West to east

>> Manitoba, from Ontario, lands in London

by KRISTA

What's in a name? Not much, really, at least not as much as one might think. Sometimes a name is just a name, because one was needed and one was found. Take Manitoba, for instance. Otherwise known as Dan Snaith, a pure-mathematics graduate student from Toronto (via small Ontario town), part prodigal genius, part madman, working on his masters of perfect numbers and creating trendy, intelligent electronica. One would think that there was some maniacal yet methodical reason behind calling himself Manitoba and naming his tunes "People Eating Fruit" and "Schedules and Fares." But there isn't.

"I really just needed a name," chuckles Snaith over the phone from his T.O. headquarters, a hint of shyness in his friendly voice. "I had the album and all the tracks and the whole thing ready to go and Tony at the Leaf label was kind of like, 'You know, you're going to need names for all this before we release it.'"

And so Manitoba it was, accidentally significant because of its true Canadian-ness and deliberately significant to Snaith because, "It had to be something that was as far from that whole trendy West London electronica-scene thing as possible."

Having grown up in rural Ontario, a good hour and then some outside of Toronto, Snaith is, and happily so, about as far from that West London set as one can get, despite the fact that his musical creations fit in there quite nicely.

"I just happened to have a group of friends who were really into music. We were all very curious and because of that ended up with really diverse collections of music. We were listening to the Byrds at the same time as we were listening to Timbaland. We didn't even really go to shows--it was more about drinking in the park and stuff."

Well, from where I sit, listening to Manitoba's debut LP Start Breaking My Heart for the 100th time and still loving it, growing up in the country with nothing to do but listen to tunes and drink in the park seems to have afforded this musically-gifted math maven far more advantages than any city life. But how did this rural boy get hooked up with the coolest of anti-cool British electronica labels?

"I met Kieran of Four-Tet and Pole at a festival in England and hung out with him. We realized that we were into the same things musically, I gave him a demo, he gave it to the guys at Leaf and they signed me--as simple as that."

At SAT on Saturday, May 19, 9pm, $10