Please Help To Make The World You're Living In Better

I've spoken about Surface To Air many times before, the seminal track by the mighty, mighty Chemical Brothers. But, I feel compelled to give it it's own post this time round.

Yesterday I was driving back from London (at night, as usual) and Surface To Air was pumping, almost exclusively on repeat, and wasn't it just bliss, hence inspiring this post :)

See, Surface To Air is one of those long, epic Chemical tracks that feature in most of their albums. Usually clocking in at 8 minutes, this one is from their 2005 album, Push The Button. Starting off with a distorted computer voice telling us to "please help to make the world you're living in better", the track starts of with just a single fluctuating bleep that sounds like a deep water diver trying to tap out a tune... this gradually builds up bit by bit until the main bass rhythm kicks in, a beautiful riff that's more guitar than electronica, all the time with little sounds of what can only be imagined as majestic and graceful sea creatures passing along the rhythm as it "surfaces to air"....

Layer upon layer of music is added to this ever repeating riff, until it explodes with percussion at what must be the "surface", and the realisation that it's all calm, serene, and beautiful up there, all alone, bar for the one or two creatures that pass you by. Probably with some man made ships or submarines making their presence evident with some metallic bleeps now and then.

It's a journey, one hell of a journey in fact. It washes you away, massages your ears, and takes you to some electronic sea bed where things are in harmony and peace with each other, and to surface to air is to breathe which is to live. This is acoustic nirvana, music at it's very best.

When it's all over you want to do it all over again, paying more and more attention to the various sounds that you might have missed before, interpreting them differently with each listen.

It's magic.