Friday, April 7, is a date marked in red on the Daft Punk fan calendar. Thomas Bangalter, member of the historic duo that revolutionized electronic music, publishes Mythologies, his first solo work. However, let no one expect music similar to what he created for almost three decades with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Bangalter launches an orchestral work premiered last summer at the Bordeus National Opera.
According to Warner, the record label behind the project, Bangalter “reinvents his relationship with songwriting.” The project was conceived as a result of an invitation to collaborate by the French choreographer and dancer Angelin Preljocaj for his homonymous ballet.
On the occasion of the album’s release, which will be available on triple vinyl and on digital platforms, half of Daft Punk has given several interviews to talk about this new stage, the end of the band, which ended in February 2021. , and even on a topic as fashionable as artificial intelligence.
In one of them, in the New York Times, his face no longer covered by his helmet or the suit that simulated a robot, the 48-year-old Parisian musician appears barefoot, sleeves rolled up, and disheveled in his studio. “With electronic music it’s very difficult and takes a long time to infuse emotion into the machines, so to write a chord or a melody and have the performers, human beings, play it and have that instant emotional quality, it’s really very exciting. It’s not the fight you have against the machines,” he explained about Mythologies.
Of Daft Punk, who went on to release four albums and sold 12 million records worldwide, and his uniqueness in hiding his identity, he describes it as “a project that blurred the line between reality and fiction with these robotic characters. It was a very important point for me and Guy-Man(uel) not to spoil the narrative while it was happening.”
“Now that it’s over, I found it interesting to reveal part of the creative process that is very much based on humans and not algorithms of any kind. I would say (Daft Punk) was an exploration, starting with the machines and moving away from them. I love it. technology as a tool but somehow I am terrified by the nature of the relationship between machines and us,” he adds.
On the irruption of artificial intelligence, also in music, Bangalter gave some clues from his point of view beyond his scope. “My concerns about the rise of AI go beyond its use in music creation. 2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps my favorite film, and the way Kubrick presented it is so relevant today, because he’s making exactly the question we have to ask about technology and the obsolescence of man.”
About Daft Punk, he notes that they tried to “use those machines to express something extremely moving that a machine can’t feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology.”
With his face hidden since the album Discovery (2001) due to his mythical futuristic helmets in his public appearances, Daft Punk was responsible for revolutionary hits that would captivate millions of people for 28 years, such as Around The World, One More Time or Get Lucky. In 2007 they stopped performing in public and only appeared on stage again during the 2014 Grammy gala.
