Caribou producer Dan Snaith is set to release a new album under his Daphni moniker.
Perhaps best known as the lynch pin of Caribou, Canadian born London dweller Dan Snaith also maintains a shadowy alter ago. Over the past 18 months, though, Daphni has come to the fore via a number of one off 12 inch cuts.
Now Dan Snaith is preparing a full length album under the Daphni moniker. ‘JIAOLONG’ (pron. Jow-long) will be released on October 8th, and is apparently fuelled by an appreciation of the essentially nebulous nature of club culture.
“DJs have the potential to blindside you,” Snaith said recently. “During the time I was making the Caribou album Swim, I’d fallen back in love with moments in small, dark clubs when a DJ puts on a piece of music that not only can you not identify, but that until you heard it, you could not have conceived of existing.”
In keeping with this fluid, ever changing lineage Daphni tracks are intended to be “rough and spontaneous. They’re about working fast and intuitively, capturing the manic energy needed to start a track one afternoon, and have it finished and be playing it in a club that night.”
As ever, Dan Snaith’s love of equipment comes to the fore on this release. “Electronic instruments are notoriously uncontrollable, unpredictable and recalcitrant!” he said. “I’ve been building a modular synthesizer, which plays a prominent role in this album. It growls or screams when I don’t expect it to. Nudging one dial changes the sound so drastically that I’ll never get the original sound back. It’s more like improvising with another musician, and its voice is all over this music.”
Currently on tour with Radiohead under his Caribou guise, it seems that Dan Snaith remains – at heart – a creature of the night. “I’ve been surprised by the number of transcendent moments I, sober and in my mid-30s, have had in clubs in the last few years,” he said.
“There’s some magic in it still. The clichés about the collective consciousness of clubs seems to still hold water in some special cases. There is a small world where dance music lives up to its potential to liberate, surprise and innovate. It’s there that I hope Daphni has a place.”
Here’s the Jane Eastlight video for ‘Ye Ye’. Yonder lies the cover art.
‘JIAOLONG’ is set to be released on October 8th. Tracklisting:
1.Yes, I Know
2. Cos-Ber-Zam – Ne Noya (Daphni Mix)
3. Ye Ye
4. Light
5. Pairs
6. Ahora
7. Jiao
8. Springs
9. Long
