“The reason it took four years had much more to do with other things going on in my life; having a daughter, I made the Daphni record, did a bunch of DJing, I toured constantly after Swim came out. It didn’t take me longer to make this record compared to previous records; it just took me a while to get around to it. I was dying to make it by the time we finished touring, just dying to make this Caribou music again,” he says. “There were bits and pieces that had been around since 2011. When I had a second to mess around with things, or when I was making something for the Daphni record and it wasn’t really dance floor-oriented, feeling like it was going in a different direction. I’m not very good at having a sense of what I’m going to do in advance, it’s more getting my hands dirty and actually making music, and feeling what my music is going to sound like. The only thing I get a sense of, accurately, is this affection when Swim came out. People were talking about what it meant to them. That was my first angle for making another Caribou record after Swim. I never really considered that at all, before that.”
The ascendance of Daphni – Dan’s peripheral club-ready project – since the release of Swim has solidified a rekindled fondness for the dance floor, an aspect not exactly shied away from within the realm of Caribou. “There doesn’t have to be a firm distinction between the two for me at all, really. There is a very different method of working and intention, which is why they end up sounding different. The Daphni stuff, I never intended for that to be released. It was just made to be played in the DJ sets after people saw me in the context of dance music again, and I wanted to have more music to play. Not necessarily my own, but that was the easiest way to make sure I knew people wouldn’t have heard it before, getting a track the way I wanted it to sound in the club. That’s why I made that record, it wasn’t intended to be an album, and it wasn’t intended to be released in the first place.”
Caribou exhibits a canny ability to toy with repetition, a vital component within dance, in a compelling fashion, orchestrating deft, underhanded swells. “Repetition in music has been a fascination of mine for my entire adult life,” he explains. “The first real challenge I had, when I felt I really developed my current sensibility about music, was when I went from listening to horrendous progressive rock, where virtuosity is valued and repetition is definitely not, to then hearing all the records and types of music where repetition is a primary element. Even now, something I learned from making the Daphni record, and from DJing, is the value of music sitting still. For me, it’s a novice mistake when trying to make music that works in a club by trying to change it too much. The best thing you can do is let it sit there, or change it only every once in a while. Our Love is a lot about being as concise as possible, getting these ideas in there in very short periods.”
Our Love is radiant in its densely layered emotion, searching deeper than the sheer, sometimes cheap, euphoria present throughout popular electronic music in recent years. “That was definitely the intent, to pack as much emotion from my life into there. I’m in no way claiming to be in this tradition, but the way I see that being reconciled is through the tradition of dance music comes from soul music through to disco music, where people have a superficial understanding about the most popular, super, super happy music, but a lot of it is very bittersweet. Marginalised groups expressing themselves in that space that they could escape from the difficulties, but they could put that in the music as well. With house music, it’s very much the same thing. That’s also more general outside of dance music, they have been my favourite songs, the songs that are simultaneously joyous and melancholic, that blend, that bittersweetness. That’s something I think music does so well as an art form – compared to film, poetry, visual art – it synthesises those two opposites. That’s something that’s so interesting to me. Our lives don’t feel like one note, it always has things and its opposite right next to them. I wanted to make music that had these things, these contradictions next to each other all the time.”