Snaith Reinvents Manitoba's Sound

Dan Snaith don't go down for none of that AC/DC, John Lee Hooker, Ramones, Boards of Canada kind of shit. Y'know, finding a shtick and sticking with it. He courts change happily, his two albums thus far as different as seasons. "I can't really understand people — and there's plenty of them — who make the same record over and over and over again," he said during a recent interview. "I'm never really happy with what I've done, so I keep trying to make something and do something that I think's better."

He's talking, of course, of the disparity between his debut disc, Start Breaking My Heart, and his latest longplayer, Up in Flames. After introducing himself to the world with a tasteful, polite, warmly melodic outing of sentimental electronics that seemed all too comfortably like easy-electro-listening-for-post-rock-fans, the Canadian mathematics boffin has completely reinvented himself this time around. His second album comes off with a similar vibe to Cornelius records. Showing a near-maniacal attention to detail, the record builds up dense layers of shoegazer guitars, heaving electronics, spatterings of digital static, colorings of hand-percussion, and heavily-reverbed doped-out vocals straight from the Kevin Shields/J.Spaceman school.

"All the tracks, I spent hours and hours, and days and days, and months and months finishing each of them. And, there's like 10 times as many samples or sounds in each track as there was on the first record," Snaith said, talking about all the work that went into sculpting such an immense, densely layered, busy-sounding disc. "I guess it was also more labor-intensive in that when I started making the record I didn't know what I wanted to do, or what I wanted it to sound like. It took me a long time to figure out the 'sound' that I wanted this record to get to.

"The one thing that I did figure out about halfway through is that I didn't just want to make another sort of laptop/folktronica/electronic record like the first one," he chuckled, with a goofy Canadian giggle. "Just because, a lot of music in that genre has really let me down and really bored me silly in the last couple years. Lots of small labels in England have a host of little bedroom artists who all sound like they're ripping off Four Tet. And people saw me fitting into that sort of thing, so I was like, 'Fuck, I've gotta change', because a lot of those records are really unambitious. They're just little pretty records that you put on your shelf and forget about a week later. And I didn't want to make a record like that."

So Snaith set about working and working. Which isn't new for him. He spends much of his time, essentially every day, beavering away at some kind of musical endeavor. Snaith said he was making the kind of bacchanalian break-centric party-music that he peddled on his Australian tour and served up on the recent single "If Assholes Could Fly This Place Would Be an Airport" at the same time as he was trying his hand at making bling-blinged R&B, at the same time as he was trying to get all shoegazeresque on what ended up being his second album.

That process, he said, was difficult, in that he didn't necessarily have any of these conceptions in mind; and, given that all these pots were on the boil at the same time, there wasn't such delineation in his own mind. "It was really incredibly, incredibly frustrating over the first, like, year or something that I was working on it," Snaith sighed. "Because I didn't know what I wanted and almost none of what I was doing came together. I just didn't know what I wanted to do or what I wanted it to sound like, and I was just fucking pissed off and like 'Fuck this, I'm not making another record again, blah blah blah.' Once it kind of started taking shape, it really all came together. It just became a matter of making the music once it started to make sense what kind of sound I wanted."

Once that idea began to solidify, Snaith found himself having to hire out studio time for the first time so he could record himself playing keyboards, flutes, hand-percussion, and guitar. Which kind of goes against why, he said, he's a computer musician: "Because it's super-cheap."

He started out his music-making life in earnest when his family bought him the standard shitty sampler and shitty computer when he was 13. Of course, there were those piano lessons beginning at 5, but, after a while, he'd found himself drifting to other dreams. "I always wanted to be a rock star, I think," Snaith chuckled. "From fairly early on, I knew that what I loved doing was music. And, well, also math, too; I really knew that I liked thinking. I liked sitting around and fucking thinking and shit. So, I guess I'm pretty lucky, in that I'm doing exactly the two things that I wanted to do."

Snaith is "doing" math now, as a Ph.D. in advanced mathematics. For the release of Start Breaking My Heart, his aggressively promotional label Leaf made much of this idea; and, of course, it resonated with the music-writer types (including myself, probably), who'd be too aware that the math-boffin-making-boffin-music bit just about wrote itself. Of course, the sentimental emo-tronics therein didn't quite match up with the concept, but, like, whatever.

"I think people were expecting me to be this guy who was taking his computer apart, and building his own machines, and doing all sorts of technical shit, and I couldn't be any, like, less like that," Snaith said, noting that, this time, the references to his mathematical endeavors have been elided from press releases.

And, he's quick to note, the idea of elitist maths as being dry, eggheaded, and obsessively intellectual doesn't really wash, either. "The math that I do, after a certain point it isn't really very technical. It's more, like, artistic and creative than people would imagine, I think," Snaith said. "I'm not sitting there with a calculator adding up fucking numbers and stuff. It's so abstract that it's a lot more artistic, I guess." — Anthony Carew [Tuesday, April 22, 2003]