In classic bedroom producer-speak, Dan Snaith maintains "I really make music by just fucking around. Very little is a conscious decision." What Snaith leaves out is that, in his case, this is some pretty inspired fucking around. Snaith, under the pseudonym Manitoba, released the much-lauded Start Breaking My Heart through the adventurous Leaf label in 2001, thanks to a friendship with Kieran Hebden (also known as Fourtet and one-third of post-rock trio Fridge). On Breaking, Snaith wound post-Timbaland electro beats around synthesizer pads, free-jazz samples, and a knack for melody and hooks rarely found in the IDM ghetto.

The oversaturated "experimental electronic" audience responded strongly and Snaith wound up touring the world, stopping off in no less than fifteen countries. On tour, his live laptop DJ set mutated into a full-on UK-Garage brain-scramble, captured on the recent Leaf 12" If Assholes Could Fly This Place Would Be An Airport.

Despite the electro bent of his live show, Snaith was growing rapidly disenchanted with his electronic music hood, "especially in Europe, [where] everybody says that electronic music is going to be huge and it's just taking off right now." For Snaith, it was "funny seeing that opinion and thinking that it's already had its really exciting period." The strict attention to genre and context that chokes the current IDM scene lead Snaith to declare "even if they're chopping up beats really well or have nice little melodies, it's just a dead-end genre at the moment."

In search of inspiration, Snaith looked backwards from the future-fixated electronic scene, unearthing old Spaceman 3 and Beach Boys records along the lost highways of US psychedelic rock and UK shoegaze. The expansive tone and esoteric production touches resonated with the computer producer trying to find a new avenue that avoided the well-pillaged pool of minimal electronic computer processes and sound sources. Paradoxically, this refinement involved loosening the quantized reigns that most electronic musicians hold tightly. "I think I just like sloppy kinds of music," Snaith admits. "There really isn't any reason you shouldn't make sloppy, live-sounding music on a computer."

The result is Up In Flames, an album that trades in Snaith's digital bitscape for vintage electric guitars, warped drum breaks and croaking frogs. Snaith also steps to the mic for the first time on Flames, albeit in an indie rock whisper suited more to texture than definition. It's a surprising and unexpected change of pace for Manitoba, and if these early indications are trustworthy, we may have another genre-hopping ingÈnue of the Beck Hansen school on our hands.

Up In Flames' hazy sonic character does its best to erase the aural dividing line between live performance and prerecorded sample. Although Snaith is a trained pianist and lifelong drummer, he admits that all the drums on Flames are taken from records. This was due in large part to Snaith's living accommodations in London ("I didn't have anywhere to set up a drum kit"), where Snaith is pursuing a Ph.D in number theory. When he's not studying advanced mathematics, Snaith searches the used bins at flea-market record counters for the odd drum breaks that characterize Flames: "Weird old records where twenty seconds are fucking amazing and the rest of it is shit? That's a real pleasure."

One of the greatest surprises in store for Manitoba fans is Snaith's singing, which colors a number of Flames tracks with subtle white-boy warblings. The relatively assured results don't begin to hint at the hours of sweat that went into their production, or the level of foolish courage it took to undertake in the first place. "I just can't fucking sing in tune at all. All the vocals on the album are recorded in two or three word bits and edited together, and it took forever trying to make it sound good."

Suffice it to say that the live show Snaith is currently putting together will not feature live singing, but rather a giant frog (among other animals or objects) singing along on a video screen -- though amazingly enough, Snaith hasn't seen recent performances by the Flaming Lips or Nobukazu Takemura, both of which utilize the same concept. Gone is Snaith's solo laptop show, replaced by two enlisted friends, two drumsets, xylophones, guitars, and "piles of other instruments." Though the trio do their best to keep up with Flames' massive size, "there's literally 500 samples on each track, so there's no way we could do [it all]. We're running around like idiots up there." The show will also include fully synched visuals (remember the frog) courtesy of Ireland's Delicious 9 firm. "Oh, and we're all dressed in bear masks," Snaith adds. "It's a pretty surreal show."

Snaith will be touring this bizarre act around America this spring with electronic acts Prefuse 73 and Fourtet. When I ask whether he is planning on sabotaging their all-digital sets by way of protest, Snaith considers the idea, laughing. "We're just going to take ten times as long to soundcheck."

Ben Sterling