You Know How It Feels

Caribou “Volume”

I remember hearing M|A|R|R|S’ “Pump Up the Volume” as a kid, usually in passing on the radio or on television. I had very little context for it but understood that it was extremely cool and futuristic, and everything about it was strange and magical and mysterious that stood apart from anything else I knew up to that point in the late 80s. It was like turning the dial on the radio and receiving a musical message from another world.

Caribou’s Dan Snaith is about the same age as me, and had the same experience. He says it was his first experience with electronic music, and I suppose that’s probably true for me as well, depending on how you’d define “electronic music” in an era when almost everything on the radio had was built around drum machines and synthesizers. “Pump Up the Volume” was essentially a dense collage of samples, rooted in the more ambitious end of hip-hop production in that era but with a different vibe altogether. Hip-hop was unmistakably connected to Black urban life in America, but “Pump Up the Volume” was less specific – it sounded like everywhere on the planet all at once, or like a scramble of radio signals from Earth getting mixed in deep space.

Snaith’s rework of “Pump Up the Volume” focuses on one of the song’s most memorable parts, which I can’t confidently identify – a loop of a marimba, or a keyboard on a marimba setting? It’s the part in the song that establishes you’ve entered the song’s odd atmosphere, and after establishing the base tone Snaith immediately starts warping it to create his own little alien world. He retains the “pump up the volume” vocal sample, so it basically comes across as a remix up until around 90 seconds in when a female vocal part enters the mix and it starts to sound like a dance pop song transposed with the M|A|R|R|S composition. I’m not sure whether that pop song is Snaith’s own original material or not, but it doesn’t really matter – the thing that matters is that it’s building on the sense that “Pump Up the Volume” is built to absorb sounds, and Snaith understood that he couldn’t just stop at altering the music. He had to make an offering, something to keep the song’s fire burning.

Buy it from Bandcamp.