New Music /

The Chemical Brothers

Ed and Tom on all things Chemical: Do you do anything with the leftover material from the albums you record? ED: ‘Ideas that don’t get fully developed become other music. There’s lots of stuff on this record that once was something else or was a little idea for an album a while ago, or we make our b-sides or different mixes. There’s really good stuff that doesn’t quite fit into this period, this hour of music that we’ve given out. But it’s good, you know, it’s a good platform to go and make other music and it’s not discardable by any means’. TOM: ‘Yeah, also the idea you may work on a track for like months and months and then you save it away and you come back to it and you think, Well the good thing about that was the hi-hat sound or something, and that will go on to be part of something else’. You must have such an ear for detail. ED: ‘For all the hours of music that are recorded for any given track, just one moment you hear it and you capture it right and you just think, God, that was perfect. Because it’s just those little details and intricacies of the music that will only come about through doing it again and again, and just exploring all the ways it can go. I was listening to the single, Do It Again, and there’s a little bit we did right at the end. We did a track a while ago and then did more on it, and there’s this one little bit that happens that would never have come to be without that perseverance, and just wanting to explore it more and more’. There aren’t many bands who experiment as much as you do and still have big hits. ED: ‘Hey Boy, Hey Girl? Well that’s like two different records almost. You hear it on the radio but when you play it in a club it’s got all these really menacing, mad acid lines – and it’s the same record, but it sounds different. It’s the same with this Do It Again track. I’ve heard it in clubs and it’s really quite dark and people are really into it and trancing off on it and then I’ve heard it in the middle of the day on the radio and it’s been complete. But it’s the same piece of music and that’s kind of cool’. TOM: ‘Experimental music is just like music you can’t really listen to and that’s fine and people get enjoyment from making it — not so much from listening to it – but from making it. It’s interesting. So we’d never consider ourselves experimental music on that level. You know like Ed was saying, the duality of something like Do It Again or Hey Boy, Hey Girl — you understand it as this sort of song but actually if you hear it at 4 o’clock in a nightclub and it’s the sort of creeping paranoia of Do It Again and this voice commanding you to do something and it’s like you think you know what it is but is it actually what you think it is? It’s sort of experimental on that level but it’s not experimental’. Do you enjoy the process of choosing and ordering tracks for an album? ED: ‘We’re pretty insistent on still making albums, that’s what we’ve always done. We like the flow of music. From the first album we’ve made we’ve tried to make something that went from beginning to end, building a kind of flow like how we’d put together an hour of music on a mix CD or DJ-ing. That’s what we’ve always done. We like putting music together’.

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