Love the window cleaning squeakiness of the melodic synth lead in your recent cut, Go. How'd you manage to do that?

It's a lot of playing around with a lot of synthesizers. I think there's a lot of layering and stuff going on, but for me, it's just like, almost when you don't remember the process of doing things, you know, like maybe it was going into a Jupiter-8 playing through a Culture Vulture distortion or something like that, but at the end of the day, it's just boring, really. You come to a sound at the end, and when it's the right sound, you don't really think about it anymore. Until it's the right sound, you're obsessed with how you're making it, and when it's done you're, like, there, it's done.

The first 30 minutes of tweaking are usually the most constructive, I think. How do you feel?

For me it's like, you can spend years making music, and you're just searching for the little tiny moments of the magic when you're not really thinking about what you're doing, it's the sort of flow, isn't it, that people talk about. It's hard to - it's that sort of magic bit of music, that you don't really understand. I love it when you make a record, and you listen to it back, and you can't really work out how you made it. You know you made it, but I can't really recall the process of how we got there at the end. That's when music takes control. Especially when working with a lot of technology, a lot of it can be really involved, and then you find that a machine, or an instrument that you just play, in a strange way, you know, it's like with your machines, when you grab all these different parameters at once and something wild happens. That's why I like making music with electronics, they sometimes have a better idea of what to do than I did!

Needless to say, you pull it off beautifully. I think that magic is especially powerful when you accomplish it with machines that are supposed to be very logical and scientific.

Yeah! That's why we like to use interesting things to play with. I remember, a long time ago, I used to talk to Daniel Hansson when I first had the Machinedrum. It felt like this was a very different kind of instrument. I was used to working with MPC and SP-12 and all these kinds of instruments, and then there was this new drum machine that didn't want to copy, to be a TR-909, it was something new, and you could get wild things out of it. It felt like one of those, when I played it, I had old synthesizers like EMS, it feels a bit wrong, and it feels like it's on the edge of destruction, and I got that from those early machines, you know. That's what made me, why I still, when we play tonight at Sonar, we have a Monomachine and we have two Machinedrums because they're such fun to play live, you know. Then you can go wild, and then you can go back to where you started from. There's a lot of machines where you can't get back to where you started from.

Warms my heart to hear that! Did Michel Gondry court you for months before you let him do the video for Go?

Believe it or not, when Michel Gondry says he wants to do a video, you go: Michel, do what you want! You know, for us, it's one of the real joys of making music, getting to collaborate with someone like that on music we've made. We've got a good relationship with Michel. For me, he's one of the great film-makers of our generation. His films have really moved me. We were talking on the phone about it, and he was like: I have this idea about concentrating on the sound of the bass and drums and that's what I want to try and represent, and then he comes back and it's such a unique view of the world, you know. I love it! For me it's one of the real treats of being a musician, seeing someone like that interpret what you do. I love what he does, and he's a nice guy, too.

Will any of the seven, properly dressed women be joining you on stage tonight?

If only!

Let's talk chemicals. Joseph Priestley claimed that water is really an element, not a compound. What would you say?

This is so far out of my sphere of knowledge. At school, when there was a pathway to go science and a pathway to go arts & humanities, I went the arts and humanities way. So science, even when you start to talk compounds and elements, I'm immediately, like, I don't know what he's on about!

Want more? Check out the Talk from a decade earlier here.

Interview by Daniel Sterner

How do you utilize your Elektron gear? Do you use them live?

We use the Machinedrums live since they are so good to tweak and change on the fly. That is really the reason I like the Monomachine and Machinedrum so much; everything is so changeable, every step is so fuck up-able! In the studio we usually sync the gear with Logic and just improvise with the instruments, recording it all as we go and then we edit the highlights. I find the Machinedrum especially good to layer over grooves to give an off kilter feel. That is something I might not get from sitting in front of a computer. As I said, we also have the Monomachine keyboard which I think is a great idea as it turns the drum machine-like interface into something much more musical.

Could you share a perfect moment you've experienced during your career as a musician?

Nothing is perfect, although headlining Glastonbury was somewhere close!

Visit the official Chemical Brothers website here.