Hot Sounds: Chemical Brothers
HUNCHED OVER a desk in the tiny editing room at Berwick Street Studios, in London, Tom Rowlands – the lanky, blond half of the Chemical Brothers – brushes a few errant strands of his shoulder-length hair from his field of vision and points at a wiggly mocha-brown line running across the bottom of a Hitachi computer screen. “I want to make it louder and thinner, ” he says in a soft but emphatic voice.
The guy seated next to Rowlands – a programmer who goes by the name of Cheeky Paul – rattles his fingers across the computer keyboard and makes a couple of circular flourishes with the mouse. Then, boom! The air literally explodes with the digital information packed on the Hitachi’s hard drive – a dense, visceral squall of martial hip-hop beats, roiling, funky bass and snappy, incantatory rapping: “You know it’s on!/Once again with the Chemicals/You know it’s on!” And sure enough, the track’s keyboard loop does sound louder and thinner than it did a few minutes earlier. The riff, once modest and bubbly like the antique gurgle of a ’60s Moog synthesizer, is now a cross between a spooked-pig squeal and a munchkin orgasm. Lounging on a small sofa, the other Chemical Brother, Ed Simons – an impish-looking guy with short sandy-brown curls and a toothy grin – nods his head in approval. The Chemicals, the hottest remixer-DJ tag team in British electronica, are wrapping up a not-yet-titled B side for “Elektrobank,” the next single from the duo’s current album, Dig Your Own Hole. “We come in here with all the bits we’ve put down in our own studio,” Simons says, looking up from a fistful of Chemical-business faxes. “Then we pull them up and out, change them with special effects like echo or delay. It’s really a kind of microsurgery.”
Rowlands, too, is pleased with the track; his eyes are wide behind his lemon-tinted sunglasses. The song, made with the American rapper Justin Warfield, has been in the can for a year. In fact, it has lain around incomplete for so long that Rowlands and Simons have already cannibalized it the same way they sample other people’s records. Fragments of the original appear in altered form on Dig Your Own Hole, in the intro to the live version of the duo’s hit single “Block Rockin’ Beats” and on the recent “Morning Lemon.”
“That was quite difficult to do,” Rowlands says of the Warfield track over lunch with Simons the next day in a West London pub. “Justin sang it at a different bpm [beats per minute], and we took it to another bpm, so it got pretty mathematical. We were doing calculations as to what the voice would sound like at different speeds.”
Rowlands chuckles at the thought of all that dizzy arithmetic. But he does not apologize for it. “People worry more about the process than what they get at the end of it,” he says flatly. “I’m not that interested in how this guy is going to make my sausage sandwich.” He gestures toward the kitchen at the back of the pub. “I’m interested in how it’s going to taste at the end.”
He pauses, then glances over his shoulder at the kitchen again. “Well,” Rowlands admits a little nervously, “I have a slight interest in how he’s cooking it.” This is what the Chemical Brothers look for when they go record shopping: “Usually it’s records with pictures on the front of people drumming,” Simons says brightly, without any apparent fear of blowing a big trade secret. “We also look for interesting instruments that are used – old ARP synthesizers, there-mins. Before we make an album, one of us will go to New York and just buy crates of records.”
This is why you can almost never tell what Row-lands and Simons have sampled from those discs and transformed for their own hot platters: “We twist something, a tiny bit of sound, into something completely different,” Simons explains. “Over the years, we’ve become so good at treating drums, twisting them up. On our first album, Exit Planet Dust, we had these bizarre supergroups playing together – like a sort of trad English indie band playing with an old ’70s funk band – which, for legal reasons, we can’t get into.”
Rowlands and Simons, both 27, have hit pay dirt with their turntable alchemy. For the past four years, the Chemical Brothers have been the toast of Rave Nation U.K., thanks to the hard-swinging singles “Song to the Siren” and “Chemical Beats,” 1995’s acclaimed Exit Planet Dust and a stunning run of daredevil remixes for Primal Scream, St. Etienne, the Manic Street Preachers and Prodigy. The Chemicals are also the first of the British mid-’90s electro-dance acts to crack the U.S. mainstream; Dig Your Own Hole debuted at No. 14 on the Billboard album chart, and the video for “Block Rockin’ Beats” is a current MTV staple.
But the Chemicals have discovered that success has its irritations. Techno purists complain that the duo’s penchant for stacking fat, harsh, guitarlike hooks over ’70s funk and ’80s hip-hop rhythms is closer to rawk than dance music. Hardened rockers don’t understand the methodology: Does the Chemicals’ kind of sampledelia qualify as songwriting? Are Rowlands and Simons musicians, even in the loosest sense of the word, or turntable scavengers? Then again, if you can dance to the final results, who gives a damn? Actually, the three surviving Beatles did – or at least their lawyers did – after hearing the Chemicals’ 1996 U.K. hit “Setting Sun,” a loving, near-literal nod to the Fabs’ 1966 wig-out “Tomorrow Never Knows” that was co-written and sung by Noel Gallagher of Oasis. “We got a letter from the Beatles, their people, thinking we had sampled ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ – which we hadn’t,” Simons explains.
“But we would never do that,” Rowlands insists. “The idea was, with our own sounds, to create something that had a similar effect” – similar, he contends, to the madhouse reaction the Chemicals would get when they segued the actual Beatles track into their live DJ sets. It took a musicologist, hired by the Chemicals’ British record company, Virgin, to assure the Beatles’ representatives that Rowlands and Simons had not touched a hair of the ’66 original.
And if they had? The Chemicals say they are not thieves but admirers and borrowers who pay up when copyright is clear and respect is due. Rapper Schooly D, the ’60s acid-pop group Lothar and the Hand People, and guitarist Jonathan Donahue of the American trip-rock band Mercury Rev all receive writing credit and a cut of the publishing money for their contributions, however recast or rewired, to Dig Your Own Hole. And Rowlands claims that after he purloined a sample of rapper Keith Murray from a bootleg mix tape and laid it over the manic gallop of “Elektrobank,” he and Simons went to great pains to find out who held the rights to the Murray recording.
“I’m not on a crusade – I’m not trying to get people to say I’m a proper musician,” declares Rowlands, who actually is a hotshot guitarist and is responsible for the great farting-fuzz-box solo at the end of “Elektrobank.” “I have no desire to be a proper musician. For ages, when I first went into studios with my little machines, you’d have this hoary old rock guy behind the board, going, ‘This isn’t real music.'”
Whereas, Simons contends, “we would regard ‘Elektrobank’ as a song. It doesn’t matter if it’s a composite of a load of different sounds with a driving beat.”
Basically, Rowlands and Simons are DJs with an itch for more than scratching; they are avid and extremely knowledgeable record collectors who see nothing illogical or illicit in playing their records, in mutant, ingeniously disguised form, for art and profit. And the Chemicals’ distinctive tastes for quixotic juxtaposition and collision – Schooly D’s voice embedded in a whirl of toasted-Hendrix distortion and brass-knuckled bass in “Block Rockin’ Beats”; the uphill charge of the massed-samples orchestra in “The Private Psychedelic Reel” on Dig Your Own
Hole – are rooted in Rowlands and Simons’ initial experiences as a turntable team. “One of us would play two records, then the other guy would play two records,” Simons explains. “It’s not that uncommon – DJ partnerships are quite the mode. But DJ’ing with two people does lend itself to a whole other set of dynamics. You want to show up the other guy, play a better record than he’s put on. Over the years, both of us have DJ’d on our own, and it’s hard. Our friendship is based on the fact that we were at college together, and we’d go record shopping together – religiously, every day. Our tastes have grown together. “That’s the thing,” Simons says with pride. “We were friends before we were in this band. This all happened without us really trying to make it happen.”
Hot Sounds: Chemical Brothers, Page 1 of 2