Chaos In The CBD

Over the past decade, brothers and production duo Chaos In The CBD have gone from New Zealand newbies in London to underground DJs to international phenomenon, with over 100 million streams worldwide. But what grounds them, after all the touring as some of the finest purveyors of spectral and jazz-inflected deep house, is their connection to home. Though they’ve been based in London for over a decade, Louis and Ben (aka Beans) Helliker-Hales have never stopped feeling at one with their homeland. Their debut album, A Deeper Life, is nostalgic for their nature-filled youth, exploring the magical coastline and lush rainforest of New Zealand. “The title refers to our childhood, which was idyllic,” says Ben. “It was just the sun, the sand, the sea, waterfalls, birds and fish…”

It’s a far cry from the metropolis where the duo first made their name over 10 years ago, defining their sound with cult EP Midnight In Peckham on the revered Rhythm Section label. After putting down guitars and picking up decks when Louis discovered raving, the brothers relocated to the UK capital in 2012 where they became immersed in the burgeoning south London scene as dance music met jazz sensibilities with renewed vitality. It was an eye-opener for two young guys from the Antipodes. “We cut our teeth in this bubbling community, with everyone throwing parties all the time,” says Louis. “Coming from New Zealand, that was just so exhilarating.”

They’ve spent the intervening years since honing an idiosyncratic, house-indebted style via their own imprint In Dust We Trust, culminating in a sold-out All Day Chaos takeover at London’s revered Roundhouse and, last year alone, sets at world-renowned clubs and festivals like fabric in London, Robert Johnson in Frankfurt, DC10 Ibiza, Womb Tokyo, Timewarp São Paulo, Glastonbury, Love International and more. But if Midnight In Peckham was the duo’s coming of age then their debut album is Chaos In The CBD coming full circle. Their first full-length artistic statement digs even deeper into the brotherly bond at the heart of their music and the picturesque island life that made that bond deeper. It’s “a love letter to home and that feeling of being within nature,” says Louis, as well as an “ode to a slower pace of life,” chimes Ben. For the album, “we created a holiday inside our heads.”

Chaos In The CBD started producing tracks for A Deeper Life around 2019 and went through long periods of experimentation in their home studio, during breaks from their gig schedule. Ben – who left high school at 17 to go and study audio engineering – makes the music while Louis acts like “the Rick Rubin,” an executive producer, cultural curator and brain behind the duo’s fun-poking social media maestro who tells his brother when something is and isn’t working. “I’ve always been his biggest fan, and someone that is able to come in and be brutally honest with him as well,” says Louis.

A Deeper Life was a new challenge, though: it was the first time they’d united all of their disparate influences – as varied as The Cure, Pat Metheny, The Orb and Theo Parrish – and also the first time they’d recorded live instruments and worked with vocalists. Previously the brothers had been a two-man cottage industry of beats and bleeps, passing ideas back and forth almost telepathically. Here, “I had to let go of my ego and let other people play on the record,” says Ben, “which was hard to do. But it has elevated the project to a new level.”

Notably, they’ve teamed up with a number of US legends and married their vocals with the UK underground: Josh Milan of house pioneers Blaze brings his soulful vocals to the bossa nova beats of I Wanna Tell Somebody, a future jazz-dance anthem. Unheralded Chicago house hero and Larry Heard collaborator Lee Pearson Jr. goes deep over More Time’s broken beat flex. And on Maintaining My Peace, the brothers have matched veteran house singer-songwriter Stephanie Cooke with UK grime MC Novelist, on a slinky LDN interpretation of LA hip-hop and g-funk – which is what Ben “grew up listening to as a teenager when I was writing graffiti and skateboarding.” “We just wanted to work with the vocalists we were big fans of,” says Louis. “Their records have been pivotal for us,” adds Ben. “I’ve got this one white label with Blaze and Stephanie Cooke remixes on it and it has hugely influenced my production style.” The tracks they’ve made together are Chaos In The CBD’s way of paying homage. “These people are the ones who started it all. They’ve invented the wheel. We’re just trying to roll it.”

A Deeper Life whirls that profound love of house music and wide-ranging influences – from Brazilian to R&B, ambient to Italo and downtempo pop – into a serene, cohesive whole with their signature finesse. The result is an international dance sound that feels unmistakably like Chaos and ebbs and flows from the beach party to the club to the afterhours. “It’s laid-back but still driving at the same time; it’s club ready, but still deep,” Ben explains. It’s also distinctly Balearic: The brothers found a particular affinity with 90’s Ibiza chillout music, being from such a “chill place” themselves. “In its own way, New Zealand is incredibly Balearic, but without the party side,” says Ben. The album opens like a Cafe Del Mar compilation with the subaqueous tiki-jazz of Down By The Cove and Mountain Mover, and later the washes of choir pads and piano on Barefoot on the Tarmac conjure images of white sands and hippie trippin’ under the midday sun. It’s a blissful setting also depicted on the album cover: a painting, by a childhood friend, of the beach where they grew up in Devonport, on Auckland’s North Shore, with a volcano looming in the background. Somewhere among this scene is a secret spot “where we’d go swimming as kids,” Ben continues, who took field recordings of the location to pepper throughout the album. “Now our friends have kids and they’ve learned to swim there too. It’s very important to us – we even scattered our dog’s ashes there.”

Marlboro Sounds, meanwhile, is named for the holiday region where the Helliker-Hales clan would “go to fish and catch barracuda and blue cod every day,” says Ben, and Ōtaki for the place where their grandparents used to live. They’ve sampled the sounds of the ocean on the album, as well as taken field recordings of native birds like the Tūī, “which has a sound unique to New Zealand,” adds Ben. The ultimate litmus test, the pair listened back to A Deeper Life while on long winding drives when they were back home, too, and found that it matched the tropical vistas. “The album really feels like it comes from there,” says Louis. It’s also a reminder, says Ben, of their tight-knit friendship group from school that has stood the test of time. “We’re still all best friends. All I’ve ever wanted to do is impress them,” says Ben. “These people are still so important in our lives, they’re our community.”

A Deeper Life attempts to strengthen the bonds with Ben and Louis’s forefathers, too. There’s a song for their dad called Tongariro Crossing, inspired by a hike that they did together, near the mountains that were featured in the Lord of the Rings. “It was quite an emotional bonding experience for us, which we haven’t had for a very long time,” says Louis. The track also features a nod to New Zealand’s homegrown jazz heritage as the pair reunite with frequent collaborator Nathan Haines on flute – whose own album track Belo Dia, from his eleventh studio album Notes, was remixed by the duo last year – and another familiar collaborator in the CBD family, Isaac Aesilli, on trumpet. “They are masters of their craft,” says Ben. (You can hear Haines’s romantic saxophone on the classy, lithe house number Love Language, too, which feels like a future classic.)

The brothers hope that their debut evidences their deep appreciation of 90’s house music, from David Morales’s Red Zone mixes and Kerri Chandler to DJ Sprinkles, Larry Heard and beyond. “We didn’t go to the school of hard knocks, we went to the school of Carl Cox,” they wrote in one of their typically hilarious posts on Instagram. But while they’ve built a hilarious persona on their social media accounts, their album shows a deeper side to them too. “We joke around but we want this album to be taken seriously,” says Louis. “It’s music from all around the globe, and there’s a deep meaning to how it flows and sticks together”.