As well as recording and performing under the aliases Caribou, Manitoba and Daphni – spanning genres as diverse as IDM, folktronica, neo-psychedelia and dreampop – Canadian composer and musician Daniel Snaith holds a PhD in Mathematics from Imperial College London for his work on Overconvergent Siegel Modular Symbols.
In February 2020, he released Suddenly, his fifth album as Caribou, winning critical acclaim and the Juno Award for Electronic Album of the Year along the way. With Covid shutting down touring just weeks after the album’s release, Snaith finally hit the road in support of the album in November 2021 with a string of dates taking the four-piece live act across North America, Europe and the UK, accompanied by FOH engineer Christos Gogos.
The requirements for the live show included the ability to run FOH and IEMs from a single console and, critically, that the console was small enough to travel with the band. ‘When we decided with the band to take our own desk on tour, my first choice was the dLive C1500 because we wanted a desk that can fly anywhere with us,’ Gogos says.
The dLive C1500 Surface provides 12 faders over six layers, to provide 72 fader strips in addition to 19 assignable SoftKeys and a 12-inch touchscreen, all in a form factor that is small enough to mount in a 19-inch rack or stash in the hold of an aircraft. With the four-piece band requiring 30 inputs onstage, Gogos partnered the C1500 with a CDM32 MixRack, offering 32 mic/line inputs and 16 line outputs in a 5U-high frame, powered by Allen & Heath’s 96kHz XCVI FPGA engine, capable of 160x64 processing channels with ultra-low 0.7ms latency.
‘I’ve used many different digital desks in the past, but when I first mixed on a dLive system I fell in love with the way that it sounded,’ Gogos says . ‘It’s really easy to set up and navigate around the desk. The compressors, FX units, dynamic EQ’s are great and I’m using the Dyn8 [multiband compressor and dynamic EQ] on almost every channel.
‘It is small but mighty; I love it…’
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