The Chemical Brothers

-- Tadashi Suzuki    

The Chemical Brothers are a good soundtrack for high-speed living, like when you're really pumping the bike or on a good strecth in the express train.

Can you hear me like I'm hearing you?

I just Gnutella'd down the latest Chemical Brothers album. It's good stuff as always (I've been a fan ever since I heard "chico's groove" on college radio KWVA sometime back in 1996) and the final track, "the test" really makes it worthwhile. It's one of those sound compositions that I want to feel in every possible pore of my body via gigantic speakers and massive amplification, the kind of music that feels like transcendent lovemaking.

It activates some part of my musculature near around my spine and shoulder blades, whipping up through my skull, down my arms and into my chest cavity, feels like there's something inside me that wants to explode, something evolving under my skin destined to burst forth into some kind of metaphysical, like someday I'll split in two and emerge as a whirling dervish and a bhudda. Nuclear fission of personalities. Maybe it will be fusion though, maybe the fragments of persona and attitude, the various characters rumbling around in my head, maybe they'll just get it together and make the scene as One Entity. Think of the energy that would be unleashed there...

If I could channel one tenth of this energy, this evocation, this ability to lay hands onto the pre-conscious mind into my own art I would consider myself a raging and unqualified success. All art aspires to music. It is truely the great metaphor.

Writing about this feeling causes my train of thought to stumble, it's a pre-cognative thing, something that exists outside the bounds of my conscious mind's ability to grip and quantify and interperet. It's a horse of a different color, this music. It's definitly in the bike mix.