Brit Hop and Amyl House

In 1996, a little too acculturated by indie rock, I figured the good downtempo hip-hop instrumental stuff being played by DJs in side rooms belonged to the stylishly po-faced Mo’ Wax rather than the goofy-named Chemical Brothers—Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons. Boy, was I wrong. I will never forget the night in 1997 I raced up to the First Avenue DJ booth—I was working there at the time—and asked my friend DJ Smitty what the track shaking the walls was. Yep, he told me with a side smile, it was them—and suddenly I was on the team.

I loved DJ sets then and listened to the ones released like albums (far less frequently than underground mixtapes; my money went to albums proper) but I never quite got as into the Chems’ Live at the Social the way so many others did at the time. And in truth, I never even heard Brit Hop and Amyl House at the time. I certainly had no idea until pretty recently that, as Discogs puts it, “The DJ Mix [credit] by  Tom Rowlands is not 100% clear, but info on the net and in interviews given by him justifies a credit.”

A quarter-century later, the sheer fun of the era comes into focus in a much different way than it might have then. The Chems tend to be crate-digger DJs, impressing you with their vintage finds and how they thread it through more modern tracks. That’s a good part of the appeal of both Social and Brothers Gonna Work It Out (1998), not to mention their 1995 Essential Mix, and it also extends to their recent Radio Chemical show on Sonos. (Here’s a recent episode of “Early Rap and Beyond.”) But Brit Hop and Amyl House is different: It’s there to sum up a scene, an era, not to express Rowlands’ (or Simons’) tastes, and it does so with aplomb. A find.