Daphni and Caribou are the same person. Daphni’s music tends to be dancier, but they’re both aliases of producer Dan Snaith, which makes one of two singles he’s released today a bit unconventional. ‘Waiting So Long’, which will appear on Daphni’s just-announced album Butterfly, features Caribou, and it does almost feel like a Daphni rework of a Caribou track. The other new track from Butterfly is called ‘Lucky’, and it’s cartoonishly trippy. Take a listen below.
Explaining ‘Waiting So Long’, Snaith said in a press release:
People understandably always ask about the difference between Caribou and Daphni music – how I decide which is which. I think there have been times where the music I’ve made under the two aliases has been farther apart and times – eg right now – where they’re closer together. One big thing that has always differentiated them is my voice. I’ve never sung on a Daphni track. When I started ‘Waiting So Long’ initially it was an instrumental. The lyric and the melody came to me as I was working on it and I just recorded it without thinking too much about it, but when I listened back to it a few days later it was the first time that i’ve had the sense that a track belonged to both aliases – like Daphni had sampled a Caribou vocal or something like that. I’m not in the midst of some existential crisis; I haven’t, hopefully, slipped too deep into the welcoming waters of the pool of Narcissus; I don’t agonise about what track ends up under what alias – in fact the opposite. I worry about it less than ever and just go with my gut instinct. On a practical level I just felt like this was a track that both Daphni and Caribou fans might want to hear.
Butterfly, the follow-up to 2022’s Cherry, arrives on February 6. It features the previously released songs ‘Sad Piano House’ and ‘Clap Your Hands’. “Daphni music is still music that I’m making primarily for the purpose of playing in my DJ sets,” Snaith said. “The majority of the tracks on this record I do play regularly in my sets. But then there are a bunch – slower, weirder – that I don’t usually play… or wait… maybe the point is that I’d only play them in the right club.”
He added:
Around the time I was finishing up this album I played a long set in a club called Open Ground in Wuppertal, Germany.” Snaith recalls, “It’s kind of, in one sense, the platonic ideal of the kind of club I’d want to play in. Every single decision has been taken, at great expense, with the aim of making the perfect sounding medium sized club room. But on top of it being the perfect acoustic environment it also is run by an amazing collection of people in a way that gives it a sense of community that dance music at its best provides. It is an absolute pleasure to play in that room to a crowd of people who come from all over. Playing in there you feel like you can play anything, and I played works in progress of pretty much every track on this album in my set there. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing a short set at a festival or in a more raw warehouse kind of club where you bang it out and only really functional music works but on record I guess the point of these Daphni records is to keep in mind a more expansive idea of dance music where the parameters are broad and the church is broad. I think that actually putting really functional stuff next to weirder tracks (both on an album and in a dj set) might be the thing that’s still most interesting to me.
Butterfly Cover Artwork:
Butterfly Tracklist:
1. Sad Piano House
2. Clap Your Hands
3. Hang
4. Lucky
5. Waiting So Long
6. Napoleon’s Rock
7. Good Night Baby
8. Talk To Me
9. Two Maps
10. Josephine
11. Miles Smiths
12. Goldie
13. Caterpillar
14. Shifty
15. Invention
16. Eleven
