Cliff: Today we’re talking about Exit Planet Dust by The Chemical Brothers

Kyle: My dude, full disclosure, I was ready to come on this thing and dunk on some white boys. God forbid some white boys get a little motion And I think my angle into it after a long period of struggling to, like, make a connection to the record was going to be purely anthropological. man, the 90s.

Weren’t the 90s

a thing? And I still very much wanna do that.

Cliff: Remember David Justice?

Kyle: I think if we have shown, maybe a little too much kindness to any decade, it’s been the ’90s. And I think a lot of people do, and I could wax poetic for a long time. Like, I think that’s a great bar topic for anyone of a certain age. But even young people, very young people sort of fetishize the ’90s, and there are socioeconomic reasons for that, I’m sure.

It fascinates me. The ’90s being crystallized so fast and so hard culturally in so many ways fascinates me because I guess it’s the first decade that we were, like, sentient for. But we’re here to talk about one very specific slab of the 90s that like started small, narrow, micro, whatever, and just exploded into an arena level phenomenon in a way that I at first would be like, “I’m not sure if that would happen today,” but like I, I think it very much would and could.

So anyway, I think there’s a lot anthropologically to like unpack that I think is very interesting if you’re like me, and I’ll speak for myself, not both of us. If you’re like me and this s**t doesn’t get its claws in you immediately or for a while, or there are things that make you laugh out loud or actively rebuff it, which is exactly what happened for me.

any album that spawns a genre that has an article titled “In Defense Of” said genre, uh, that was on Vice. If Vice is defending it, then we’re already in the hole a little bit.

Cliff: Defensive being defensiveness on main

Kyle: Right.

And, you know, the 90s also just very little, or let’s say the inverse. Nearly all of white boy culture of the 90s has aged extraordinarily poorly, extraordinarily fast. Feels like the last vestige of a dark age. But, but hey, we’re looping right the f**k back around to. Uh, anyway, I don’t wanna lay all that at the feet of Tom Morellos and Ed Simons. They’re just two dudes who wanted to have a good time, innit? and so there’s a little bit of a, like, stop worrying and learn to

love the bomb thing here for me.

so anyway, now that I definitely haven’t picked it on the jukebox at the bar, what are your thoughts on this s**t, Cliff?

How’s it going, buddy? It’s been a long time. Good to see you

Cliff: Kyle doesn’t usually dig a trench at the beginning of the episode and then go, “Now crawl out.” But sure. I can hedge my frustration with the seeming lightheartedness or unseriousness of the thing by kind of similar to like you’re saying, trying to see these people in 1995 and this music as it is.

more agriculture lyrics coming down through religion back to me. Um, may I see Big Beat as it is and not as I want it to be,

Kyle: Uh-huh.

Cliff: As much as possible. But the

Kyle: Oh my God. I’m listening to the ecstatic big beat of the Chemical

Brothers

Cliff: There was a Guardian article written, I mean, back in like 2015, I think, about The Chemical Brothers, and one of the first quotes in that article is, “The Chemical Brothers never claimed to be celebrities. They are ordinary people who make extraordinary music, a distinctive modern version of psychedelia that is both intense and idealistic.”

And that is a really friendly way of putting it, but I think the first sentence helps me. They do not claim to be celebrities, and at pretty much every possible moment where Ed or Tom could speak, they pushed that narrative away and almost mocked it.

Kyle: Uh-huh.

Cliff: throws me a little bit because we usually, as we talk about a lot, generally we will find people on a spectrum of like extremely humble and unappreciated or unbearably full of themselves but manage to create something great despite that, and it’s still worth talking about their egotistical existence because of how great that thing was.

And then people sort of scatter in between those two things. But s- somewhere here we have a, an actual decades-long nonchalance about being capital I important in music, but it is not of the type that endears me to them. It just feels like a fact,

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: which is a bit different than the way I usually encounter something like this.

And all of that has just made it complicated. It’s complicated to place and we will talk about this ’cause I at least got some answers, but like why does this record feel so like landlocked? It feels like it’s happening in places or a place, and I can feel that it is supposed to be happening in places or a place, and all I can figure out as I’ve listened to this record like 50 times is I’m not in that place.

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: Th- this is a fun record. I feel like I’m listening to it through a wall while a thing is happening somewhere else and I’m considering whether I should be over there versus where I am now, and it… Just the combination of that, which some of that’s intentional in the way that they did their music, but those things being true, the fact that this is like an inherently sort of Gen X experience record, which we missed, like we’ve said, only by a little bit, but enough to have not been…

You know, I would’ve been 10-ish years old when this album came out, so I was not clubbing yet, um, as you may be able to infer. So like none of it has

Kyle: They weren’t ripping this at the youth lock-ins of your Baptist

megachurch

in the rural South?

That’s crazy

Cliff: for, a mostly instrumental record, I might have been able to get away with

it in places,

um, just ’cause it never says any wordy dirts or whatever. But man, like what, just what an odd sort of pocket of time to try to place because it’s even felt… I mean, we were even talking about, apropos of nothing, The Rolling Stones in the ’80s a few minutes before this, and like even though we were babies and/or nonexistent in the ’80s, it, it has a feel that you can lock into a little bit, but it’s also like a, well, I was never there and I was never a part of it and I was never close to it, so I can kind of figure out what the ’80s and the ’70s and the ’60s sort of feel like and I can imagine myself there.

But ’95 is just, well, we were really close, but we weren’t there, and it’s really hard to just feel myself in that place or understand where I would’ve encountered or how I would’ve encountered this music if I were, you know, if we were five years older. Would this record have been different for us or important in a way that it isn’t now, as opposed to just being a thing that we’ll be able to appreciate for a little bit?

I don’t know. And usually I feel like I have a decent grasp on sort of how I’d play out. You know, if Cliff existed in 1969, would I like this music? Usually I feel confident. I have no clue.

Kyle: That’s right. I can’t place it either. I think there’s a phenomenon that we’re trying to work out in real time, ’cause there is so much ’90s stuff that we’ve covered. I think about counterpoints to this, like Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” from ’94, Nas’ “Illmatic” from ’94 that we just pretty recently covered.

Cliff: Cocteau Twins Twins is another great example where it’s like I wasn’t there, but I don’t need to be. I don’t think it’s that this doesn’t transcend, ’cause it clearly does, ’cause it’s made an impact over multiple decades and they’re still a highly successful arena rocking group. But yeah, there’s something about like I wasn’t there and I don’t know how to get there. The best thing that I can figure is that they created a sound that was a pretty singular and specific to them set of layers, and then that sound just sort of like locked into the zeitgeist, was used for commercial purposes, and then completely subsumed itself within like half a decade. And we came of age in the subsuming time of Fatboy Slim and the music videos and s**t like this and “Gone in 60 Seconds” and PlayStation 1 video games.

Kyle: And I, I– The first thing that I texted you when we started listening to this record was, I– “This just sounds like you wouldn’t download a car core.” just very like Michael Bay oversaturated quick cut. But that’s not The Chemical Brothers’ fault. That’s pop culture’s fault for taking a thing and ruining it.

But that’s the thing about the ’90s is like it was high capitalism. It was the peak of high capitalism. It was 16 f**king dollar CDs. It was big budget multimillion dollar music videos. It was NAFTA, free trade was rocking and rolling. we were running a budget surplus in the U.S. I think all of those things had the like post-Reagan…

The success of Reaganist completionism was like full bear, and then we had the, the neoliberal pop culture with Clinton in office. hip hop had come into the fore. We were like uneasily figuring out how to diversify culture. And then I think somebody pointed out in one of the articles that I read that like after grunge, it was just gold rush after gold rush of trying to make a, quote, “authentic” cultural movement happen between hip hop and grunge.

And so you had things like Big Beat and all the things that it turned into. But I’m still in the trench a little bit trying to, triangulate between things we know or think we know about ourselves and why. ‘Cause this is the first time in I don’t h- I don’t know how many episodes that we haven’t been like, “Slam dunk.

New favorite thing. It’s all I love listening to for months and months.” And maybe it’s as simple as we’re 40 now, and going out and getting f**ked up and having a soundtrack for that kind of thing is not our thing anymore. But, like, we’re still going to hardcore shows and stuff. We’re still in a rowdy atmosphere, even if we’re, even if we’re not physically getting as rowdy as we used to.

So I don’t think it’s that. Maybe I’m in denial. I don’t… It’s just like a, it’s a specific lane of a thing that doesn’t necessarily speak to me anymore. Having said all that, there are a lot of things I think to appreciate about it. I still do think it is essential at least once listening, no matter how much you think you might love or hate it, and then it is most definitely a portal to a s**t ton

of other stuff.

Cliff: Yep. Previewing, there is at least one portal that maybe I won’t surprise Kyle, but maybe I will. But if e-

Kyle: You’ve had some bangers on the last few, by the

Cliff: I’m about to, I’m about to pull a thread on this

one that is gonna feel incredible. But yes, like strong agreement. There is a very lighthearted many paths to go down from here. And what I think a way, another way of expressing what we’ve talked about already, which I can kind of turn into a positive here, is Listening to this record and then moving to other records, artists, genres, whatever, enjoyment doesn’t have to flow through you to find the next step. So what I mean by that is if you love this record, cool. There’s a lot of stuff I love about this record. We’ll talk about a lot of it, and a lot of it reminds me positively of things.

But for many of the reasons we’ve already sort of mentioned offhand and we’ll mention throughout, like there were so many intentional cultural shifts happening in this music and specifically, with what Ed and Tom wanted to do through their constantly name-changing artistry. There were intentional shifts away from certain moves, certain genres, certain sounds or whatever.

And even if those almost appall you in a way, it can bounce you off in a direction towards another thing. Because there was so much seeming activity and life and creativity in this sort of dance house whatever scene that we’ll pull apart a little bit here, there was so much going into it that I think that there was a lot to offer, even going back now and trying to find threads that make sense.

So I don’t think of anything on this record as offensive or… A- and I mean offensive as in difficult to take on, challenging music. This is not a Charles Mingus record at any point, right? It doesn’t become complicated or even heady. But

if you identify with certain things that happen, there are a lot of little electric moments that point you towards other really interesting things, even if it is just the way that analog hardware responds versus the options that could’ve been taken or chosen in the mid-90s as electronic music is, taking off truly exponentially because of the access to the instrumentation to make electronic music.

And so some of this record, as we’ll talk about, benefits from some of that, but a lot of it like specifically doesn’t on purpose. Like the first half of this record is a DJ set from two people who considered themselves at this point to be a DJ set and not someone doing albums of music necessarily. And all throughout that, we’ll get to see intentional choices being made about how that music is constructed and how those sounds came about to begin with.

It is, y- uh, as a spoiler, it is not a computer hard drive full of samples that then got mashed together. It’s more complex than that. Whether that makes the music itself interesting, for you to decide. But there’s a lot of interesting complexity here and a lot of unnecessary challenges in the musicianship that can pay off if you learn to appreciate them.

Kyle: So let’s start there. What– Let’s start with the noticing, because this, this is the perfect kind of record for me to succumb to the usual temptation of the way I listen to a record, which is not to think about it for 100 hours at all. That like, uh-oh, it’s designed to crack a b- uh, crack a pint and not think.

Great. I’m… Kyle Stapleton is there. but not you. machine n- your machine never turns off.

Cliff: That’s true

Kyle: so where,

where do you start with this? What were some

of the first things that you noticed?

Cliff: Sure. So I will bound myself in here to ensure I never seem to be fawning too much. Let’s do a couple of things to set up barriers. So one quote directly from Ed Simons. Kyle, you mentioned Oasis already as a bit of a foil to whatever is or isn’t happening here,

Kyle: Yeah, ’cause they’re my favorites

Cliff: they’re everyone’s favorites

Kyle: I mean, they f**king are. The way they sold out their shows

this year, Jesus Christ.

Cliff: Well

that’s just Europeans

Kyle: big case of what am I missing?

Yeah, yeah

Cliff: They all went to go throw tomatoes

Kyle: Would you like to stand in a big gross outside place and drink a big gross warm beer for too much money and wear a bucket hat?

Sure, man

Cliff: The bucket hat bit is inexcusable, but yeah. So

Kyle: My, my baby brother would beg to differ

Cliff: Can’t believe those have looped back around. Oasis was a common touch point for a million reasons, including the fact that they were huge at this time. Huge, huge, huge. But that’s to remind us why they come up so often in, in quotes from other artists. So Ed Simons, one of the two from the Chemical Brothers said, quote, “Why is it left to a group like Oasis to express the way that young people want to go out and get battered every weekend?

That’s what the Chemical Brothers are about.” Okay, so like full stop. Let’s just start right here at the beginning of the sentence. If we take it too seriously, we f**king missed it.

Kyle: Yep

Cliff: Y- you can want them to be serious if you want, but this type of mantra is repeated frequently by the both of them. Do not give too much of a s**t or you will misunderstand.

This is about getting European versions of blasted and being somewhere where the music is loud.

Kyle: First of all, quick aside the best version of getting blasted that I saw was the soccer forum that I sent you that was who’s better, the Chemical Brothers or The Prodigy? Who’s better for getting off your biscuits? Which is the single most British thing I’ve ever heard. but I wanna read my favorite version of, of your quote.

Y- you are right. They have re-articulated the mission statement perhaps more clearly than nearly any other artist we’ve ever covered. So points for a gripping level of clarity and self-awareness. I, I gotta, uh, you simply do have to hand it to him for that. Tom Rowlands said, “Our DJing has always been about us just getting up and having a go.

Neither of us have any decks at home, so we have to practice in public. We’ve definitely been getting a lot better lately, though.” Cool. To which Ed followed up with, “It’s important to connect with the audience. You can hear 1,000 records being mixed technically brilliantly, but the, if the DJ doesn’t actually mean anything to you, the people who come to hear us DJ probably own some of our records and wanna know what else we can give them.

Whatever our mixing is like, we’ll always give you a f**king rocking party.” Which I wanna hate so badly, but then I was like, that sounds like Iggy talking about the Stooges.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: You know what I mean?

Cliff: close to purity

Kyle: That’s 100% spiritually up my alley. I don’t care how it sounds, but I know exactly how I want it to feel. Mm, ah, gee, I, I’m having a lot of cata- Catalina Wine Mixer moments where it’s like, “So you’re doing a really great job here.

Really, really lovely, but there’s just something about your face. I wanna put one right i- right in your suck hole.”

I probably need to talk to a therapist about this experience,

you know? The, like, 311Lover screen name guy in me is probably doing a fair amount of projecting about who I am deep down. I a- I am a chemical brother. I am a

party boy. There’s not as much to me as meets the eye

Cliff: Yes, Dr. Kyle’s therapist, I did attempt to make the spreadsheet full of people that Kyle has said he would like to punch at least one time, and then I ran out of space on

Kyle: It crashed my computer?

There’s not as much to me as meets the eye

Cliff: Yes, Dr. Kyle’s therapist, I did attempt to make the spreadsheet full of people that Kyle has said he would like to punch at least one time, and then I ran out of space on

Kyle: It crashed my computer?

Computer, make these guys get super beat up by the redhead

Cliff: When I was younger and purer, I used to mildly judge that as like, “Man, this guy wants to punch maybe a few too many people.” And I have to admit that as I’ve gotten older, the distance

Kyle: like, “Oh, he really just wants to punch

himself.”

Cliff: But it’s like every time I come back to that list, I’m like, “You know, I wouldn’t take that many names off this list myself.”

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: So understood. So okay. W-

fully acknowledging then our ostensible energetic alignment with this whole thing, and yet our, uh, nagging reservation about it somehow. Fine, these are duly noted.

You know, my version of, of the nag is like, I can never forget that these two people called themselves 237 Turbo Nutters. Like

Kyle: The second most British thing I’ve ever heard

Cliff: Which, you know, for, for fun lore and for what it’s worth, and w- you know, we’ll actually go through this what we’re talking about. But like, 237 Turbonutters and then they tried to change their name to The Dust Brothers, but The Dust Brothers was already a production duo mostly in America gaining a lot of steam at the time forced them through legal action to effectively change their name.

And that is why we get what is sort of a light tongue-in-cheek reference for the name of this album, Exit Planet Dust, because they were The Dust Brothers. Now they’ve gotta change their name to The Chemical Brothers.

Kyle: And, and real quick the 237 from Turbonutters I thought

was a “Shining” reference to Room 237. Nah, it’s just the address of their party house. It’s the best answer is always the simplest, yeah. Which is I thought of Tyler Battles, our friend Tyler Battles, who like, if he did DJing with our other friend Tom Kilgore, they would be the, you know, whatever Grant Street Turbonutters.

their name would be less stupid than that ’cause they’re cool. But it would– it just reminded me of something that they’d do, just like, “Yeah if you wanna come

see us DJ, here’s the address right in our DJ name.”

Cliff: Yep. Stone Rider could’ve been big house turbo nutters

and we missed it.

Kyle: I’m s- I’m sorry. Now I’m just thinking about them doing, like, Stone Roses, another Madchester thing. I’m thinking

Cliff: to imagine as you want it to be,

Kyle: It’s not hard to imagine at all, man.

Oh, man. Those guys would’ve ripped a Love

Spreads cover back in the…

day.

Cliff: 100%.

Kyle: Oh, man.

Cliff: So, okay.

Kyle: Stone Wreck, Big House, Turbonutters

Cliff: It’s, it’s good

stuff. So to the larger point that we’ve been digressing from for like five minutes now. Okay. So i- the shape of this thing and what has caused me to start appreciating it, I– we’ll have some maybe track by track moments for sure, but I started appreciating the So to the larger point that we’ve been digressing from for like five minutes now. Okay. So i- the shape of this thing and what has caused me to start appreciating it, I– we’ll have some maybe track by track moments for sure, but I started appreciating the simple, almost obvious types of shape that they put into this record for something that was otherwise a debut record from a DJ duo who is kinda trying to do some stuff but don’t seem to have a ton of like, “We’re about to make the greatest big beat record that ever ha-” there’s none of that.

There’s none of that energy

Kyle: There’s not the nas like we’re about to make the greatest hip hop record of all time.

Cliff: a good foil. Yes, it is inverted Nas for

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: So the first bit I think is to start like breaking down the overall start to finish of the record into chunks that actually help it make a little bit more contextual sense. So and I think this is to its credit, I didn’t notice that the first six songs were one continuous set for a while It goes together, it feels right.

Of course it is once you know that it is. But otherwise it just felt like, damn, six songs that really just kinda hop together. The butts and the tops of each thing just sorta align in the right ways and that feels good. No, this is a DJ set happening at once for about, whatever it is, 18 or 19 minutes for those first six songs.

It is a start to finish thing. If you start to listen to it that way, some of what we were talking about earlier comes into view a little bit. It starts to feel visceral. Why is the first half of the record this way? What’s the next half of the record about to be? Why was that continuous and the next part feels like it’s not supposed to be?

The whole thing starts to feel like, and we’ve already done some very hyperlocal stuff here with big house mentions, but like, MJQ plus Drunken Unicorn era time, there are rooms where music is playing, but then you would turn a corner and find a room that actually had nothing in it. And like this, that room, sometimes it was, had a bar in it. Sometimes it’d just be a sorta empty space or whatever. And people were just in there fucking not being in the other room. That was the whole point. Like, just I’ve either had too much or I’ve had not enough, or I’m bored, or I’m overwhelmed, or I’ve had too many of a drink or a thing, or I came here with someone who had too much of a thing.

So it was just like, in there is the thing going on, and then this other room is sort of like the release valve from that thing. And it’s never a people go… Like some type of people go in here and do the event, and some other people are in the other room not doing the event. It’s never that.

It’s everyone’s here at the thing, and we’re all just like banging our senses up against lights and noise and sound and fucking smells and all sorts of s**t. Like even though we w- were never mid-90s clubbers, we did enough of adjacent type activities to know what it feels like to be in a

Kyle: we were

Cliff: really loud… Yeah, you’re in a loud place. It’s late.

You’re there on, like you haven’t eaten in seven hours.

Kyle: and, i- in all of that, you’re like, “This is the best day of my

life.”

Cliff: Yeah. I, I feel incredible and terrible at the same time. I’m tired, but I can’t possibly be tired yet

Kyle: I feel like,

s**t, this rules. I want this to last forever

Cliff: Yeah. But I started… I haven’t had to do this, I feel like, too much with records, but okay, then I gave it like a visceralness. Once I gave it like a place, the f- okay, the first half of this record is the loud room.

The second half of this record is basically the chill-out tent. It’s the wind down. It’s like a version of this has existed in basically every version of dancing and music culture even to this day. I heard or I read something about this record that tried to talk about basically like chill-out tents don’t exist anymore.

Brother, they’re the low sensory seats at every event. Yes, we absolutely do. Baby, this, this point, everybody’s got a touch of the ’tism, okay? We’re all like, “Oh, that’s too much lights. Oh, that’s too bright for me. No, thank you. Oh, I don’t think I can breathe in here.” And we all need our, like, little bit of space from it.

And like, by the time I let myself get

Kyle: the best part of a festival is the finding the farthest away point from any

loud sounds and sitting down with a f**king basket of french fries or something.

Cliff: Yes. Which by the time you get to the end of this record, “Alive Alone,” that’s what it feels like. I f- I, I’m at Warped Tour and I got really overwhelmed and I found the furthest corner of the fenced-in parking lot that I can possibly sit in and now I’m j- now I am repeating to myself the lyrics, “And I’m alive and I’m alone, and I never wanted to be either of those things.”

yep. So, like, to me, just, putting the record on an experience that I had that has, like, a physicality and location aspects to it then helped me to go back and start to sort of hear and perceive what was happening here differently. Because I can’t know what it was like to be in this club in the 90s while this was being tried out before it became an album, because that, that whole th- everything I just said doesn’t exist anymore.

None of that happens that way. But I can find enough connective tissue between my experiences and this one to where I can start to really understand and appreciate Like, it clicked for me when I realized the first six songs never sound right when I’m listening to them because I feel like I should be shouting over them to somebody else going, “Hey, Waffle House after this?”

” Yeah?” Like,

Kyle: Do you want… I’m gonna try to push through to the bar. Do you want one more round before we go? ”

Cliff: Four PBRs?” “Yeah.”

Kyle: Can I– If I do another shot, will you do another shot?

I don’t know why my yelling, my soft yelling sounds like Jerry Seinfeld, but

Cliff: Pickleback. Yeah

Kyle: Ugh. I spent New Year’s Eve, uh, rang in New Year’s Eve with Cara Lee one time in a bar in Chattanooga, Tennessee called The Pickle Barrel, um, that gives you picklebacks with your shots, and it was exactly the kind of

New Year’s you can probably imagine

Cliff: I may not drink anymore, but pickleback’s still low-key one of the best things in drinking.

Kyle: still do the thing

Cliff: Mm. So all that I feel like, again, helped me come back to and perceive some of what was happening on this record and in the way that they intended to make it, whatever level of intention that was. And so, you know, finding out… One tidbit we always like to bring out is when we, when we find out that people have sort of recorded this in a streak, like in one big chunk really fast versus, a long project that they’re working on piecemeal.

And this one was done in a, three-week timeframe, uh, between August and November 1994. And as we mentioned, it came out in ’95. But putting some pieces together from other interviews, they talked about how they reworked “Chemical Beats,” I mean, the quote was 50 times. I don’t know if that’s just like a placeholder number for a lot or a literal number, but it’s interesting.

It seems like they did quite a bit of like, we sort of know how to do the 80% immediately, and then the last 20% of what we’re doing here, like we’re just gonna keep feeding details through basically analog hardware. One more sample, one more sound, one more synth thrown into a guitar pedal, like just a little bit more until it’s completely full.

And, you know, they talked about, you know, I mentioned that Guardian interview earlier. They talked about, you know, over their career just constantly coming back to the like feeling overwhelmed by the music that they made and them then knowing that that was the right point to stop. Like when I’m just like imbued with joy at the sound of my own music, that’s the stopping point, and everything before that is work.

Yeah, okay. Man, we probably have a lot of differences of opinions on a whole lot of stuff, but I think we’re together on that one.

Kyle: The agriculture sort of toss-off reference to agriculture that you made is so funny because not 48 hours ago, I saw a clip where they asked two members of the band “What’s the most ecstatic song or something that you can think of?” And one of them said a pop song by Robyn, and one of them said a song by Children of Bodom, which is just like, that’s what agriculture is But this idea of, and I’m gonna roll my eyes saying this, but this idea of ecstasy haha, club rave culture, drug joke, they talk about drugs a lot, blah, blah, like all that.

Set all that bullshit aside. The specific feeling of ecstasy, not happiness, not fun, of ecstasy, of hitting like peak almost nirvanic feeling in your body Is a thing that like only music and meditation can do, by my estimation can do. Like maybe physical, pushing your physical limits in competition or things like that, but like it’s a thing that you have to have discipline or total abandon to achieve.

So like maybe, maybe ecstasy, ecstatic is the guiding word for this for me. And that’s not a feeling that I’m chasing in my life as much anymore. Like I’m chasing more centeredness and maybe that’s, maybe that’s where the disconnect is. But like ecstasy and abandon is definitely the, feeling.

They’re go- like they’re going all the way full send into the map, capital LFG meme type s**t

Cliff: So I think a couple of things could be interesting here. So I think a couple of things could be interesting here. I’m enjoying setting up bounding fences for myself, and then talking inside of them. That is a fun thing for me to think through as I talk. So one bit is this is in the category of albums that we’ve talked about that I would say commercial success betrays the level of impact over decades.

This was relatively speaking for its genre a hit at the time. Yes. But that’s still, peak position number nine on UK Albums Chart, but did stick around for five years straight. So never the Oasis level megastar category everyone knows that song necessarily, but simmering right under the surface for, again, five straight years staying on the charts and being interesting enough while it kind of catapulted other DJs and house artists and things like that, which I’m, I’m sure we’ll mention more of.

It is cool to think about this album sitting on the charts as it actively impacted The Prodigy and Fatboy Slim and Moby and all the other folks that sort of were jettisoned out of all of this.

Kyle: Daft Punk

being another big one, na- naming them in their liner

notes in ’97

Cliff: Yeah. So yeah, actually that’s a great call-out. So Daft Punk on “Homework” mentioned Chemical Brothers in the liner notes and “Better Living Through Chemistry” by Fatboy Slim mentions Chemical Brothers in the liner notes. So l- lots of direct yes it was them type stuff happening then which, which is cool and helpful to us as podcast hosts.

We don’t

Kyle: Yeah, it’s rarely that overt or, or singular. I feel like hardcore is a good teacher for us in this way because we, we joke, we half joke about how like, you know, one album will set off a whole genre and it rarely feels that simple or rudimentary. But like this is the album that truly

launched a bunch of

stuff

Cliff: Yep. So that is true despite it basically selling, you know, I mean, a million records is still a lot of records, but, you know, basically globally selling a million records, it is contextually impressive, right? coming all the way back to something we mentioned earlier, this is effectively an instrumental electronic album.

Like, there are a couple of spots of vocals, but it’s mostly just an electronic album that’s fully instrumental for that to have this much success, and then to have crossed over into the U.S. Where it sold 3 to 400,000 copies here as well. That, that was a big challenge for acts, uh, in that genre at that time.

And so,

This was a, a huge crossover hit in that sense. So, so just putting in that boundary, like so much of what we can talk about from here will stem from people directly pointing back at The Chemical Brothers and a lot of times this album specifically saying that. That is when it started. I’m pointing my finger at it directly.

I’m doing the like Sophie Cunningham meme or whatever, like point directly at this thing. I see it. That is what we’re doing. That’s 100% what we’re making music like now and you know, what we’re making flows out of this. So that stuff is cool. From there, I think We can talk about a couple of things and maybe even mix them together. So one is I do think that there are We can talk about a couple of things and maybe even mix them together. So one is I do think that there are really interesting, like track-by-track-ish musical moments, active listening exercise rewards, however you wanna look at it. But the overarching category for me across all of them will be that’s an analog piece of hardware and it’s cool that it sounds that way. And I will give really specific examples, but that’s pretty much my level of interest. There’s no like, “Oh s**t, the jazz drumming on this is incredible. Oh my God, the guitar solo is so cool. Oh man, I can’t believe this complex sequencing.” Like none of it’s really like that. And then for a while I really felt like I was beating my brain up against a wall I, I mean, I get it.

Like I get it. This is okay. What is here? What was it that made this so explosive? And pushing further into it and learning more about the musical artifacts that came from the way that they made this music is what really drove me to appreciate it really deeply. So inter-song moments, intra-song moments, I don’t know that I think would be worth drawing out.

But then also those will then point downstream to a lot of the other places that you can go and listen and be inspired by here. And I would argue that some of those directions are really surprising as we get in there and maybe talk about what came up.

Kyle: Tell me some of the moments

Cliff: Yeah. Yeah. So let’s start with probably out of all the albums we’ve done in recent memory, the strongest opening track, relatively speaking on this one than we’ve had, I think, in a while.

Leave, “Leave Home” is now, especially listening back on it, like feels immediately recognizable as like home base of an entire genre.

Kyle: 100%.

Cliff: Like it, it buil- the four count builds, here are the layers. Those are exactly the layers you’d sort of expect at this point.

Kyle: I wrote down, it’s the, you know, a couple months ago we talked about Nile Rodgers saying “Everybody Dance” was the mission statement for Chic and for their sound. I wrote down that this is the “Everybody Dance” for this genre. This is the– There is one clear track for all of the stuff that you can point…

If somebody’s like, “What is Diplo?” You can point back at this, uh, from 25, 30

years before, and it, you’re like, “Oh, I get it now.”

Cliff: Can… You have already brought out one of the ones that I wanted to mention.

There is an awesome through line here that we can ride the obviousness of and it takes you in a cool place. So, okay, we already mentioned that “Homework” by Daft Punk in the lighter notes specifically refers to the Chemical Brothers.

And then you just mentioned Chic, which we, in the Chic episode that we did recently, which by the way, we, we love our own podcasts a lot of the times, and that is one of our favorite episodes

now. Straight up. So that album is awesome, but like Daft Punk gets a mention there because Niles Rodgers, Nile Rodgers did the guitar part for “Get Lucky” and like all these like seminal electronic adjacent things are sort of shoved in here.

And now you can pretty easily draw this line where, okay, Daft Punk came to exist in its form in part thanks to what the Chemical Brothers did specifically. Then what Daft Punk would also end up doing, which Chemical Brothers does some, but Daft Punk does way more, is they actually reach back through time, grabbed more of the funk straight up and said, “Actually, let’s bring that clean into our current production.”

So instead of sending a funk part sampled through, through a hi-fi, through a synth, through a sequencer, through pedals, whatever, Like we’re actually gonna bring forward that chugging chunking guitar part or the, the kind of walking, moving bassline that we’re used to, all those things. Like this is gonna give you some ingredients to play with as you look like or look at artists like Daft Punk and you can see that there are not just the sort of big beat influences but like i- if in case it’s not obvious enough, hopefully we’ll mention a few things here, but like all this big beat stuff wouldn’t exist without funk.

Funk is downstream of a ton of things that we don’t know to appreciate the sort of eventuality of hip hop being one of many of them. But driving an appreciation for funk is entirely possible here and like we’ve already set up this connection and all we’ve done is talk about the very first song

Kyle: Questlove thanks you

Cliff: Yes It also pretty quickly reminded me of, you know, we were talking about earlier, Kyle, like this was maybe just before we could’ve latched on to anything musically just sort of because of our age.

But when I do look at that through line, one of the first things I remember coming to understand or know pretty well about music that’s in this through line is “Play” by Moby from 1999, which had “Natural Blues” on it, which reminds me very much structurally of “Leave Home.”

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: the repeated, easy-to-remember sort of vocal thing at the beginning that gets repeated, although obviously in “Natural Blues” it’s a, a gospel snippet.

But just repeating the thing, then we layer the thing, and then we make this sort of like unforgettable wash of sound that keeps building and going over time. So Moby’s “Play” came to mind for me, and then also like, we’ve made many jokes and references about being at skating rinks around this time in our life.

You can be certain that I learned about “Smack My Bitch Up” from Sparkles. But like ” The Prodigy” and “The Fat of the Land” from 1997 is again, like directly downstream of a lot of this, and would’ve been some of the first things that I picked up on as a burgeoning conscious adult,

Kyle: Remember how scary the Breathe video was when you were a kid? I just… That s**t was

scarier than Slayer to me

Cliff: Being able to go back and have an appreciation for my kid brain hearing these songs and not having any idea where they come from, uh, has been a delightful little thing to think back on. So I think, and I, for the record, I can and we can go back. I can go sort of track by track through all of these, but just hitting some highlights from here, I think.

The next thing that sort of hit me, but I only really came to appreciate it once, you know, this happens a lot. W- we li- we listen a ton to whatever album we’re covering, and then eventually there’s a moment where we go, “All right, I gotta go read.”

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: I just, I don’t know. I’ve absorbed as much as I sort of can now, and I gotta go, like, poke more holes for this liquid to flow through.

So I just need to go read more about it and understand more. So we’ve already talked about that the first six tracks are basically one set that go together, which is cool, fairly simplistic. You would also then imagine, like, those were probably then recorded together because that would make sense. But you would actually be wrong because “Song to the Siren” was actually predating the rest of the songs on this record.

It was the duo’s first ever track recorded in ’92 under the name Dust Brothers. And like this is a live track that’s integrated directly into an ostensibly non-live set of six songs on an album. Like just the little details like that of like, oh, okay, on its face, not a crazy thing, but when I think about the particul- like the particularness of the production for it to be so seamlessly integrated between songs that belong together is a damn impressive feat on its own

Kyle: Also, that is an unusual choice to take a live cut and throw it in the middle of a studio record, and certainly in the highly commercial 90s. I can see that kind of working on like a 70s rock record, which probably speaks to their headspace and the, the kinds of things they were emulating, idolizing.

You know, a bit of a ZZ Top’s Fandango thing happening there, like a, a Kiss Alive mixing of the worlds. But yeah, taking a, a live recorded thing and passing it off as part of your studio record, acknowledging that it’s live on the track listing, but not like emphasizing that it’s live in a live record kinda way is kind of a head-scratcher.

It’s certainly not a common move. The example of something like that that I really like is that one Young Widows record where they took Kurt Ballou on the road with them and he live engineered their playthrough every night, and you’ll occasionally hear crowd reaction at the end of a song, but it’s a s- it’s a, quote, “studio album” that they recorded completely live.

And so at a bare minimum, you can appreciate that they’re trying to draw out raw energy in whatever way they can, and they’re, they’ve stumbled upon kind of a unique

approach that works for them. So that is pretty cool.

Cliff: Totally. So a few more interesting details specifically about this record or this song then. So like I said, originally recorded in ’92 under The Dust Brothers, but the version that’s on this album was recorded at Sabersonic Nightclub in March of ’94. Again, is an actual live recording. But a couple of things that I thought were cool specifically about this song.

Again not some sort of deep or consequential things, but mildly endearing things to learn about these two knuckleheads, okay? This song, again, was their sort of original single before they even sort of became what The Chemical Brothers would be. They pressed 500 copies of this with a 300-pound loan from a friend.

So like this… You know, we’ve, we’ve made a couple of connections back to, you know, even punk hardcore DIY ethos. Like, okay man, cool. Get a little loan, press some copies, go out and do it. But on top of it, something else that made me appreciate it, which this is always a phenomenon every time we talk about a different time period.

But so th- this track is at 111 BPM, and then I read, quote, “Prompting many record shops to reject it.” Man the journey of our world and the music that is allowed to exist and not exist based on intensely cultural like moments and opinions that never hold for more than five or 10 years is so wild.

It shapes so much of our access to the arts and so much of our history in a way that is just deeply inexplicable to me. Just ev- j- everything from, the electric guitar is too much. Drums are hailing Satan. Like

Kyle: It can’t be over three minutes because of the amount of space on the side.

Cliff: Yeah. It just, man, the… We’ve talked so many times in so many ways about how a technological constraint or a cultural decision or whatever shapes so many years and decades of music, and that one just stuck out to me again.

And again, helps me… It still doesn’t feel like a big deal. I don’t care about certain genres existing or not in the grand scheme of things, but it does help me to appreciate when I read things like that, what they must have been doing as they tried to stretch or create genres. If you are stretching and changing things to the point where the record store may not wanna try to sell your record ’cause it’s too slow for better or worse, you’re doing something, right?

It’s like primitive man trying to sell an EP somewhere and them being like, “Brother,

you gotta speed this up. I can’t keep up with any of this.”

Kyle: There is some– That’s another 90s thing though is there is almost a political spectrum of people that think culture should be mashed up and people that are kind of protecting a cultural ideal or a moment or a place or a whatever. Like I jokingly made a 311 comparison earlier, and that’s maybe unflattering to people that love Manchester rave culture.

But when you think about the like pure spirit of, or like the Horde Festival that would have Blues Traveler and Cypress Hill on it, where it was just like these big obvious in retrospect why, like why wouldn’t all these things just be together? It’s all cool. It’s all a vibe. We’re on the same sort of spiritual wavelength or whatever.

Who gives a f**k what it sounds like if it’s cool? That was a big– There was like Crips and Bloods of everything, uh, which is maybe like a Gen X-y peak thing. I– There was identity politics to every subculture and there were waves of people. I think you find example after example after example of people that were just flogging that, just being like, “That’s stupid.

We shouldn’t be that way anymore.” And that predates a lot of what we’ve talked about with like internet culture and its responsibility for de-regionalization and hip hop and, and things like that. This is– It is kind of trailblazing even if a lot of it was like clumsy or primitive or reductive in the way that they did it or it just like didn’t feel quite right yet.

Somebody hadn’t come along and made it super cool. It is very pioneering

In that way.

Cliff: A little bit more trivia to shove into this one before we move on from “Song to the Siren.” So this song itself is based around a sample, a sort of lo-fi-ish sample of This Mortal Coil’s cover of a Tim Buckley track,

which we, you know, you mentioned Jeff Buckley earlier and the connection straight to that.

So between Jeff Buckley and Cocteau Twins, like, not only will you hear those people simultaneously existing as you listen to this music, but having a literal straight line over to Jeff Buckley from the sample in this one just all felt really cool. M- maybe it’s painting intention on in reverse or whatever, but it feels supportive and cool that people who were trying to succeed in, different realms of ’90s music were supporting one another and talking about one another in these ways.

And so we get, you know, we get this straight line to Jeff Buckley, yes, but then, Cocteau Twins is not just something we’re making up. That was something the Chemical Brothers said specifically that Cocteau Twins’ music was an influence on them making this and other records. And you can certainly hear it in a number of places.

But the last half of this album has a number of places that could’ve been on Heaven or Las Vegas

Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. A- and certainly pretty similar studio processes for the

two

Cliff: Yes. So one more big one for sure that I’d like to mention, um, and this is the one where I don’t know if I’ll surprise Kyle or not, but even if I don’t surprise Kyle here, I’ll delight someone on planet Earth. There is a silent third partner of TuneDig that’s been around for a long time, and he is called a Boss HM2 pedal And, uh, if you were wondering what this could possibly have to do with anything at this point, guess what distortion pedal they were throwing synths into?

Kyle: Shut the f**k up. They were using an HM2 on this?

Cliff: So in multiple places, yes, but specifically on “Chemical Beats,” it’s throwing a signal directly into an HM2. Now, you wanna find the special corner of my brain, like this is it. This is it. This is the, uh, oh, Cliff is a special spicy brain on the inside when someone talks about an HM2 pedal because it’s like at once the most abrasively like single path through a thing that you can possibly imagine in terms of musical electronics.

It makes a thing sound like a Swedish buzzsaw, and yet at the same time, if you let yourself look for it, you will find that this pedal this pedal that Boss stopped making in 1991, that then even by this point you would’ve had to get like Japanese and Tai- Taiwanese remakes of and whatever, which I have some of.

Like even by this point, there is enough interestingness in what this crazy f**king pedal does that you’ve got big beat and house DJs using it to try to do something unexpected. And so I- I’ve mentioned several times like the hardware on this record. Like I’m not a huge synth head, but I understand what it means to push something into a pedal like this

and then return it.

And when you start to listen, especially on “Chemical Beats,” like if there’s an active listening track I can encourage anybody about, it’s this one.

Kyle: Which it’s their signature track in many ways. It’s where– It’s the middle of the album. It’s where they got their name.

So it, it

is important

Cliff: Yeah. And like Thank f**k we can play clips of songs after we say things, ’cause this would be insane otherwise. But if you listen closely, a really specific thing that sort of blew this record open for me, not in a like, “This is now my favorite record” type of thing, but in like a, I have a new level of appreciation for what they were doing.

Specifically on “Chemical Beats,” especially now that you know a little bit more about the distortion pedal, listen really, really, really closely to everything that repeats in the song. What you will find is that nothing repeats in the song. We are so used to electronic music being loops, tight four and eight measure or beat loops that just stack on top of each other and they repeat and they sound the same way.

Even if you throw an effect on top of them the effect in the, the saturation and the wetness and the dryness of that effect is consistent across when that thing loops. What they do here isn’t that. Every single time through the s- the little looped sample, it’s a fresh, slightly different sound making its way through the hardware, and it returns differently.

Like, when I say the return, like, listen through the whole phrase and then wait for it to start again. The little artifacts that you hear from the sound at the end every time you’ll start to notice are different. There’s no repeat. There’s no loop of the thing. They are like live making this sound and DJing this thing like in, in real time and playing with and controlling literally like high levels of feedback that then go in, you know, ’cause that’s what a distortion pedal does, but it’s like, you know, scooping out highs and lows and like blasting the middle range way past the normal saturation level so that it sounds distorted.

And they’re like… it’s like when we’ve seen Converge live, and there have been a few moments where you, you know, you mentioned Kurt Ballou earlier, like there have been a couple of times where his stage volume, we- we’ve watched it get away from him.

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: oh, it’s starting to actually make a constant feedback sound, and you can see him notice it and do something about it.

It’s not just turning the amp down. He’s like changing the way he plays guitar or where he stands. And so it’s like being able to perceive someone doing kind of a similar act to that, but instead of doing it with, you know, a live stage volume of tube amps and, loud humbuckers and all this, it’s the signal path that they’re sending all this stuff through just like blasting into an HM2 and playing with it just enough to where it’s hard to express, but like they’re pushing it enough to where it’s doing those unique things.

If you just kinda do the same simple stuff, it’s gonna sound the same over and over. They are actively keeping things just under the surface when they make these types of beats. And like being able to sit and appreciate that specific thing in the middle of the record, I feel like helped me go back and listen to everything else with a little bit more, like respect is really overselling it, but sort of respect.

there’s probably some cool s**t here and it’s not gonna blow my mind, but it is gonna make me appreciate that this is not two people sitting in front of a computer.

Kyle: Yeah. knobs and wires and stuff.

Cliff: Yep

Kyle: I mean, that was the big takeaway from the “Tangerine Dream” episode, right? Is man versus machine and the maximum effort bit that it requires. There is sort of a jokey “Beavis and Butt-Head” Gen X slackery thing about their whole ideal, especially in these early days, you know?

Like dudes having a pint. But it belies a bit of a they, they got in there and got after it. Like anybody that’s going to rework a song, quote, 50 times, there, there is a level of intentionality and care there that you, just simply cannot deny. So I can see the posture was maybe a bit of a function of its day.

But yeah, the, the proof is in the pudding and there’s a, tightness, there’s method to the madness for sure. So you talk about the front side a lot, and the highlight on the front side for me is the baseline on “In Dust We Trust.” And this is a just me connection, but I was wondering why the notes sounded so good and familiar, and then I connected that it was the breakdown of “Yanni Depp” by The Chariot.

Which is another, like, very visceral

Cliff: Yeah

Kyle: young dudes in their element moment. But I just really like that lick, and that was a bit of an endearing thing that, like, took a while to register on a conscious level. But the action for me is on the back half of this record, and, maybe ’cause I’m a pirate looking at 40, and it’s the, comedown bit.

But I th- I think I texted you and explicitly said, like, I would probably listen to this even more if it were just an EP of f**k-up beats as an intro. Or even… What comes after “Chemical Beats”? “Chico’s Groove,” yeah. “Chico’s Groove,” “One Too Many Mornings,” “Life is Sweet,” “Playground for a Wedgeless Firm,” “Alive Alone.” Five-song EP, very interesting. Probably doesn’t become a genre-defining thing without the explosive first half. I’m also very interested in the unique phenomenology of very different A side and B side.

Cliff: Yeah

Kyle: the Bob Dylan’s bringing it all back home, electric and acoustic sort of thing. It’s a strange move, but I mean, if it’s about like going out and being in the world, uh, it’s a bit like Arctic Monkeys “AM” in that way, I guess.

Like getting ready, going out, going out, having the time, coming back with someone at the end of the night on into the morning. That… I don’t think this is a concept record, but that is an interesting sort of a timeless concept capturing the energy of youth in linear fashion.

Cliff: if it’s

a concept, it is no deeper than ankle deep for a record that starts with, “The brother’s gonna work it out.” I’m like, “Okay, man. Yeah, I know. You guys are like brothers. I get it.”

Kyle: Yeah. The– there, there were a number of reviews though that were basically like, “This sounds like people working it out in real time,”

Cliff: Yeah, sure

Kyle: deconstructing and reconstructing stuff. So I, I appreciate that that, that is not only visible, but they get points for that. One person, one of the reviewers on Album of the Year said “Each track is stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster learning to dance,” which I thought was nice.

So onto this back half from “Chico’s Groove” on what hits for you? I mean, I, I definitely have some thoughts, but would

love

yours.

Cliff: Well, I love planting worms like this in people’s brains. So Chico’s Groove sounds like the bridge in “Come Sail Away” to me.

Kyle: That is not one I expected to invoke. Not a song I’ve listened to in a long time. Did you also download, uh, the Eric Cartman version of “Come Sail Away” in the early download days?

Cliff: Jesus Christ All right.

Kyle: Hadn’t thought about that in a long time, have you?

Cliff: Nope. I was gonna say, I have not had that thought in a very long time,

Kyle: Welcome back

Cliff: Thank you. Yeah, I– each of the songs from there on out on this other side had a sort of like I didn’t think I liked this. I like this type of moment, which was interesting enough, right? So “One Too Many Mornings.” Honestly, the, the direct aping of Dub really rubbed me the wrong way for a while on this one. It felt w-weird, and I didn’t totally love the combination of things there for a bit. Uh, and for a while, it just sounded like “Paper Planes” by MIA to me which, like, that’s still a pretty cool song despite her incredibly public crash out recently.

But I beat myself into submission a little bit on it. Came to really appreciate the sorta dream pop vocal thing that they did on top of it as a, okay, that’s an ingredient I didn’t really know to expect and didn’t make a ton of sense to me originally, but came to sort of appreciate what they’re doing.

And then again every time I listen to these after seeing it as the chill-out tent helped me. This is a song I’d like to hear in that room, you

Kyle: Yeah. Yeah, yeah

Cliff: So, so that, that framing on things has helped

me. And then obviously there’s the two tracks that have technically, I guess, vocals on them here, so “Life Is Sweet” and “Alive Alone.”

“Life Is Sweet” is… So this is Tim Burgess, frontman of The Charlatans, and this track itself, “Life Is Sweet,” reached pretty high on UK singles charts, so, so that was cool. You know, they had a, not only a big song with vocals to it but also charting songs without them. Honestly, this “Life Is Sweet” in a non-musical way reminded me of the Bad Bad Not Good song with the Future Islands guy on it, “Time Moves Slow.”

Kyle: Yeah. Wow

Cliff: Yeah. That just sort of idea of

putting like an awesome vocal front man kind of in front of something and giving it a little bit of soul. Obviously, like I said, again, very different songs, but reminded me of that again and of people in a totally different genre, but who are dialed in all the time doing very specific things in, in bringing in vocals with intention when they want to.

And then, you know, lastly, I’d just add “Playground for a Wedgeless Firm.” First of all, the term wedgeless firm is just, um, becoming more European by the moment. That’s cool. Okay. I haven’t even looked up what that means yet because it’s delighting me how it just could be a very obvious insult or nothing all at once, is, also describes European cuisine for that matter.

But this one grew on me in a really fun way, and then I liked how overdriven the bass was on this song, and then I heard someone describe it as approaching John Bonham territory, and I was like, “That’s it. Okay, that makes sense to me.” It d- it sounds like the electronic equivalent of someone pushing a beat the way that John Bonham would push drums, and then I kinda liked it again.

And it… Man, it it feels odd to be over an hour deep in a podcast episode and just go, “Yeah, man, all these songs are inoffensive.” But yeah, sorta. Yeah. Some days I like these a lot. Some days I’m sort of whatever on ’em. But they’re good at what they’re trying to do. They feel right. They fit.

And you can tell that they were… these songs were stitched together by people who know how to use this equipment to stitch songs together in person, live, on demand, and do a thing that makes people move their bodies in a particular way or not. Whether or not that will change my behavior in the future about music, I don’t know, because I still don’t know where to put this album.

But I do know that I have a deeper appreciation for it than I did when I just pointed blankly back at it like, “Yeah, that was important. Them, Prodigy, you know, that stuff.”

Kyle: I’m still hung up on what wedgeless firm could possibly mean The Google AI overview, which I never ever trust, says, “The title is widely understood to be a surreal abstract play on words combining a stylistic twist on architectural or structural elements like, quote, ‘wedgeless mechanism used in Yale wedgeless handles for windows,’ and firm evoking a s- a company, a solid object, or a tight, robust rhythmic structure.”

Sure, man.

Cliff: Uh-huh.

Kyle: It all makes about as much sense as it’s supposed to.

Cliff: Uh-huh.

Kyle: And then Slant Magazine in their top 25 Chemical Brothers songs countdown calls “Playground” a real proper horror show. It feels like taking a confident strut through a garden teeming with satanic pinwheels, or to this listener, like home.

Not the vibe at all that I picked up from that song, but, that person’s probably taken more of the bad drugs So, uh, godspeed to you, man. Uh, and then there’s a whole other thing on the Chembase, which I guess is their old forum. This is from January 2005. Someone asked: What is a wedge? Which my five-year-old is learning in engineering camp right now and would be able to answer this.

Th- this is a really stupid question, LOL. There are tracks by The Chemical Brothers like “Orange Wedge” and “Playground for a Wedgeless Firm,” but I am confused as to the meaning and context of the word wedge. Anyone? Yeah, a lot of really insane responses that are probably not even worth reading live.

So,

uh, anyone who knows, feel free to write into the pod. That is my favorite song on the record, though.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: Yeah. For two reasons. One, you know, this seems like this LP seems like it has 1,000 noticeable samples, and they have said there are tons of samples layered through here, and most of the time even the people who made the sounds originally would not be able to decipher them.

So it is Dust Brothers-y in that way, but less overt. But there are two samples that I really like on this song, and they pull them very distinctively through. One is Georgie Fame’s “Music Talk” where they got a really, really good crisp drum loop for it, and, like, I’m a sucker for that. And then Baby Huey who had that sort of killer cult classic soul funk-ish record back in the day.

The song “Hard Times,” the bass groove of “Playground” comes from Baby Huey. So they don’t do a lot of really overt, here’s the sample, ladies and gentlemen.” I feel like the two biggies are this one and “Leave Home,” and “Leave Home” has at least 10 n-noted licensed samples, including the big Kraftwerk one and The Brothers’ “Gonna Work It Out” vocal sample.

So that is sort of the one that people tend to talk about when they talk about sampling. But “Playground’s” got some really good ones. But then it’s also got this little move in it like almost at a minute and a half where, like, most of what they add on top of those samples

is sort of trilling keys.

Cliff: Yeah

It’s got a almost like Bond theme type

Kyle: Yeah, or like Alain Goraguer

Cliff: Yeah

Kyle: type, stuff. But then there’s like noise guitar and at 1:25 the rest of the instrumentation cuts out and they… It’s like a string rub, like when you rub the string with the pick and it’s, it’s really metallic and weird.

And that’s a specific moment that I was like, “I wonder what that actually is.”

Like, is that a thing that they played or did they run a sound through a million things to feel like that very visceral moment? But it’s, it was the first small thing that stood out to me as a like, I just like that sound. And then it led me back around to the “In Dust We Trust” baseline and I started feeling the textures of the record a lot more.

And I love that you spent a lot of time talking about the HM2 ’cause it’s a very texture adding pedal.

Cliff: Yes

Kyle: And I don’t remember how you said it, but it a- it adds noise, it adds information. Y- The way you described it made me visualize pixels, stray pixels in the waveform. There’s a lot of that type of action happening, and so there on “Playground” is, is probably my favorite example.

You saying what you said about “One Too Many Mornings” being like s**tty white boy dub made me laugh, uh, a- again as an avowed child of 311. there was so much in the late 90s turn of the millennium 311 culture where they were like clearly really into Tricky and Ronnie Size and so much like UK dance and dub and techno and jungle and drum and bass and all that stuff.

And there would be like remixes of their stuff that would just like pop up on the boards. And so when I hear sort of electronic dub, I always think about Nick Hexum trying to do DJ stuff. I think about the like synthesi- highly synthesized stuff Brad Nowell was doing in Sublime. There were just like weird specific hang-ups these two California white boys had that they like subtly influenced me over a long period of time.

So when I listen to “Alive Alone,” I hear that sort of UK dub, and I mentioned that “London Thing” book, and it’s like not as big a deal to them because they had 50 years, 30 or 40 years at that point of soul going through reggae and dub into all of these sound system and nightclub sounds. Like of course that stuff all belongs together.

It was just all part of the nightlife. But I like “Alive Alone” ’cause it’s got some of that dub bass patterning. It’s got some Tangerine Dream electronic synth element happening. And then to your point, I wrote down like you have three episodes that I wouldn’t have thought to converge all in one place.

You have Augustus Pablo, you have Tangerine Dream, and you have Cocteau Twins with the vocals and guitar processing in that. So I really like it as an endpoint. The other things that I like in that world are not quite like it. I was like, “Is this kinda like ’07? I really love ’07.” It’s like it’s not quite.

It’s definitely its own thing. Not for dinner parties as they described Portishead as being. But I, I dig it

Cliff: Yeah, think they meant the thing about Portishead being for dinner parties and them not as some sort of like insult light, but I just find that factually reasonable.

Kyle: Yeah

Cliff: Like, yeah, dude, if I have friends over, I am probably playing Portishead and not

Kyle: Definitely not this

Cliff: Planet Sauce.

Kyle: The one friend you left off of the group chat because they ruin dinner parties is the person to show up and put on “Leave Home” and be like, “I got some coke.” Nobody else here does coke

Cliff: Yeah. Like a person who brought their own Bluetooth speaker to someone else’s house type s**t? Yeah.

Kyle: Exactly. Exactly. You love them. You’re like, “Oh they’re so great. They inspire me so

much, but Jesus fuck.”

Cliff: And this dro is hitting, but they have got to leave

Kyle: Ah, yeah, they brought leftovers from

their restaurant job where they’re a line cook and it’s f**king amazing. They’re so good.

Cliff: Oh, we’re getting too real too quickly.

But yes.

Kyle: I called them my Uber so that I can be in contact with the Uber driver to make sure they watch them cross the threshold of their apartment safely, ’cause otherwise it’s, it’s,

anybody’s guess where they’ll be in 12 hours.

Cliff: I do think almost as a matter of necessity, I just wanna mention a couple of things that, People who care a lot more or are more knowledgeable about these genres or this period of time are probably screaming a bit about not hearing it. Obviously, we have talked a lot about this music being physical and locational and having, having a sense of being in a place and a time very much so.

And so in that sense, we, you know, we’ve mentioned that Chemical Brothers and previously the Dust Brothers and prior to that, whatever the fuck, Turbonegro, effectively a DJ duo, but they like, like a lot of very interesting and creative artists and genres in movement, they had a sort of home base for their music and their experiences, and they had a culture around this music which gave this album and them as artists a place to emerge into.

So first Manchester, we’ve mentioned that in general, but what was known as their Madchester scene the basically the college years for the Chemical Brothers and other folks. There was a nightclub called the Hacienda, and it was where, I guess as it was put in a number of places, indie kids and house music kids came together.

That feels like a weird separation this many years on, but I can appreciate that having physical spaces where, yes, this is what we go and do on the weekends in lieu of a better plan. We go to this place and we listen to whoever is playing, and we get absolutely European hammered, whatever the cool words for that would be.

I’m, I’m off my biscuits. I’m what- whatever the fuck. And then similarly to that sort of coming out of that moment then the Heavenly Sunday Social was, you know, a dingy basement nightclub at Albany Pub in London where Chemical Brothers served as resident DJs in ’94. And so that’s where first of all, not only did they, you know, hone what was happening here, and, you know, we’ve sort of hinted at this before, but like in this exact moment, they played music for an audience to test whether it should become music that exists on an album, a concept that is now completely lost to us in time.

But that was one important part of it. But the other thing that was happening during that residency, uh, around ’94 was that was where they then built up the fan base locally For all of the people who would go on to support them. And, maybe this was a little bit of a juke earlier when we quoted them sort of making fun of Oasis representing young people who want to get drunk every weekend.

But Oasis became huge fans of The Chemical Brothers during that time at the Heavenly Sunday Social to the extent that, like, they, they demanded to work with them. think it was Noel was on their next album, like collaborating with them really specifically. Um, and so, in, in the mid-90s at Heaven- Heavenly Sunday Social, they’re getting not only Oasis but, you know, Paul Weller and Primal Scream and other artists and cultural icons emerging during that time.

Like, this was their…

Kyle: David Bowie wanted him to remix– wanted them to remix him. Yeah, they were a commodity. There was a bit of like, you know, there’s that apocryphal Radiohead guest list from their New York or LA show, and it’s got like Brad Pitt and Lenny Kravitz and sort of a who’s who of ’90s people when “OK Computer” was coming out.

This is a bit of a more underground version of that. I think it’s also important to like understand Manchester, which I love so much. I went for Outbreak Fest a couple of years ago, and I mean, it’s probably the second biggest city in the UK, like punches above its weight class if it’s not. I think it’s like– it reminds me a lot of Atlanta ’cause it’s got like half a million-ish people in the city center and then a bunch of people in the metro area, you know, a couple of million that are in the metro area.

But unlike Atlanta, it’s got a really geographically compact city center, which contributed to what to me was a really small town, intimate. It felt like an art kid town. Like small record stores and coffee houses and stuff you can pop in and out of. So when they talk about the record stores that they went to or the clubs where they were regular spinners at, like, like there’s a small town spirit of generosity and like sense of who’s who that feels a lot like our time coming up in Atlanta.

one of the interviews Ed said there was a record store, Eastern Bloc, and they talked about a guy who worked there and was inspiring. They said “The currency of records was high back then. I remember getting one record from a guy, Richard Moonboots,” amazing name, “and it had the master sleeve that had all the ordering details on it, all the information you needed when it came to restocking the record.

He gave it to me and said, ‘No one else will be getting that now.’ There was a real generosity of spirit back then and an excitement on our side to go there and have this world open right up. That shop was really the heart of dance music in the North. Getting acceptance from those people felt exciting.”

So like, you– I guess you can start to see where the passion might have come from, ’cause there was like a real familiarity for those two dudes and their love of music and what, what they were trying to do, and just their sort of persistence on the scene. right now, I’m always looking for anchors and things to still love about Atlanta, and I think about the great Divine Interface or Wi-Fi Daddy on Instagram, who’s like, if he’s at a thing and he’s spinning records, I know it’s gonna be good.

Or like Scott Morris if he’s DJing, I know it’s going to be cool. Or if he’s at a thing other people are DJing at, I know that thing is going to be cool and have cachet. So, you know, if you’re on the scene in a city, you know to look for people. It’s a bit of that Velvet

Underground thing.

Cliff: Something that comes to mind as a similar sort of anchor, like a musical anchor in a place that crosses the threshold of genres otherwise. So basically like dudes or people who I trust so much that I’m pretty much interested in anything that they’re doing at least once. Um, it feels like that’s a lot of, of what Ed and Tom built up.

One person that came to mind for me is Johnny Dang from Oh Brother and from Big Jesus. He’s also done some really cool

I think it’s, I think his latest project is called Himself. But just

almost– yeah, so just, I mean, uh, very different styles

of music, uh, different approaches, different songwriting techniques, all sorts of things.

It’s even like every now and then he’ll post a thing on Instagram that’s like him playing to his kid or something. Like just 100% of what he does is fascinating to me. Like, dude, this is incredible work. Like you, you know, you, you’d probably cringe into a ball to hear somebody heap this much praise.

But like, you know, watching, literally watching him play guitar has always been interesting to me, and he has a real thought process around the tones that guitars can make and what sort of music that naturally implies and that flows out of it and all that. And so this thinking about The Chemical Brothers and the community, for lack of a better term, that they built reminded me of like what were the places that I went to as musical community during my version of these times, right?

And like Johnny Dang is an example of this. Uh, you know, we’ve already mentioned Drunken Unicorn, but like going to weird shows at like Wonder Route, like places where it’s just like,

Kyle: Brothers trying to work it out.

Cliff: yeah. And, and like all that matters here

is we’ve got the vibe right. Like we’re here to play music cheaply to other people and drink beer.

Good? Good. Cool. Don’t f**k up so that the police get called. We good? Good. Let’s go. And like that’s-

Kyle: And you might not understand what everybody there is doing, but you know they’re doing, they’re doing something and they’re going to expand your– They’re gonna widen your aperture just by virtue of you being there. Like every, everybody is there to have a good

time and, and maybe get into something that they weren’t into before.

Cliff: Yeah. But it also reminded me

then less of the musical centeredness of everything, but more– We’ve already made a Big House reference here, but like there is a feeling that I can viscerally recall that is seeing Stone Rider at Eastside Lounge at 2:30 in the morning. And like this record puts me back there again too.

And we’ve, you know, we, we sorta referred to that in general, right? But like just that period of life where it’s like, “No, for real, I don’t have anything better to do right now than come do this, hang out with people, be barely awake, sleep for like three hours, then go to a job that I hate that starts really early in the morning.”

Like a j- a job that starts so early, so early in your career that sleep feels ridiculous to attempt. So you just sort of like plow through your nights and then get sick every two weeks and whatever. And just like… but we went there because we loved the dudes who were playing music at Eastside Lounge at 2:30 in the morning.

They were great. They appreciated that we were there. Our friends were there. It was way too loud. I was way too tired. And yet, th- “Yes, I’ll be back next weekend.”

Like, yeah.

Kyle: That was on Wednesdays, by the way. That was not the weekend.

Cliff: Oh, yes, Wednesdays

Kyle: We were mad lads

Cliff: We were our version of it. But it,

it reminded me in a really fun way of those moments where I have leaned on communities that are about music to just persist and exist for a while. I don’t know what to do, so I will go here. I’m not sure what to do, so I will go to 529 or The Earl and see sort of whatever is happening there at 1:30 AM, ’cause that is how I want to feel and this is the best idea I’ve got.

And like putting that headspace back onto this record helped me, yeah, appreciate it, but also sort of like helps me understand why it doesn’t feel right all the time. Um, this is not a record that I’ve ended up wanting to put on… this is gonna sound bad, but almost ever.

Kyle: Right.

Cliff: Ex- except out of pure like drive to get inside of it and learn more about it, you know, as we’ve studied it intentionally.

And I think that, I mean, that’s usually not the direction we go, right? Usually you end up going like, I love The Cramps now. I used to listen to The Cramps every now and then, and now I play The Cramps a lot. Like this probably isn’t gonna change any of my behavior other than if someone decides to have a conversation about some of this and maybe I can do a little bit, a bit more intellectually than I have.

Kyle: Yeah, if it lights somebody else up, I’ll be way more stoked than I would have a few months ago to see what else it can animate in me, and certainly to just get to know and appreciate them a little bit

better.

Cliff: We’ve covered a lot of places to go from here. Are there any specific to mention that you haven’t said out loud yet?

Kyle: Oh my God, yeah.

Cliff: Sweet.

Kyle: Aren’t there always?

Cliff: It is time

Kyle: I mean the first thing that like kind of got in my craw when reading about this record was them talking about it as a psychedelic record. It’s just like a very specific word that has always been very loaded for me and sort of meaningful. It’s a stupid word to be possessive of, but it’s been like, it’s a thing that pursu- actively pursuing the psychedelic has gotten me to the headspace that I am in as a person now tripping through time and space.

You mentioned Primal Scream. I– The comedown side of this record made me think a lot about Brian Jonestown Massacre and that one super bummer song that was apparently Bourdain’s favorite song. I thought about Stereolab. I specifically thought about the characters in Atlanta walking around Amsterdam with Stereolab in their headphones, and the sort of psychedelic phenomenon of being an American in Europe and just experiencing a culture that is, you feel like you know it and you don’t know anything about it at all.

So stuff like S- Stereolab and Zero 7. I think it’s interesting that Tame Impala is moving in this sort of dancier direction. It’s not at all like Chemical Brothers, but sort of nightlife and bright colors and whatever. There’s something there. We haven’t invoked Black Moth Super Rainbow, but

they’re somewhere in the same yin and yang orb thing.

Then I think the next category would be the ’90s. Very specifically, there are two records on the calendar that you and I very nearly picked for the album of the month to cover. They made the shortlist, and they sort of scratch the same itch here, and I have, sort of an unconscious childhood relationship with both of them.

One is “Hello Nasty” by the Beastie Boys. So we talked about the American Dust Brothers, who were largely responsible for Paul’s Boutique, but then everything sort of led in the ’90s up to “Hello Nasty,” which was, in my view, like the most ’90s album ever in some ways, and it’s kind of a magnum opus for them and what it means to be a truly freewheeling artist doing whatever comes naturally and feels good.

So that’s a record to revisit if you haven’t in a long time. Also Madonna’s “Ray of Light.” The Stereogum 20-year retrospective, there’s a great bit where it got invoked. The writer said, “Because the album sequenced these tracks to flow into each other, it was just about impossible to figure out when one song ended and another song began. When I put it on his car tape deck, a friend sniped, ‘When is this song going to end?’ before ejecting the tape and throwing it out the car window.

He promptly apologized, and we spent about 15 minutes looking for the cassette in the grass outside. A couple years later, when he did the same thing with Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light,’ he broke the tape and I got royally pissed.” So like they felt pretty similar and we were– when we were like, “All right, I don’t think we’re gonna do Madonna,” then it was like, “Well, let’s do the Chemical Brothers in a different month.”

So I think what you see, ’cause “Ray of Light” is a couple years later, is big beat and EDM broadly conceived sort of cresting into a pop mega phenomenon the way you see like Charli XCX moving wave to wave and pop perfecting a big musical idea. That is kind of what “Ray of Light” was. When it comes to Madchester, you talk about Happy Mondays who were great, but like The Stone Roses, specifically the second Stone Roses record with “Love Spreads,” it’s a little less of the sunny pop stuff and more like kind of a f**ked up blues record in the vein of like an endless boogie that I love.

there’s a couple of rabbit holes that, like, I’m not recommending you go listen to, but I think observing the phenomena of, like, the related artists to them on streaming are the most insane collection I’ve ever seen for any artist ever. So just gonna run down this list real quick. Justice, Empire of the Sun, Danger Mouse, Kylie Minogue, Lykke Li, Crazy Town, that’s “Crazy Town” of “Butterfly” fame, Benny Benassi, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The xx, DJ Shadow, MGMT, Portugal The Man, and Fred again Man, what?

I don’t even know.

Cliff: I’m convinced, man, this is a huge aside. I am so convinced though that there was a literal day that had to have happened in like 2013 where Spotify took a snapshot of Last.fm’s related artists, and for whatever artists already existed who got that snapshot, it’s like it never changed again. ‘Cause there’s like a whole bunch of bands that existed right then, and all of their related artists are like a whole bunch of little bands that like AP Magazine would’ve put together

Kyle: Right. So somewhat to that end, thinking about like what did Chemical Brothers lead to? I was thinking about early 2010s mashup culture. Like Chemical Brothers 1,000% led to Girl Talk and that sort of phenomenon of doing it in a more Andy Warhol type of way, like winkier layering. Then I thought about Skrillex and specifically him working with everyone from Rick Ross to A$AP Rocky, and the A$AP Rocky and Skrillex song being in Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” and “Spring Breakers” being very much a spiritual descendant of whatever was happening with Chemical Brothers.

By the way, there’s a “Dawson’s Creek” episode where they all go to a rave and they’re playing rehashed Chemical Brothers songs that were like five years old at this point. So, ” Spring Breakers” feels like a, badass at alternate universe version of that “Dawson’s Creek” thing happening. I mentioned Diplo, and I’m specifically thinking stuff like Jack Ü and the work with Justin Bieber, like Marshmello, Steve Aoki, Party Favor, Carnage, all the sort of dub weird American dubstep and all that stuff that you might love or hate or have been like WTF the whole time that was happening.

Chemical Brothers is upstream from all that. So I think it’s worth observing ’cause like that was such a weird cultural moment, but it does have a predecessor in this. The two things that I’m like I actually think is fun to go check these out. One is like, do you remember in the ’90s how big remix culture became?

And like a remix, a weird remix would be a way to get you to buy a movie soundtrack or a CD single or whatever it doesn’t really exist that way anymore, and I think it’s partly ’cause it’s, like, harder to track in a streaming playlist or whatever. It’s not as easy to get your claws into a thing, ’cause they were such specific physical artifacts back in the day, and they’re not anymore.

They just don’t get served up as easily. I think they were, like, a highlight of ’90s high weirdness, and there’s, there was just so much money in the ecosystem going around that, like, that’s an easy way to make more money, create more product. And that’s not really how it happened in the dance world, but I think it bubbled up to pop culture because of that.

So, like, they remixed Primal songs, Primal Scream’s “Jailbird” back when they were still the Dust Brothers. They remixed The Prodigy’s “Voodoo People”. They m- remixed Method Man’s “Bring the Pain” from Tical, which I had forgotten about. They remixed a Leftfield song with John Lydon vocals called “Open Up”. They remixed EMF of “Unbelievable” fame’s “Lies”.

They remixed Saint Etienne. So anybody that you think is interesting, Chemical Brothers, Paul Oakenfold, Fatboy Slim, whatever, go find 50 remixes that they did or just type in remix, ’90s remixes and see what happens. Just anthropologically interesting The last thing is this idea of like, what is party rock now?

It’s like sort of hip hop, sort of electronic. What evokes the spirit of this even if it doesn’t sound like it? And a couple of the ones that exist now that feel like they’re getting after the same thing, but they’re modern they’re right now– They don’t sound alike, but they feel alike to me. There’s that brand new record from Fckrs, F-C-U-K-E-R-S, called “Ö” with an umlaut on it that feels very much in the vein of this.

I feel like Pink Pantheress for some reason feels a lot like this. I think Jane Remover feels a lot like this. That dude The Dare that had the big TikTok song, his remixes of other people’s songs like Wet Leg feel very much in the ideology of The Chemical Brothers. For some reason 100 gecs came to mind of just the sort of f**k it-ness.

Kaytranada to some extent, especially li- the live experience of Kaytranada. But the number one, and they’re not alike at all, the number one thing that this reminded me of was Angel Dust, was the punk band Angel Dust, and that they’re going after like kind of a Lemonheads, but also they’re calling themselves very aggressive music.

It’s just like there’s a guys being dudes thing and they don’t know how to classify what they’re doing, so they use sort of ridiculous terminology and posture and whatever. I think Angel Dust is one of the coolest f**king bands in the world right now, so maybe I’m shoehorning a little bit. But they capture people’s attention and energy in a way that I see strains of that when I go back and read or observe video of Chemical Brothers experiences.

So, psychedelic remixes and party rock broadly conceived, and I would love for people to at us and say like, “What is party rock to you these days? What feels good? What activates your limbic

system in the same way The Chemical Brothers did for people?”

That’s a long

Cliff: Force 5 for me.

Kyle: Jesus Christ, we

Cliff: Literally.

Kyle: we’re, bringing up some weird stuff in ep- this episode.

Lot, lots of newspaper clippings of,

lostmedia going on in this one.

Cliff: I’ll add a couple more to that pile in weird directions,

but I think you did a great job with the meatier parts of everything. I did wanna make sure Justice got mentioned, even though I don’t care about Justice, you have, and a lot of people do, and there is some overlap here for sure

Kyle: Once again, gotta thank our boy John Asante for putting me on. I saw Justice recently because Kaytranada was opening for them.

Cliff: yeah

Kyle: My brother and I went. They played an arena show. None of that is normally my bag, but we got free tickets and went. Kaytranada was amazing. It was a way bigger place than I’d ever seen him before.

But then Justice was like– Seeing Justice live definitely made me appreciate what people talked about with the Chemical Brothers live experience, where it’s like it would be boring if you were just watching the two dudes in boxed in by a square of synths. But it’s such an audiovisual sensory assault that it makes all of it larger than life, and it allows you to like– It just fries your circuit so that you can be in the moment.

You can sort of be like lost in the night. So yes great call on Justice.

Cliff: Excellent. Also just because this l-

this is a unhelpful aside, but it made me laugh ’cause it’s a little bit of lore that I keep in my brain. So at some point in here you mentioned… So let’s see. We’ve touched on Daft Punk for sure, for some obvious reasons, but then a minute ago you mentioned Skrillex, and you also name-checked Andy Warhol, and just to like put all of these things in a little thread together in my personal life experience, right, Skrillex came about after From First to Last, where Sonny was the vocalist in this band when he was like 16 years old.

So that would’ve been like 2004, 2005, the “Dear diary, my teenage angst has a body count” era. but point being, what h- what happened to old Sonny is he went to Coachella in 2006 and saw Daft Punk, and like that’s like the origin story.

Kyle: Right

Cliff: And then just to really fully connect this later on, right? Last year he r- he released the record called “F**k You Skrillex, You Think You’re Andy Warhol, But You’re Not.” Which also, like actually the reason all of that came to mind for me is because apropos of absolutely nothing here, Kyle, you sent me a TikTok this week that talked about file sharing maybe being both the past and the future of cool music stuff. And that record that I mentioned, Skrillex sent a Dropbox link out by email before he put it on streaming. Just like… ‘ Cause as much as I don’t really care about the type of music he makes, the way that he does make his music is interesting to me, and he seems to care about it and about his fans, which is pretty cool

Kyle: You remember this other thing he did where he played his work in progress music for two of the surviving members of The Doors, and there’s the famous studio footage of them basically being like I guess, man.”

Cliff: Oh speaking of I guess man, here’s another place for you to go that I thought about. Um, when we think about pushing the boundaries of electronic music in certain forms and, you know, th- uh, this feels trite to look back on now, but there was a lot of like The Chemical Brothers integrate rock into what they were playing in ’95.

Like, I’m not sure I’d really call it that anymore, but I can sort of see what they were trying to say at that particular moment in time if you were writing it a bit closer to when the actual music came out. But extending that forward and saying, “All right, let’s shove another really intense genre into electronic music, but see what we can do to make it intense or whatever.”

Um, I think I’ve mentioned before The Algorithm on this podcast, which is effectively electronically programmed death metal. And it is at once like unenjoyable and challenging and also like really delightful and fun, and breaks into being basically video game music from time to time. But they were he, it, they?

Whatever. The Algorithm, the artist. That was honestly like I, I had a friend several years ago who was like super, super, super into house music, and he was respectful, but we always talked about like he’d start talking to me about stuff, I’d be like, “Homie, I don’t care.” “I love that you love it, but like I’m not talking to you about ‘Behold the Arctopus’ right now, so like I really don’t care about Swedish House Mafia, but that’s awesome,” and we ended up finding The Algorithm as this sort of in between where it was like, oh look, somebody doing a little bit of both of what makes our brains click on an interesting thing, and it was just enough to be like, all right, yeah, I see it.

Like I, I can see the chaotic beat making in public in a really loud speaker system. Like I, okay, I kinda get it. Uh, it’s attacking my senses, but you know, I see it, but I need some like complexity and, The Algorithm brings a lot of that forward. So, I don’t know where you’ll go if you go down that rabbit hole after that.

There’s not a

whole lot there. Y- you’re gonna have to loop back towards one of the genres to begin with. But I think that’s a pretty cool and challenging aspect to go

Kyle: or Tiësto

Cliff: Yeah

Yeah. Just, yes, Just,

noise core at that point. But to that end, like, so a few other softballs I think that are worth saying out loud, but that touch on different aspects of what Chemical Brothers did overall and on this record.

I mentioned them earlier, but Bad Bad Not Good, mentioning them again because of the remix proclivity Which you mentioned a bit earlier, right? The, the interpolating songs that don’t always feel like they belong and doing them so well that you become famous for it. Yep. The, they just do it with instruments instead of synths and hardware.

Similarly, probably the most obvious things we can say but needs to be mentioned directly, if you’re enjoying more of the second half of this album, Portishead was one of our earliest episodes, and you can watch us listen to us begin to struggle to talk about how much we should talk about that record.

It’s still an awesome one, and speaking of records that have become, like, much more played since we talked about it, Portishead’s definitely one of those. Um, but also I’d put Massive Attack down on the chiller end of this stuff. Um, feels fairly obvious for people familiar with this genre, but, you know, if you’re a little bit more like us in some regards and, you know, some as- aspects of it may be obscured Massive Attack and Portishead are both the down-tempoed good you can go listen to this and enjoy it, uh, avenues.

Kyle: And by the way, another Cocteau Twins connection, if you listen to Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine,” the famous track “Teardrop,”

With Cocteau Twins singer on it

Cliff: Yep.

So a lot of places to go both musically and like sort of spiritually from what they did here, which is cool. Again, like just being honest, I found more spiritual goodness here than I expected to find when I started digging, and that’s cool. I wish that would happen with people more often. I’m working on it

Kyle: Ah. It’s nice that they’re not trying to, not trying to do too much. Piss off the snobs.

Have a good time

Cliff: In lieu of a better idea, I do think we could close out with Robert Christgau’s review of

Kyle: Oh my God, I was just thinking the same thing

Cliff: It’s so good

Kyle: Do we give the dean of American music critics the, the final word? Yes, I think we do

Cliff: So quote They won’t convert you because their main interest is pleasing you. Pleasing anybody who’s both open-minded enough to conceive techno as a bright sun in the rock cosmos and well-adjusted enough not to start Star Wars over it. Starts out whomping irrepressibly, ends up schlocking imperturbably, and either way provides the noise, beats, and basslines us earthlings like in our electronically enhanced popular music.

Means nothing except that pleasure is a function of somatic and cultural givens less malleable than mutants have always claimed. A minus.