos and tiny little machines? Do you have monitors and stuff on stage?

Caribou

Yeah, we have monitors. Obviously the sound engineer takes care of the technical details of what microphones to use. I’m also totally clueless about that sort of thing, I don’t really have much technical knowledge. But all of the small instruments are just played into an SM-58, just a standard Shure microphone, which as far as live sound especially in Europe you get to a lot of shows and they have fancy microphones. If you’re playing Cleveland, man, you’re lucky if they have three microphones.

Audience Member

So you take your own microphones?

Caribou

No, we don’t.

Audience Member

You just go with what’s there?

Caribou

We obviously tell them what we need.

Audience Member

How many are you working with?

Caribou

Oh, I don’t know, it’s 21 channels or something like that. But if we’re playing in a room this size with two drumkits, you really don’t need to mic those drumkits very much, you can cut corners in some places.

Audience Member

Another question, just about communication amongst the band members. Do you find that doing rehearsals you’re getting more feeling with the music, there’s more communication? Sometimes electronic music can be very much in one person’s direction. Do you find that by making this music into a band, the communication that happens there makes the music more alive?

Caribou

Earlier I alluded to when I released the album there was only my recording process and the album and now I definitely see this whole other side of there being the live band and playing with other musicians and we’ve obviously developed a rapport playing with each other for so long and that’s just been great. But I kind of see it as separate because I still want to make music that’s a bit sample-based and has some of those kind of elements, which I also think is kind of exciting.

Audience Member

You said you’ve played 100 gigs, what’s the general response from the experimenting that you’re [doing] on stage?

Egon

So sorry to do this, but I’ve got a train to catch. This has been Manitoba, or Caribou. gestures to Caribou then gets up and leaves

Caribou

My favorite part about the touring has been… I mean, I’m a bit of a control freak and in the studio, or in my bedroom or whatever, I’ve got everything set up and everything’s set up the same every time. With touring it’s just been – and anyone who’s gone out and DJed or played in any live context knows this – you’ll show up one night and… We did a festival here in Italy, the Arezzo Wave festival and we played on the main stage because we didn’t really fit on the electronic stage so they put us on the main stage in a football stadium in front of 20,000 people and we were just like, “What are we doing up here, man? This is insane!” We’d never played in front of more than like 500 people and we just walked out and there was literally a sea of people. And I was like maybe this isn’t going to make any sense at all and they responded really, really well and obviously it was just amazing. And then we fly somewhere else and play to 14 people and the ceiling’s right here [motions an inch above his head] and the PA is terrible and that will be totally amazing, too. And then we’ll have some bad gigs or whatever, but it’s really good, you just never know what’s going to happen… We’re like, “Yeah, we’re playing in such and such a town and that should be good,” and it’ll be terrible and the weirdest little town will be great. It’s been really invigorating to do that and for people [in a small town] who don’t know your music, they’ll come because it’s the only gig in town. And that can be just as good as people who know all the songs.

Audience Member

Do you ever work with your band while you are creating? And since you are so into jazz, do you ever get that jam feeling that sometimes [happens] in free jazz?

Caribou

So, the first question. All the parts on the records I record myself, this goes back to me being a bit of a control freak. But really the main reason that it’s like that is because I’ll get up really early or I’ll stay up until six in the morning recording stuff and I really enjoy that. Being able to do it any time you want and having it right there, right beside you, you don’t have to book a studio for these two hours and go in and make music on a schedule, you just do it whenever you want. And having a band, that would be tough because you have to organize getting everyone together. So that’s really the main reason I make music [as an] individual, I guess. Obviously, there’s pros and cons to doing either. But when we’re playing live we’re not playing jazz instruments so much. It’s more like noise improvisation and making things sound different than they do on the record, lots of feedback or lots of different drum passages or whatever. I was kind of making music using free-jazz samples, but it didn’t have that interaction between the musicians so [my interest in free-jazz music] has kind of informed the way we play.

Tony Nwachukwu

Cool, I think we’ll wrap it up there.

Caribou

Perfect, thank you!

(applause)