The Chemical Brothers Are Obsessed With Finding New Sounds

Following The Chemical Brothers' headline DJ set at Bugged Out Weekender in West Sussex (January, 2015), Ed Simons' academic pursuits forced him to temporarily step away from the pair's live touring commitments. Adam Smith, the dance duo's long-time visual collaborator, stepped in for a touring stint. Performing without his musical brother "was really strange", Tom Rowlands admits. "It was odd, yeah. It was surreal to look over to the person who you've looked over to for about 20 years and go, 'Alright, we're doing this now and have you got that - oh, hello! That's not...'"

Smith has been on board since "basically the first gig [The Chemical Brothers] ever did", also directing the outfit's 2012 concert film Don't Think. Of Vegetable Vision, the collective that Smith co-founded to create visuals for raves and nightclubs when he was just a teenager, Rowlands observes, "They were as obsessed with the visual thing that they were doing as we were with the music and it was an amazing kind of meeting of things. They used to find old Super 8 reels and old cinema projectors and all this strange, old, antiquated technology, because they couldn't afford the digital stuff that was being made at the time. People were chucking out all the old stuff, which was pretty much how we were buying old synthesisers that no one wanted that were slightly broken and stuff."

The Chemical Brothers are renowned for their visionary live shows - sensory overload guaranteed. They actually prefer performing under a blanket of lights and lasers to the degree that "you can't see where the person begins and the light ends". "That connected us to early raves we went to when you'd have this very intense experience of just a strobe and dry ice," Rowlands shares. "There was a creation of a different, special environment to hear music in; you're stepping into some other place, you know? So right from the start we were really interested in creating this kind of, I dunno, sensory experiment to go along with the music and heighten the effect of the music."

During his gap year from touring, Simons actually watched The Chemical Brothers' 2015 Glastonbury set on TV and also attended a show in Paris. So did he give Rowlands some post-show notes? "Yeah!" Rowlands laughs. "Annoyingly, now he often interjects with, 'Well as I'm the only person who's seen The Chemical Brothers live, I can tell you that doesn't work!'... It was hard him not being there, but I think in the long run it's good because it sorta renewed his enthusiasm for what we get to do, really."

Last November, The Chemical Brothers released Free Yourself, which was the first piece of original music they'd put out since their standalone C-h-e-m-i-c-a-l (2016). An irresistible combination of matter-of-fact, deadpan directions to "free yourself" and "dance" delivered over banging rave-cave beats, Free Yourself also contains a hectic sound that'll make you feel like you've suddenly woken up inside an electronic beehive. "A lot of our studio work is based around jamming with lots of old instruments and setting up things on a big mixing desk and getting a different cascade of sounds going in and being affected by something else, and then that sound going into another thing and it feeding back and, you know, you get this complicated sort of feedback loop of ideas. And then you move toward something."

Rowlands says the aforementioned sound "felt like kind of instant delirium" when they created it. "For us, that is something that we can go, 'Yes! We will press record on instant delirium'," he extols.

When asked whether audio a-ha moments such as this are extra exciting because The Chemical Brothers can foresee live moments, Rowlands enthuses, "Oh, yeah, in the studio it's about trying to get that feeling, you know, the studio is a place for sound experiment; it's what we spend all our time doing - trying to find new sounds that give us a physical reaction, that make us feel something. That's why I'm obsessed with sound: I'm obsessed with how it has that immediate kind of transformative effect. You can hear the right sound and the right note at that moment and you're just, like, taken away - you're just transformed, you get goosebumps or you have a feeling. I dunno, the power of sound is immense."

During the recording of No Geography, the latest and ninth studio album by The Chemical Brothers, Rowlands recalls the pair "just doing things because they excited us in the studio and not because it had some great kind of narrative or great meaning that we were looking for".

Listening to the resulting album personally makes us want to track down a time machine and transport back to The Hacienda's dancefloor when Rowlands and Simons were carving it up in the Manchester club's heyday. "I was remembering the other day we used to go [to The Hacienda] and they had a section where people called the Foot Patrol used to do a new dance thing, kind of jazz dancing to hip hop records and stuff. But it was in, like, an acid house club, you know, you've got all these different ideas carefully put together - that definitely influences this record.

"I think those musical experiences that you have early on kind of stay with you as a touchstone of kinda like the well of inspiration that you draw from. I'm still totally inspired by remembering how I felt when I heard the first Public Enemy album or when I first went to a nightclub and I had that sort revelation of hearing loud acid house music and it just feeling so alien and so different and so exciting - I still draw from that kinda thing; you tap back into that. And that's something that's been in all our records, I think; that spirit has kind of always been with us."

Rowlands observes that the kinds of clubs he and Simons frequented when they first started raving existed as "a reaction to the other club that would be in a town, where people would be all dressed up" for a night out. But where The Chemical Brothers were regulars, Rowlands chuckles, "You'd 'dress to sweat', as they would say on the flyer."