Swimming against the stream

Dan Snaith aka Caribou is regarded as one of the most cutting-edge musicians in the charts, but is was Genesis, ELP and Yes that got him started

'IN THE last eight months, we've played 175 shows. I love playing live, it's so different from the recording process, which is an anti-social, isolated thing. I love the travelling, meeting people, going out in different cities." Dan Snaith aka Caribou (and formerly Manitoba) is holed up in snowy Cologne a week ahead of a sold-out Dublin gig and Swim, his fifth Caribou release, is already perched at the top of 2010 albums of the year lists. His peripatetic life has taken him from Canada, where he grew up, to the UK, where he completed a PhD in maths.

Along the way, his musical tastes – often “terribly unfashionable” – have coagulated and filtered into what has become Caribou’s very distinctive, percussive sound. “I really liked overblown, progressive rock like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes and Genesis. I grew up in this weird, little hippy town and there were more people who liked Yes than Nirvana. A friend introduced me to dance music and would loan me his Walkman at the back of class and play early Chemical Brothers, Plastikman and The Orb. I’m glad I came through a weird avenue with music. It helped me forge my own way – I didn’t rely on magazines or so-called taste-makers.”

With previous albums, much has been made of Caribou's sound, from folky electronics to 1960s pysch-rock influences. Andorra [which won Canada's 2008 Polaris music prize] drew a lot of retro comparisons, which frustrated Snaith, who felt it was an album about composition and song-writing, more than production. When it came to making Swim, he took a conscious decision to be different. "Yeah, I really did want to make a different sounding record, to make an album that was harder for people to compare to other things. What primarily excites me about music is making something that reflects me. I really wanted to push my own identity on this record. I've also been really excited again by contemporary dance music – it's one of those times where there are great things going on in electronic music – so that seeped in."

I mention Four Tet's There is Love in You, released this year, and Snaith is a good friend of the man behind Four Tet, Kieran Hebden. "That album is almost a brother of Swim. He lives around the corner from me and we were working on these records at the same time. Apart from our wives, we're always the first people to hear each other's music, or play it in our DJ sets. They're connected in some way. We've had a big impact on each other's music. I remember bringing him to Toronto to DJ years ago and we went on a big record-buying expedition where he found the sample for [Four Tet track] No More Mosquitoes."

Central to Caribou's sound is Snaith's drumming, which he mixes up with vocals (no Eagles jokes please), programming and a live band. Like many kids, he grew up playing the piano, but loved the "primal, innate" element of drums. The gigs involve live drums, but there's a lot of sampling too. "There are lots of live drums on Andorra, but Swimhas a lot of sampled drums. I think I've actually gained a reputation as a great live drummer by sampling records that have really good drums on them. I like to mix it up. It's so much fun playing drums live . . . it's such a physical, visceral experience. I'm not a particularly good drummer or singer, or even particularly co-ordinated at doing both."

After using Acid software for years, he finally made the leap to Ableton Live, which not only makes recording easier, it's made playing Swimlive – the way the band want it to be played – possible. Snaith doesn't believe in starting an album and being hindered by how it will be performed physically, but is grateful technology has moved on. "The problems of playing electronic music live have really evaporated because of the way technology has developed." As a bookend to Swim, remixes of the album appeared in October featuring Junior Boys, F**k Buttons and Gold Panda. The release wasn't planned but Snaith approached acts whose music he liked.

" Swimis very influenced by contemporary dance artists so it was a good way of getting in touch with people and opening a dialogue. Before I knew it, there was 90 minutes worth of music which came out of being excited by having other people do their take on the songs."

Live, Snaith tours with the same three band members and collectively they’ve honed a live set – if this year’s Electric Picnic set is anything to go by – that is kinetic, lush and spectacular. “We’re very much a unit, and we keep learning better ways of doing things live.”

Caribou plays the Button Factory tonight