In his first Fabric mix under his Daphni alias, Caribou’s Dan Snaith zigzags his way through an eclectic set of edits and original productions.
Around 2011, Dan Snaith stepped away from his band, Caribou, to focus instead on the tricky mechanics of making dancefloors combust. As Daphni, he began moonlighting as a club DJ and releasing edits and drum-heavy remixes. Since then, Caribou itself have moved toward Daphni’s own gravitational pull: Our Love hewed more closely to leftfield house than to the sounds of his previous work. Meanwhile, Daphni’s beats have gotten tougher, trickier, a tad stranger.
Following Ricardo Villalobos, Omar S, and Shackleton, Snaith’s entry in the Fabric mix series is built exclusively out of his own tracks and edits, although delineating them as original productions versus edits isn’t quite right either. “It’s almost a category mistake,” Snaith recently told NPR. “Yes, it’s a continuously mixed piece of music, but I didn’t put it together by DJing and I didn’t put it together imagining that it would be played in Fabric.” Samples, loops, synth and drum patterns, and more all blur together to create an organic whole whose tracklisting breaks down into 27 smaller tracks. The mix includes a few insanely rare songs (like Pheeroan akLaff’s “3 in 1”) chopped up by Snaith as well as his remixes of contemporaries like Container and Jamire Williams; the rest of the set constitutes a trainspotter’s (and Shazam’s) worst nightmare. His Fabric mix minces disco, post-punk, EBM, R&B, rave, and free jazz, and stirs them together in a way that disregards conventional notions of genre. It doesn’t consistently inspire listeners to move, but it still reaches atypical peaks.
At their most effective, disco edits take the body-moving aspects of older songs and heighten their effect. In some cases, that means slicing away cheesy choruses or honing in on one dope passage and stretching it out to tantric lengths. Daphni’s approach is slightly different, as opener “Face to Face” shows. Rather than focus on the break itself, Snaith zooms in on that slack moment a few seconds before a beat tightens up. Tapped hi-hat, plucked bass, and shuffling snares run throughout “Face to Face,” and out of this minute measure, Snaith adds studio laughter and tambourine, dropping each ingredient in and out at his leisure before finally teasing in a falsetto loop of the title phrase. It’s the equivalent of finding a tasty dish in the offal of a track, rather than the prime meat, and few can pull it off like Snaith.
But Snaith never fully gives himself over to dance music’s pleasures; he’s always pulling back on the reins, fussing with other sounds and moving on to new directions. He takes the spare, drilling snares of Williams’ “Futurism” and adds ghostly voices and warm arpeggios, slowly morphing it into the prickly, dubbed-out drum machines of “Ten Thousand” (itself an edit of Nyrabakiga’s “Cor Corora”), and he lets the African tones of that track splinter into gentle kora figures before the stomping filtered house of “Medellin.”
“Hey Drum” and a looping edit of Luther Davis’ 1979 cut “You Can Be a Star” provide the mix’s first transcendent moment, as the looped refrain swells into a disco mantra. But nothing stays settled for long, and the mix soon shifts through more restlessly varied territory: glints of kora, Bollywood vocals, menacing acid lines, storming drums. It’s an impressive display, but it’s also slippery to dance to. “So It Seems,” with its cooed vocals and minor-key chords, even drops a false ending into the mix, some 23 minutes before the actual finale.
A surge of steel-drum-laced UK garage beats leads into the mix’s propulsive home stretch, though it’s not without its own quick detours. Snaith moves from the orchestral disco stabs of “vs” into the dubby house of “406.42 ppm” and on into the triple-time groove of “Always There” before peaking with the anthemic pianos of “Fly Away.” It’s deftly mixed, but it’s also a lot of ground to cover, and after that breathless sequence, it all lurches to a close with “Life’s What You Make It,” a woozy song whose title name-checks Talk Talk, yet whose chord changes more closely resemble Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” A snatch of laughter bubbles up, a burst of static obscures the music, and the final few seconds warble like a tape getting chewed up—a fitting metaphor for a set that’s all about scrambling listeners’ expectations about club music. The mix won’t convince diehards that Snaith is a dance music demiurge. At crucial moments, it sacrifices momentum for eclecticism. It’s less for club puritans than for adventurous Caribou fans who are willing to follow Snaith no matter which rabbit hole he dives down.