Caribou

There can't be too many artists within the iTunes muso-sphere who earned a PhD in maths from Imperial College, London — but Canadian electronica wiz Dan Snaith (aka Caribou) may be addressed as "doctor", thanks to a thesis titled Overconvergent Siegel Modular Symbols. Seems like his brainiac background has had nothing but a beneficial effect on his endlessly intriguing body of music: check out the insect-like arrangement of digital clicks that underscores early track "Dundas, Ontario" (released when he went by the moniker, Manitoba), the delicate cascades of "Cherrybomb, Pt 2", and the mellow funk of "Odessa" from 2010's marvelous Swim.

The fluid geometry of Caribou's compositions continues to fascinate, in Next Steps.

He quotes Shakespeare — the album-gracing phrase The Milk of Human Kindness appears in Macbeth — and he understands advanced mathematics . . . small wonder that Caribou's headspace is teeming with invention. Our overview of his greatest sonic creations continues with such beguiling and fanciful confections as "Boreal Forest Opper", which manages to sound both rustic and futuristic at the same time, "Ole", where he folds a head-spinning web of beats and rhythms into the soft tangles of a re-ordered acoustic guitar, and the confusing-yet-danceable "Hannibal" which seems to move through time and space with shape-shifting ease.

In the techno-philiac early 21st Century, geeks undoubtably rule the world: they gave us our social networks, our 3-D movies and our iPads. Now, thanks to the likes of mathematics PhD-holder Dan Snaith, better known by his stage names Caribou and (formerly) Manitoba, musical creativity is also falling into the realms of geekdom. As you'll hear on this fascinating collection of electronic Essentials, Snaith occupies the largely uncharted but supremely fertile middle ground that exists between the sciences and the arts, between clinical structure on one hand and free-ranging, entirely unpredictable flights of creative fancy on the other. So, in a way, you might say he's the perfect renaissance artist for our times.