Inside the Chemical Brothers’ Quest for ‘Transformative Music’
The Chemical Brothers emerged in what now seems like dance music’s Stone Age. In 1995, when Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands released their full-length debut, Exit Planet Dust, they were two London DJ-producers pushing England’s fading acid-house scene into a future filled with hip-hop, Britpop and big-room house — and toward America’s initial dalliance with something then called electronica. Two decades later, with eighth Chemical Brothers LP Born in the Echoes just released, Simons and Rowlands are global dance-music superstars, comfortable block-rocking EDM festivals, or dropping techno and house bangers in intimate DJ sets. As for Echoes, the album explodes with possibility and personality, encompassing pop-friendly collaborations with Q-Tip, St. Vincent and Beck (on “Wide Open,” which sounds like a great lost Postal Service tune), captivating modern beats and profoundly experimental oddities. We caught up with Rowlands to discuss the advantages of being a legacy act and the lure of the long-player in an era where bite-size reigns.
Where did you start with Born in the Echoes? How did you decide that, “Hey, we want to put together a new set of songs and make another Chemical Brothers full-length?”
There was a definite sense of “Shall we do this again?” I’m always making music. I’ll get up in the morning and go to the studio; that’s how I like to spend my day. But that’s different than thinking, “Right, let’s make a record.” Ed and I talked about it and decided that this is only worth doing when you’ve really got something that you want to do. We wanted to make a record that would fit alongside the other records we’ve made, and we both felt that there was another good Chemical Brothers album in us.
One thing that does spur us on is that we still DJ every so often — not week in and week out, but every couple of months or something. And we’re making music that we’re excited to play. When we played new tracks [in our sets], even when they were kind of half-formed ideas, they felt exciting and fresh to us, something that we could follow when making this album. That helped us decide that we were going to make a record, and what the kind of general feel it was going to have.
What were some of the stylistic guides for Echoes? There are elements on the record that reflect your earlier career, but it also sounds quite modern. For instance, “Reflexion” sounds like Chemical Brothers doing a Kompakt track.
DJ-ing is my great spur to make music. It’s an impulse that we’ve had since we started — we couldn’t find records that we wanted to play in the clubs, so we started making them. “Reflexion” was actually one of the first things that was made for the new album, and we were playing it out. When we DJ, we like to play small club things. That record, we were DJ-ing in Italy, playing it very late/early in the morning, and it just had this magical thing. It felt like a Chemical Brothers record but in a different kind of way. It still had that noise. Do you know [experimental saxophonist] Colin Stetson? We did a session with him in New York; he plays on that record. So it had that feeling of psychedelic wooziness in a kind of modern techno way. And we were excited about that.