Hendrix With Ko

from the LP Up In Flames, Leaf Records, 2003




The man behind the project formerly known as Manitoba (I’ll get to that in a second), one Dan Snaith, hails from Dundas, Ontario. After having performed and released records as Manitoba for a few years, he was actually sued over the use of the name; apparently, he thought the threatening letters had been a joke, until he was served a subpoena at a show in Los Angeles about a year after this album came out. Rather than waste time, money, & creative energy fighting some stupid lawsuit, Snaith simply changed the name to what he is currently known as: Caribou. When asked about the new name in an interview, he admitted that he picked “caribou” while he was tripping on LSD in the woods with his friends. This song bursts forth like the seeds of a dandelion’s afro on a blustery day, soaring atop the angelic sounds of a harp and tenor chorus of “ba-ba-ba’s”, all driven along firmly by one hell of a phatty breakbeat. An ethereal voice descends out of the nimbus mist, “Times up, get on the way, and be right now…something’s got me started, but I can’t tune it out…it just took ten times, to take what I’ve become, but it starts right now, and it’s only just begun…”; flourishes of pan-pipes and a squelching synth effortlessly drift in and out. The guy singing is Snaith’s fellow Canadian (they are even from the same town), and avant-beats producer Koushik, whose voice they recorded perfectly in the mix here. Suddenly, at about 2:45 into the track, it all unravels a bit---the drum cuts out briefly, leaving us with only the harps and a new synthesizer to viscerally guide us down this tributary. Slowly, helped along by some handclaps, the bass & snare of a drumset pounds & kicks at attention, and things shift once again right on the way outro. Soon after completing this record, Dr. Snaith finished something else which caught my attention: in 2005, he received his fucking PhD in mathematics, with a dissertation entitled Overconvergent Siegel Modular Symbols. I’m not entirely sure what that means, and I teach college, so there you go…acid, mathematical theory, Canada, and a big furry deer.