Until now, for Dan Snaith, an album of Daphni tracks may have come as a bit of an afterthought. Since his debut Daphni album in 2012, Snaith has continued to focus most of his energy on his main project, Caribou. He once revealed that his dancefloor-oriented Daphni alias is all about immediacy. “I could make a track, play it one weekend, have it pressed up on Monday or Tuesday, and it could be in shops three weeks later,” Snaith said several years ago.
After releasing the remarkable Caribou album Our Love in 2014, Snaith has largely ended his live shows with that group. Instead, armed with an arsenal of exclusive remixes and productions on his thumb drives, Snaith plays extended DJ sets to dancefloors across the world. This year, Daphni DJ sets came into the spotlight when London’s Fabric club tapped Snaith to contribute the 93rd edition of their Fabriclive mix series. Just a few months later, Daphni is back with a new album, Joli Mai, consisting of unmixed, extended versions of many of the tracks from Fabriclive 93. In fact, 11 of the 12 tracks on Joli Mai were first heard in some form on Fabriclive 93. The omitted track, “Vulture,” was featured prominently on Midland’s Fabriclive 94. It’s safe to say Snaith envisioned these tracks exclusively, or at least primarily, for the club.
Snaith is the rare electronic producer who has a totally distinct sound from the jump. You can hear it on the first synth stab, or vibrant arpeggio on a track, where his synths drift and ripple in a fantasia. As Daphni, Snaith’s tight percussion is distinctive, too—his bass drums don’t thwack as much as they thump, creating a rounder-sounding low-end that is physical, but not overly aggressive. There’s an inherent joy on each Daphni track, with rhythms propulsive enough to make you sweat. It all blends together in an alchemy that’s ecstatic but understated—fun, unpretentious, and positive dance music that is neither too flashy nor too dull.
Just as Daphni’s first album, Jiaolong, was comprised of a number of dancefloor tracks and singles lumped together into a single package, Joli Mai is easier to categorize as a compilation of the producer’s recent work than a proper studio album. In contrast, the Fabric mix was intentionally and scrupulously stitched together as a pristine vision of a Daphni DJ set. And listening to the mix, alongside the unmixed versions of the tracks on Joli Mai, it’s clear that Snaith’s meticulous work for Fabric is the context in which these tracks are truly meant to be heard. Still, in the re-contextualizing these tracks for an album format, some falter while others flower in new ways.
Joli Mai is a grab bag in terms of style. Snaith’s hypercolor synths are on full display, along with his tight vocal sampling, which he perfected on Our Love. The beats themselves span disparate eras and scenes. He touches beatdown disco, shuffling house, rave anthems, and straight up psychedelia while maintaining a cohesive eclecticism. Tracks like “Vikram,” only a minute-long vocal snippet on the Fabric mix, is extended to almost six minutes of gorgeously unfurling melodies and superimposed beats. “Vikram” exemplifies a patience in arrangement that Snaith didn’t have the space to explore on his Fabric mix, and hearing the version in full is rewarding in its own right. “Hey Drum,” another vocal one-shot that was scattered throughout Fabriclive 93, is extended for an additional two minutes, giving the meandering track a more definite, self-contained structure than the jerkiness felt in the Fabric mix.
There’s deeper territory for Snaith to explore than heavy drum workouts and flashy, effervescent melodies. You can hear a deep, gentle dub at the very end of “The Truth” that touches a more minimal nerve than anywhere else on the album, and this lithe outro didn’t make the cut for the Fabric mix. Snaith seems more interested in spilling all of his ideas on the floor as colorfully as possible than managing them with focus and discretion. Joli Mai is loaded with effusive energy and expertly executed ideas, but alongside the specifically tailored Fabriclive 93 mix, Daphni’s new album feels extraneous—an unnecessary step for a DJ quickly reaching the height of his powers.
