Daphni (aka Caribou, aka Dan Snaith) has announced his first full body of work under the moniker since 2012’s JIAOLONG album and most recent 2014 album Our Love. It comes in the form of a FABRICLIVE 93 MIX mix composed of 23 original, unreleased Daphni tracks and four new Daphni edits. Today, Daphni has shared the first track to come from the mix, ‘Face To Face’.

Daphni was originally born out of a desire to make more immediate music, working fast and capturing the energy of those moments in smaller club spaces Dan found when touring and DJing with Caribou early on. Growing into bigger rooms and impressive line ups such as his recent night at London’s Printworks with Floating Points, Joy Orbison, Gold Panda and more; wherever he may now play, the ethos remains the same. As a result the second full body of Daphni work (containing more original material than has been released to date in total) finding it’s home inside of this mix makes perfect sense.

“I’ve been to fabric maybe ten or fifteen times over the years and the majority of those have been to see Ricardo Villalobos play”, Dan said of his decision to collaborate with the club, “I’m always drawn to the eccentrics in each field of music and I love that a club like fabric, that is such a mainstay of London’s clubbing landscape, is also the de facto London home of dance music’s foremost eccentric. I’ve got a friend who is a longtime member of fabric and whenever Villalobos plays he gets in touch to see if I want to go. We usually meet out front at about 6am (having had a full, if truncated, night’s sleep rather than having been out the night before) and then spend the next few hours inside.”

“We were there when Villalobos played his entirely ambient ECM based set in room three at one of the anniversary parties (I’ve never been in a club where the atmosphere was so charged – everyone went along with it for a while but at a certain point people started shouting out for him to play something with a beat while others shhh-ed them and shouted the dissenters down) and when he played ‘The Imperial March’ (or whatever that Darth Vader song is called) in Room 1 – two of the most memorable moments I’ve had in a club.”

When it comes to his personal relationship with fabric, Dan talks of his time DJing alongside Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet (“hopefully we left our own oddball imprint on the miasma of musical memories that hang in the air in that room”) as well as the fact that when making Our Love he was allowed into the club during the day to listen to demos on the fabric sound system. “There have been so many (excellent) FABRICLIVE and fabric mixes at this point that I knew I should only do one if I could think of a way of doing my own take on it. As mentioned above, Villalobos is the primary artist I associate with fabric and so I immediately thought about making a mix of my own unreleased music – following on in the tradition of his, Omar-S and Shackleton’s fabric mixes”.

What started as a mix featuring bits of new music gradually evolved until it reached a place where it was essentially a studio recording and barely a DJ mix at all, yet the structure remained. “I embarked on it thinking that I could have a mix with lots of exclusive new stuff that would make it unique/justify its existence but as I worked on it I became more and more intent upon making it all my own tracks”, Dan said of his process when making the mix, “A lot of these tracks were recorded in situ in the mix itself – I’d put one track in place and instead of searching through existing music to find the track to follow it I’d just make an entirely new one. You’d expect a DJ mix where someone made each track to follow the previous one to be very homogenous. To seem like it was planned out and build in a controlled way. I think the result is almost exactly the opposite! The tracks on here pull from very diverse ends of the spectrum of music that I like/make. In the end, I just sort of charged ahead following my nose as to where the mix should head next. I hope that some of that sense of intuition translates to those listening to the finished mix”.

Tracklist:

1. Daphni – Face to Face
2. Daphni – Xing Tian
3. Daphni – Carry On
4. Jamire Williams – FUTURISM (Daphni Edit)
5. Daphni – Poly
6. Daphni – Ten Thousand
7. Daphni – Medellin
8. Daphni – Hey Drum
9. Luther Davis Group – You Can Be A Star (Daphni Edit)
10. Daphni – Try
11. Daphni – Vikram
12. Pheeroan Ak Laff – 3 In 1 (Daphni Edit)
13. Daphni – Listen Up
14. Daphni – Tin
15. Daphni – Moshi
16. Daphni – Strange Bird
17. Container – Dissolve (Daphni Edit)
18. Daphni – Joli Mai
19. Daphni – Nocturne
20. Daphni – So It Seems
21. Daphni – Screaming Man Baby
22. Daphni – vs
23. Daphni – The Truth
24. Daphni – 406.42 ppm
25. Daphni – Always There
26. Daphni – Fly Away
27. Daphni – Life’s What You Make It