The Looking Glass: Caribou, "Our Love"
October 20, 2014
Interest in Caribou ÛÒ who, over the years, has been known in various forms and styles ÛÒ has recently been reawakened with the release of the new album Our Love. It is no accident that this release seems to further clarify many of Snaith’s vague and idealic self-descriptions of his musical aesthetic as a pure idea. However, the aesthetic form of this album does more to further a central thesis ÛÒ one that he put forth many years ago ÛÒ than any previous work. In fact, this album seems to problematize this central claim.
Daniel Snaith once noted that, in his world, music is not so much a phenomenon of external representation, one to be consumed or viewed. Rather, in a second sense, his views on music hold that the aesthetic qualities of music refer not only to a type of representation ÛÒ of chord sequences or sonic moods ÛÒ but also to an idea: to him, everything is secondary to the representation of music as an “idea.” But this is more than a vague proclamation, as he once noted that:
I’m not interested in things in the real world as much as I am interested in mental ideas and mental contexts. That’s why I did a PhD in Pure Math, this elegance of pure ideas and things that are somewhat intangible and about ideas. Music is very much like that, playing around with ideas and creating this aesthetic of sound.
How are we to approach this notion of “idealizationÛ? Let us risk a detour from the common conventions of musical description ÛÒ one that confesses itself all too easily by describing or explaining a given album as a “development” within a larger context of industrial and cultural iterations.
What makes this claim of idealization impossible is that Our Love does not stand as an idea among ideas, as an example among examples. In fact, the theoretical foundation underlying Our Love is not some pure logical form ÛÒ one that begs for a mimetic relationship to a real representation of form ÛÒ but rather, I argue, it is a purely descriptive enterprise, one that intends to reveal a certain style. Evidence of this can be found easily throughout the album.
Courtesy of The New York Times.
First, we don’t have to know the exact historical and cultural path of the artists work in order to be overtaken by the style of the album; in fact, it is precisely through one’s ignorance of the artist that guarantees’ that the album will be made into an object of understanding, of seeing and of presenting something to see.
We can’t avoid the punctual nature of tracks like “Silver” – a kind of dramatic reechoing of “Mars”.
That this is not a blind appeal to idealism goes without saying; that, at the very moment when an album is conceived, when a track first begins to be constructed or listened to, the idea of the album undergoes a reclassification. The aesthetic sensations not only to provide the basic foundations to this album, but they also secrete a sense of movement that is distinct from space of time covered by the album. No where do we see the emergence of a transcendal ideal ÛÒ a timeless form brought forth in this piece.
The style is not observable in the first listening, nor the second; the essence of the album never appears at the very beginning, but rather, in the middle, in the unveiling of its development, when its gathered itself within our world as a whole, as a force of signification, as a style that we slip into.
In this respect, the banal technical interpretation of music as a chord of sequences or even the emotive atmosphere evoked by the work falls short of offering us a meaningful description. The reign of technical interpretations of aesthetics and musical movements, since the time of Wagner, oddly ends up positing itself as an expression design to evoke pure forms, while, in fact, what makes Our Love possible is how it functions to efface this appeal.
Our Love is an album par excellence because it seems to us, as the listens, that we find the appearance of ourselves ÛÒ of our memories, of our experiences, of our singularity ÛÒ in its style.
This style is suggested and defined by the album itself. And, most importantly, against the idealized tendency, it is this style that spells out the nature of the moments in which we define and redefine this album as a specific moment in time, that is as a moment in time that we share, an era in which this music takes place with us always already included in it. (Snaith himself says as much at the introduction to his recent BBC 1 Essential mix: “I hope [the mix] captures the music around me right, so if I hear it years from now I am reminded of the music right now.Û)
Check out the mix below:
Caribou – BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix 2014-10-18 by Core News Uploads on Mixcloud
