See exclusive images from New Chemical Brothers book 'Paused in Cosmic Reflection'

35 years ago, the trajectory of electronic music history changed when Ed Simons met Tom Rowlands at the University of Manchester. Then students, the pair would go on to form one of the most celebrated electronic acts in the then-emerging genre's history after teaming up as The Chemical Brothers.

The three and a half decades of shows, albums and block-rockin' beats that followed are under the microscope in the Chemical Brothers' latest offering, Pause in Cosmic Reflection. Out today (May 7) via Mobius Publishing, the retrospective unpacks, in often painstaking detail, the mythology of the Brothers from early days as students to rising UK stars to trendsetters and global heroes.

Along with extensive interviews with the duo themselves, the book features new interviews with friends and collaborators including Noel Gallagher, Wayne Coyne, Beth Orton, Michel Gondry and Beck. The 300 plus pages Pause in Cosmic Reflection also includes many rare and never seen photos. Compiled by Robin Turner, the book is dedicated to Stuart “Jammer” James, the group's longtime tour manager, who died in 2015.

Talking to you Advertising sign about the book last September, Simons said, “I guess there's no end date, but we're closer to the end of The Chemical Brothers than the beginning… It was good to reflect and remember some history. I guess you have to do it before you start forgetting everything and I have a very good memory.''

“He remembers, like, every little gig above a barbershop that we've ever done,” Rowlands added. “Then someone would take a picture of it and I'd be like, 'Oh, gotcha. Maybe we did that…” But one of the things about our band is that we don't like to stop and think. I always want to move on to the next thing. This book really felt like stopping and thinking.”

Check out exclusive images from the book below.

“Early on, Oasis were accepted as part of that culture,” Noel Gallagher says in the book. “Mixmag gave Sure maybe full marks and an incredible review when it was released. When I picked up the guitar and started writing again, the lyrical content of house music showed up in my songs and became a big part of it. A song like 'Live Forever' would never have existed or been called that before acid house. It would be melancholy. The euphoria of acid house was so ingrained in me, I was so into it and what I loved was the inclusiveness. The songs were about us, they weren't personal, they were about the collective. I adopted it and put it in my music.”

“There were a few electronic bands playing live in the early '90s,” Simons says of the group's early days. “We went to see Kraftwerk when we were at university in 1991 and Tom had gone [prior dance act] Ariel, so we knew it was something that could happen, but initially we were just DJing. An offer was made for us to make [the club night] Sabresonic too early; we had only done a handful of remixes and [Chemical Brothers EP] Heaven of the Fourteenth Century was just outside. We knew from the beginning that we didn't want to be the center of attention on stage. We decided that we wanted graphics projected directly above us. And lots of strobes. That ethos has been the same for every gig we've played in the 30 years since.”

“Ultimately, I think the Chemical Brothers have a great propensity for exploration,” says Beck, who collaborated with the duo on 2015's “Wide Open” and 2023's “Skipping Like a Stone.” “Their records always seem to they take you to different places. They sit in an unusual place between different eras of electronic music and DJ culture. It's like they have one foot in multiple decades at once in a way that's completely unique among their peers.”

“[1997 sophomore album] Dig your own hole we gave free rein to all the different influences that were feeding us from all over the world,” says Simons. “It was the most extreme expression of that, where you could have a track like 'It Doesn't Matter' sitting next to 'The Private Psychedelic Reel.' They are completely different forms of music, but each evolved from everything that was channeled, fed into the creation Dig your own hole. For us, our sound was completely natural. It wasn't something we sat down and thought about, tried to perfect. We didn't set out to make a pure electronic dance record. We always wanted all these outside forces to be reflected.”