‘Wir sind die Roboter’
Daft Punk Phone Interview: Translated
(I promised one of my German translations for my next post, and I deliver! This is an HAA-era interview, and one of the many clippings available through @ifcwdjd‘s archive; for that reason, I can’t source which publication exactly this comes from, and defer to the tumblr mention instead. This is an interview with only Guy-Manuel, and for that alone it was worth some attention; the entire interview has been patched into the above image, but if you’re on mobile, there’s still a text version available!)
Text version: [Link]
Documentation: [Link]
Disclaimer: The original speech of this interview, given by Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo, is not copyrighted by this blog nor by the author of this post. Therefore, the original German text will not be distributed here. The author claims ownership of the wording of this translation, which does not deny nor seek to possess the existence of other translations. This translation may be subject to changes in the future.
Daft Punk in Chronic'art 2007/2008 - scans & translated interview
Here it is, the long-awaited monster interview that sat untouched on my bookshelf for 6 years. I bought this magazine on eBay in 2017, fresh off the Grammys performance with The Weeknd, and I was really excited when I realized it was a huge 10 page spread... Until I started translating and realized the content was extremely in-depth and complicated. So, it got put to the side and accidentally left there for many years.
Anyway, here we go. Buckle in for a long read! Please note that I did not translate the extra sections of the article titled "Discovered" and "Very Disco" as these are just basic information about DP's discography and samples they've used- they are not part of the interview.
My usual disclaimer- I am not French, nor am I fluent in French, so some of this may be incorrect or interpreted differently than the author intended. If you find any glaring errors, my ask box is open for feedback and I can update the post/files as needed. (Post updated May 2023 with corrections)
Feel free to repost to other platforms/social media sites, but I humbly beg that you link back here or give me credit because I really spent a lot of time slaving over this (like 50+ hours).
Thank you so much for sticking around my blog after so many years. I really appreciate this fandom and community and I'm excited to experience new music with you all soon!
(Trigger warning for discussion of suicide [Electroma] in the interview!)
Download full scans and translation at my Dropbox.
Full translation below the cut.
In ten years, from Homework in 1997 to Alive 2007 and Electroma, the electro duo Daft Punk have popularized electronic music, launched fads (the French Touch, filtered house, monumental live shows), and transformed a simple music project into a verifiable universal, even metaphysical, concept. Are Daft Punk dropping the helmets?
SCANS AND TRANSLATION BY STEPH @ ONE-ADDITIONAL-TIME.TUMBLR.COM
(Please see the downloadable PDF file for translation notes/comments)
Everyone has been hearing about Daft Punk for the last two months, because their live CD (Alive 2007, from EMI) and the DVD of their robotic road-movie Electroma are being released for the holidays. We wanted to go a little bit beyond the obligated promo, and the repeated wooden language found in all the media, by trapping Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo for an hour and a half in a restaurant in the Latin Quarter, subjecting them to questioning, and if possible, making them drop the helmets a little bit, over ten pages and many questions.
We’re not going to harp on what you already know (the French touch, the robot helmets, the live pyrotechnics), we’ll just say that we wanted to do this thorough interview with Daft Punk because they’re more than a CD or a DVD, more than music, more than any current pop group. They are an essential symbol of our post-post-modern times, speaking in a very clear yet always paradoxical voice (between hedonistic joy and profound existential sadness) on the human condition, no less. Over the ten years of their career (Homework, like Chronic’art, again, decidedly, appeared in 1997), Daft Punk have invented a new way of presenting music to the world. The robot helmets reveal (social uniformity) more than they cover (buried humanity) and have given them perfect anonymity, which seems like the anonymity of those who succeeded, not in annihilating the self, but becoming self-less. This anonymity accentuates the dominance of the art over the artist, and it has made Daft Punk a universally well-liked and famous group.
A conceptual, pop, philosophical, even metaphysical group, Daft Punk mixes Andy Warhol (seriality, pop art, emptiness) and Friedrich Nietzsche (the man who wanted to die in Electroma, the superhuman for and against technology), mass culture (disco, Albator, Star Wars) and esoteric symbols (the masonic pyramid), the dancing body and thinking brain. In that respect, they are a purely manufactured product of our culture and likely represent the completion of the pop figure began by the Beatles: fragmented culture (the sample) and repetition, theatricality and abstraction, universalism and experimentation, technological innovation and advanced marketing, refusal of the embodiment and worship of the personality…
The current tour (Alive can also mean “en vie”) also refers to an interstellar voyage, like Discovery and Interstella, which seemed to mean that humanity is, by nature, dispossessed, that humans do not belong on Earth but came from Heaven and are destined to return there, that they are “stardust.” They themselves [Daft Punk] are probably not aware of the symbolic and almost metaphysical significance of their creations, and they always prefer to talk about “emotions” rather than thoughts, the heart instead of the head, and they act as the “guinea pigs” for their own experiments. Listening to them, we realized that Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo do not really theorize their work, their music, or their image, but that they react to the infinite accumulation of data from our culture of abundance, that they are indeed the guinea pigs of an experience that has outrun them, marionettes played by “high culture,” pop culture, and the entertainment industry. Maybe Daft Punk really are robots, and no one is pulling the strings, certainly not them.
Chronic’art: Between Homework, which would correspond to your schoolwork or your learning phase, Discovery, which would represent your adolescence, the discovery of the world, microscopic to macroscopic, and Human After All, a moment of reset before a new cycle, it seems to us like you have come full circle, which would be represented by the mirroring of your two live albums, in 1997 and in 2007. Could you have scripted your career?
Thomas Bangalter: It’s strange. We have never written out any part of our career, because even ten years ago we didn’t think we would do this for a long time. After the fact, without having planned it, we realize more that we had sort of reset prior to the live show from 2007. For us, these concerts, this tour, this CD, they are more of a new step than a conclusion. We had not done concerts for 10 years, and there was something very exciting about doing things that weren’t technologically possible when we started. With the last live, we wanted to produce something original, that could predict what might become the norm of tomorrow. We know that we’ve done certain things in the past that were five years ahead of their time, and we are happy to be trying something no one else has done right now. We feel like, during each album, we’ve started back at zero and have had to create a new process, even if it’s true that there is a consistency which emerges in the straight line of our career. But this consistency is not defined a priori, we just emphasize working on projects that can become sort of a realignment of everything we’ve accomplished until now. Interstella was consistent with Discovery, the live show was consistent with our third album compared to the two previous albums, but each step represents, in the moment, the desire to start a new cycle. As for Human After All and Electroma, they’re about something darker, less celebratory… Maybe the live show is a loop; our record label released a Best Of last year, but the concert itself and the way we worked on it is more a way of combining things and expressing them in a new way, rather than celebrating a sort of anniversary or something from the past. We definitely didn’t want to give people the impression that they were in 1997, in a continuation of past music: we instead wanted to give them the chance to feel like they were really in 2007.
During the live shows, you mix together your own tracks, referencing and quoting yourselves. It’s like being simultaneously and precisely between 1997 and 2007, as if the past and the present were merging. All of your songs evolving in a sort of loop…
T.B.: It’s almost the third generation of sampling: us sampling ourselves. At the same time, it’s like having created a universe and an aesthetic that is more than the music, or that the music isn’t actually a central vector. Our approach isn’t at all demonstrative, it’s entirely sensory. There isn’t another message to understand. That being said, there is a desire for cohesion, to make sure that each element added to the structure resonates with the others, with the little mythology that governs this universe. It’s a bit like in a video game, each new element opens a new level in a new environment rather than replacing an older element. We wanted, for example, to break these things with Human After All, but in the end we realized that the album was very cohesive in the continuity of our work.
There is a very strong sense of nostalgia, mixed with a strangeness, in the timeless juxtapositions listeners are subjected to in the tracks. They seem to be complementing and responding to each other, as much musically as thematically…
Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo: It’s especially very exciting to see that twelve or thirteen years after our first maxi, our music has not aged too much. There is a sense of nostalgia1, but it still works in the present, and it’s very strange to see that we can mix four tracks from four different eras simultaneously, and not a single one kills the mood. Right after we started making music, we were seeking timelessness. It’s the same with Electroma. At our core, we are fans of timeless things. If you listen to the Beatles, aside from their very first period which is a little bit stuck in the past, you notice that time doesn’t touch their music. We are following that: we are trying to move through time without getting stuck in it. In the same way, we are trying to make sure that our music can be listened to by a lot of different people, without having to worry about languages or genres.
The Beatles were, for that matter, the first group to reference themselves, for example in All You Need is Love, where John Lennon sings She Loves You…
G-M.H-C.: We don’t compare ourselves to the Beatles, either…
T.B.: The idea is constructing a cohesive universe from a series of spontaneous attempts. If you watch Star Wars, people don’t seem to come from when the film was made. It’s as if the 70s have no effect on the film’s universe. Its atmosphere is its own, even if mixes a lot of things together. For about five or six years we have tried not to let the times we live in make an impression on us.
You are very privileged to be in a time when everything moves so fast, or everything ages so fast, right in the middle of acceleration. For example, you did a massive world tour without having an album to promote…
G-M.H-C.: The day before the first concert of the tour, at Coachella, we were terrified, we weren’t sure of anything. Every time we try something new, we start back at zero.
T.B.: It’s the live show that sparked the craze, I think, truly. The success was really unintentional. Separate from that, being immersed in a certain underground before our first album taught us a lot. We’ve seen all the trends come and go—jungle, speed garage, electroclash, new rave, French touch, revival—and we are really surprised to have slipped by all of that. We didn’t want to be specifically concentrated on music, we only released three albums in 15 years, and we had a lot of luck. The legitimacy of our music, the future of our music lives in the combination of different forms of expression, the scope of influences, the mixing of techno with funk, with metal, the intermingling of rules and cliches. A lot of important decisions have been roughly made; also by means of spending time solidifying this roughness in order to share it. In fact, electronic music, in the 90s, put you in a state of experimentation, urgency, innovation, it literally prohibited you from repeating yourself. Electronic music was still very elitist, because it was expensive—you had to go to the library to find out about these musicians, you had to go to Beaubourg to make photocopies of books on filmmakers, you had to go to small shops to buy old drum machines. We know what changed, we’re familiar with the saturation that followed. We were also lucky because actually there wasn’t much of that happening when we started out.
The permanence of Daft Punk is also really linked to your image. People don’t only dance to your music, they dance with your personas, with the robots, like you predicted the fatal characteristic of the embodiment of rock (John Lennon, Kurt Cobain). With your robot helmets, you have made the entire process of love, requisition, and the sacrificial reclaiming in your place impossible. You come across as impersonal and therefore verifiably impossible to sacrifice. Not gods, rockers, heroes, nor rulers. The helmet prohibits any kind of identification process. When put on, they show the listener-viewer their own reflection. By giving nothing, the helmet says (silently), “Know thyself.” Can your work be considered an invitation for people to know themselves?
G-M.H-C.: Yes, I agree with that interpretation. At least, that’s what happens with our concerts. Audience members, rather than being lost in the view of a far-off guy, Mick Jagger or another inaccessible idol above the audience, find themselves between us, or even with themselves. It’s kind of like a rave, without superstars, like in the era of anonymity. The robots don’t give the audience much except music. There are robots in a pyramid, but the audience enjoys it in a more selfish, more self-centered way.
T.B.: It’s a mixture—the chance to show the listener their own reflection, to respond to a question with another question, but also the opportunity to go back to a fiction, in a cult that isn’t the cult of a personality, but of an art, of an image, of an aesthetic. Without personification. Then we can let ourselves to be two robots in a pyramid of light. If our faces were uncovered, it would be the most megalomaniacal thing in the world; with the helmets, no one sees us because we stay within the fiction. And without wanting to make a joke, there is also a degree of separation, a distance. A distance from the reflection, like in Electroma, or a distance from the entertainment, softer.
All the lines from Human After All work in the same way. They recall Kraftwerk, but Kraftwerk developed a precise message about celebrating, in a way, the immediate future. Your messages are a lot more ambiguous: are they critical, ironic, devoid of meaning? Like we see so well in Electroma, your helmets are, above all else, mirrors…
T.B.: Ambiguity is good, because it allows for a certain interaction between the viewer and the artist; between what the viewer interprets and what the artist is trying to depict. It’s very participative, and that comes from a desire to go against the demonstration. We are the first consumers of our music, and we hold the view that we can’t make any judgement values by calling things into question. In speaking about technology, about consumer society, which completely inhabits our art, we don’t want to teach a lesson, or offer a point of view or a judgement, we just want to find paradoxes and point them out as is. For example, we’re dependent on consumer society and it’s so appealing, productive, optimized, and at the same time totally terrifying, horrible, and very funny.
Your work is dialectical: sometimes it seems to denounce a sort of robotic totalitarianism (like in the Technologic video which depicts propaganda of a robot on top of a pyramid) and at the same time it plays with this imagery, strikingly. The video for Around The World also shows how robots surround and surveil the population; they are in the last circle, and they are the ones who chant the phrase “Around The World.” Does the video denounce the surveillance of us by nonhumans, or does it condition us to accept it? We never know if you’re denouncing a conspiracy against humanity or if you’re participating in it. You use of language is equally dialectical. Your language is refined, born from catchphrases and words of totalitarian order (Technologic), and if taken literally, it’s this: the phrase “Television Rules The Nation” can be taken as the assertion of an established fact. It then becomes constraint, manipulation. At the same time, the distance imposed by the performance can give the words a double meaning, and adds to them a critique of this established fact, even the denunciation of a totalitarian power. This recalls the “doublethink” in Orwell’s 1984: the capacity to simultaneously accept two opposing points of view and thereby put critical thinking on the back burner. Where do you situate yourselves in this in-betweenness?
T.B.: But it’s inside this paradox where we progress. In terms of our experimentation, we are in fact the heart of the system; it would be totally obscene to lean more to one side or the other, to claim to be part of a totalitarian system, as if we were giving lectures. It’s because this is so interesting that we refused to do any promotion for Human After All, because there couldn’t be a willingness on our part to encourage people to buy the album, because of this paradox. Because it’s like an unbiased opinion on technology, on consumer society. The video for Technologic actually gives you the keys to derive an ironic and scary message from the track, but it has since been used by Apple in a commercial for the iPod, and there the lyrics turned into blind praise for technology! It’s funny seeing to what extent the double meaning has effectively functioned. That’s why we so often refer to Andy Warhol who had an experimental approach through his connection to pop culture that, depending on the project, had as much a place in very elitist and private circles as it did on supermarket shelves. Creating with perplexity, in short.
Nevertheless, you use very strongly significant symbols, like the robots or the pyramid. The pyramid that you use on stage is a Masonic symbol. It is on the dollar bill, with George Washington and the note, “New World Order.” The pyramid represents the structure of society, from the masses up to the elites and the leaders. The cornerstone with the “all-seeing eye” surely represents the summation of technology which, though it could be plainly operational, will make sure that the “New World Order” can truly start coming forward and establishing itself on Earth. Some interpret it like the construction of a new technology, a technologic eye that would see all, through a generalized surveillance. With that said, the presence of robots like operators of this pyramid makes a lot of sense. How do you fit in with regard to these symbols and this story?
T.B.: We work a lot with the senses, with the power of symbols on the subconscious, and the pyramid, in effect, is a very heavy symbol, in terms of the senses. We don’t want to discuss the details of the symbolism, but to question its power without its history. The pyramid has become a symbol because, geometrically, harmonically, it’s a magical, occult, mysterious object. There is also this mysterious and occult, on the verge of paranormal, power in music. No one can really theorize about the effects of music on the body and mind, so it’s incredible. We just try to pass on that magic in a rather empirical way. Moreover, we could carry out experiments on the way in which light or sound intensity acts on the body and on crowds, to see which types of sensations or emotions are provoked by one frequency or another. But we could never really explain the reason for these effects.
G-M.H-C.: We are the guinea pigs of our own universe. We managed to create a sort of self-sufficiency between the two of us, which lets us experiment with a consistent voice, and what works for us tends to work for the audience, it’s like a small miracle. We put a pyramid on stage because we think it’s cool, and it makes everyone trip out.
When you talk about guinea pigs, it’s as if you were manipulated from the outside, by a mysterious third-party, as if you were also puppets. There is a determinism there, but one that serves humanity. According to the Laws of Robotics by Isaac Asimov, it’s humankind who constructed the robot, and the robot is at its service…
T.B.: Above all we want to express a paradox on the discussion of human dependency on technology. We’re not virtuosos and we rely on technology like a crutch. We could never do it without technology, and at the same time, we try to value, like any artists, the human element in our work. The process we’ve used for these fifteen years has been to try merging the machines and us. We are the operators of these machines, the editors of the experiments: we select them, we choose them, and we decide to keep them or not. Daft Punk is the product of a tug of war between human and technology, always questioning the place of technology in the project.
Electroma addresses this discussion between human and machine, in a sort of grand general inversion. Electroma seems to be the account of a traumatic experience: in the world of robots, the two characters presented a human face to the others, in openness, generosity, expressiveness. The result of this demonstration of humanity leaves them ostracized, chased, and reduced to aimlessness and suicide. Do you think that showing your humanity is dangerous?
T.B.: Yes, that’s the background of the film. But speaking more broadly, formally, it’s part of the same approach as what we’ve been able to do before; to know how to create emotion while using machines, in a creative process. Without actors, without a script, without a real plotline, but with photography, color, framing, made from machines, objects, just like a still life. We began with creating an environment around the spectator, who is almost like the only actor in the film, and wondering how to make them experience these emotions, which are not the same as those on the dancefloor, but aesthetic emotions, where the spectator can project onto themselves. The film is totally open, and we thought a lot about Magritte when making the plans. What you can see in Electroma is essentially sensation, that’s a lot more at the level of the gut or the eyes than of the brain…
Robots After All by Philippe Katerine was clearly inspired by your album Human After All and touches on the idea that human society has attained such a degree of conditioning and conforming that humanity became a species of robot, a determined creature, ruled by automation, in their language as much as their everyday comportment. When we recently asked what he thought about your music, Katerine told us, “I hear nothingness in it, so I want to find a place there.” Is the universality of your music due to the fact that it’s also, in a sense, empty?
T.B.: It’s empty because it’s more sensory than significance, yes. Theoretically devoid of sense, it allows people to see something from nothing and project themselves there. We just heard Katerine’s single. Our music is open, it can be interpreted and taken in different ways.
The musical abstraction and loops that by and large make up your music allow each person to take possession of the music and go beyond it. There is a shamanic aspect in this usage of emptiness and repetition. As a matter of fact, musicians like Animal Collective, who were inspired by shamanic trances, now cite you as an influence. Also, you could interpret the end of Electroma, when the two robots die by explosion and combustion, as referring to shamanic initiation rituals, in which one goes through a symbolic death by division of the body or self-combustion. Could you say that the end of Electroma represents, in some sort, this symbolic and initiatory death? In other words, do you perceive a shamanic side to your music?
T.B.: Yes, it’s a trance: the loop, the heartbeats… We use samples to express the desire of prolonging a strong sensation that comes during one or two seconds in a track, and wanting to repeat this sensation, not only feeling it for ten minutes, but also seeing what consequences come from ten minutes of that feeling, how everything unfolds. Visually, with Electroma, our desire is the same: to create images or an assembly of images that produce a physical sensation, a feeling of hypnosis, wandering, or weariness; in any case a state of mind that you can only reach by feeling this sensation for a certain time, for quite a long time.
Wandering, loss of identity, and expropriation are pop themes in a sense. If you think of the Beatles, the “Magical Mystery Tour,” the transformation of the Beatles into the “Lonely Hearts Club Band.” As of now, you are a group that “turns,” that travels, to those “lonely hearts.” Is there a “trip” pop?
T.B.: It’s true that during this tour, we felt a little bit of a psychedelic thing: there are people who saw and re-watched the concert multiple times, almost like a Grateful Dead concert, with this idea of there being, during the concert, something imperceptible that you can never capture on disc or on film: an experience which was unique and can only live in reality, at a time where everything is virtualized. We felt like people wanted happenings, concrete experiences, which could consequently be produced by advanced technology: we could multiply the giant screens, have a very strong sound, and combine everything into these unprecedented audiovisual processes, which had never been seen anywhere before. Even a film projected in an IMAX theater could be no more than the “ghettoblaster” from another experiment with new technologies. Our music is moving: it was within an industrial system which ended, it was dependent on the economy. And the economy was destroying itself, it influenced new formats and new ways of creation, like the tours we’re doing currently.
Today, music needs to find new ways for distribution, with the death of the record industry and the virtualization of music. The live show, as a unique experience, is a response to this situation. You were the first to start a download site on the internet, with the Daft Club in 2001, which didn’t work out. Was it five years too early?
T.B.: Being current five years too early is really better than we can hope for. It’s good to be precursory, it’s almost our principal objective. Speaking about the musical economy, I think that music has never been as important as it is now, and the concert isn’t a response to difficulty selling CDs nowadays, because live shows are also very expensive. Economic upheavals are interesting: I read a book recently by Jacques Attali, Bruits, which talks about the musical economy and its power since the Middle Ages, and if you look at the place of music in the world in the last 2 thousand or 3 thousand years, the place of the record and pop music industries will have not been an end in itself, compared to music as a whole. It’s interesting to try to find out where music will go and what it will generate, in the sense that it is often a precursor of the relationship to come between social and economic powers. But we define ourselves less as musicians than as artists and creators, in trying to combine things and experiment with new formats and new technologies. We aren’t uniquely musicians.
Homework represents a sort of pinnacle of the age where a certain technologic novelty was expressed directly through music. You could literally hear knobs being turned. Does Daft Punk necessarily have to excel technologically in an age where all these methods have become normalized? Were the concerts from your new tour sort of like an advantage?
T.B.: It’s not an advantage, it’s a set of challenges that could be technological, actually. You wind up with a concert that looks sort of futuristic, like a remake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or a mix of a Grateful Dead and a Kraftwerk concert. Making something that we couldn’t make before. We pick up the tools, we manipulate them, we try to progress. Electronic music in itself, in 2007, doesn’t seem to me to be very conducive to experimentation from a strictly musical point of view. I’m waiting for the new generations to prove to me otherwise… We pay attention to technological developments because we’re interested in them, and because they are at the heart of our art. Musical instruments are advanced technologies which have continuously reinvented music.
Since Human After All was released online, there were a lot of rumors about the album, which was an indication that people were waiting for you. In that context, are you able to feel free as musicians? Have you produced things in reaction to the public’s expectations?
T.B.: Actually, we aren’t free relative to our own expectations. We can’t totally set the public aside, but we have our own demands and we respond to our own vision of what we make, while taking into account paradoxes, contradictions, restarts, new beginnings. But we don’t think about the public: it’s both selfish and more respectful for people because we don’t have the pretentiousness of putting ourselves in their shoes.
G-M.H-C.: We are our own fans. We work until we find moments of pleasure in our work, and when we save those moments and explore them on an album or in a film which we release, that resonates for people. But within those moments, which are like lightning, we are like spectators—we feel like we’re revealing something, and discovering something we created at the same time. In this way we are ourselves in the position of spectators and fans. I imagine that this process is even more evident in painting: you have a piece of canvas in front of you, and there is a tangible process of creation. Creation is a mystery and you can really speak about magic when it comes to music or art.
Could the image of the pyramid that you use be a graphic representation of your music? With its foundations, progressions, ascents, and its climax? Bercy, it so happens, also has a pyramid shape…
G-M.H-C.: Not all of our songs follow a progression. We have flat songs, square songs, round songs… And in the live show, there are a few final moments where the tension comes back down. Bercy really does have a pyramid shape, but the top is missing. And it’s true that we would have really liked to play on top of it (laughs)…
Finally i finished the translation of which i believe is about ✨The Photo✨. I'm not french or english native speaker, so i'm sorry if something looks like weird or wrong😓. I hope you guys enjoy it! 🥳
Guy-Manuel,
to the arts, and etc.
Like his friend, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo is a workaholic. Producer, composer, the creator of Daft Punk Logo is also a passionate about graphic arts. By Pascal Bertin & JD Beauvallet.
"A friend played a cassette to Stuart MacMillan and Orde Meikle de Slam. They called us and we signed with their label Soma", explain with the most naturalness of the world Guillaume Emmanuel Paul* de Homem-Christo, aka Guy-Manuel, for the rushed ones. All his story looks like flow so natural. It is in Carnot School in Paris in 1987 that, without knowing, the life of Guy-Manuel tiltis when it crosses in his way Thomas Bangalter, with which he finds himself on cinematographic and musical references in common. Some few years later, the two teens creat the group Darlin' with their friend Laurent Brancowitz. Guy-Man holds the guitar and proof of an innate sense of staging, sticking glitter on his face when the perform in concert.
More economic in the words than his friend, the eldest of Daft (he was born in February 8th 1974) compensates, however, with intact spontaneity and a full-bodied humor of references which, from the outset, allow us to defuse all seriousness and the pretensions in which successive hypes could have embarked them. Like his bud Thomas, Guy-Manuel has long cultivated a not-so-secret garden through the crydamour label (1997-2004), which he had also mounted on a completely new model independente with Eric Chédeville, the two produced singles under the name of Le Knight Club as well as remixes: Too Young from Phoenix in 2000 or still Taken It All to Zoot Woman in 2004. In addition to around twenty maxis, two compilations were released with a distribution under a major, which summarize the range of Crydamoure releases's outings, a label on which we met the master DJ Sneak, The Eternals (trio that will release later two álbuns), or yet Play Paul, Guy-Manuel's brother.
An emeritus producer
After the label hibernation, Guy-Man will meet Eric Chédeville in 2006 for the tittle See Me Now, from 15 Again, the third álbum of their friends Cassius. The workaholic Guy-Man produced the classic Sébasten Tellier's Sexuality (2008), which he also composed My Poseidon in 2012. He also worked in 2010 with Kavinsky in the Nightcall ep.
Like in Thomas' house, if the musique occupies a preponderant part of his existence, it doesn't occult however the another disciplines. Guy-Manuel follow-up of studies in plastic arts and it's about him the credits by Daft Punk logo in Homework's cover - as he explains, he has been passionate since adolescence for graphics and music. He has changed his hairstyle many times since his debut, but Guy-Man keeping faithful to both. And if he is away from the social mídias, his brother Play Paul is one of the most funny facebook's characters!
*: Probably the interviewers did a mistake about it. Because i refuse to believe that their parents put the same name in their both kids.
Photo credits to: thehouseholdcat
ooookay i'm about to pop off for a little bit RE: comments i keep seeing about Daft Punk just being whoever puts on a costume and mixes whatever music. so please forgive in advance. here's two examples of what I'm talking about, screenshot and reposted to not put ops on blast:
#1 is hot garbage, get it out of my sight. #2 is ... okay i get where it's coming from in an alternate universe rpg way, sure, cute, pretty harmless but like.
Daft Punk was the 28 year long passion project of two childhood friends who formed their unique talents into an even more unique collaboration; we're lucky to have experienced it! They were always very clear and exacting about their artistic vision. It's not an empty mantle for anyone to just pick-up. The Robots are creative identities developed and embodied by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo so they could a) have a sense of privacy, b) have their music standalone without celebrity gossip, and c) they liked the idea of secret identities and building a fun aesthetic world around their music. The media would often make flippant comments wondering if it was really "them" at events, interviews, even their own concerts. They mostly ignored that noise–famously declining an appearance on The Colbert Report in 2013–but Thomas responded to an interview during their Alive 2007 tour: "Of course not. Who would want to trade such a spot?" The only time anyone other than Thomas and Guy-Man wore the helmets in an officially endorsed capacity was for their film Electroma, which had actors playing robots while Daft Punk directed.
It's important, especially right now as we continue to fight against AI scraping art for marketable content, to defend artists as people who have put blood, sweat, and tears into their craft. And to value that craft. Bangalter, in 2023:
"Now the story has ended, it felt interesting to reveal part of the creative process that is very much human-based and not algorithmic of any sort. [...] We tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology. [...] As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot."
sorry to get all serious business, yes i hear myself lmao, but Daft Punk is Daft Punk. okayyyy beep boop bye x
Daft Punk - Fun Radio Interview for the release of Discovery (3.09.2001) Part 3/8
Thomas: And the truth is we didn’t feel like doing the same thing as Homework a second time, mostly because nowadays this music is accepted, understood and that’s also what we fought for in the first place but we wanna keep on breaking the rules, create unexpected things, that can even surprise us.
Host: Right.
Thomas: We had fun doing that, now it’s true the tracks are ‘songs’ a little, there are things with vocals but it’s still not traditional though…
Host: That’s for sure.
Thomas: And it’s true that, as today the norm is electronic music, long format, 10 minutes, an idea, something, it’s good but…
Host: You really wanted to make versions for an album, for the radio.
Thomas: We often say, the first album you really picture yourself on the dance floor, dancing, making this music you wanted to listen to while dancing and for this album, you kinda picture yourself like driving a car, listening to the radio out loud and the aesthetic…
Host: Or a scooter.
Thomas: Or a scooter yeah. Well more… It’s a fantasy right, the car…
Host: Yeah you’re allowed, I mean, as you want… I know I’m a pain in the ass, he doesn’t know what he wanted to say anymore!
Thomas: I prefer the story with the radio in the car, in preference convertible that’d be better! And it’s the idea of the aesthetic of the radio cause there’s something about the sound of American radios like ‘Bonjour HELLO’.. y’know..
Host: It’s true that almost every single track of the first album has been played in clubs, I mean the dude would take the album and not only play like 3 or 4 tracks, the whole thing could be played whereas here, it’s more of an album concept, like we can listen to it at home..
Thomas: For those versions yeah. But in EDM you usually have two categories: music for clubs, really punchy,
Host: There are one or two tracks like that in the album.
Thomas: And another music more in the ‘relaxation’ tempo, and that’s true the album doesn’t belong in one category or the other.
Host: Which means every time a single is out, there’ll be remixes for clubs.
Thomas: For clubs yeah.
Guy-Man: And the Daft Club.
Thomas: And for the Daft Club!
Host: And rightly so, we’re gonna talk about that in a few but I just wanted to say, that was interesting you’ve opened a breach, concerning your influences, saying you wanted to have fun, that you had for the new album, regarding your tastes in music that weren’t all focused on EDM, it is correct that in this album, we can read about that in the press and you guys say it and claim it, the 80’s and the 70’s, a little, we can feel a bit of Supertramp, Van Halen, it’s more like little signals like that, like AC/DC… They’re all references to you?
Thomas: They are yeah but not only. But that’s true we wanted to have fun.
Host: But it’s voluntary?
Thomas: What is?
Host: That you sometimes put like some keyboard part and you’re like ‘yeah it’s Supertramp-y’ or a bell and it reminds you of AC/DC or a guitar solo that makes you think of Van Halen…
Thomas: It’s more or less unconscious… Some things are more conscious than others but…
Host: You maybe didn’t realize back then, while making the album.
Thomas: No. Now, the ‘Supertramp sound’, it’s true, it’s a sound we really love, why would only Supertramp do it, use it?
Host: I totally agree with you.
Thomas: We’re currently creating an association, I’m happy to be on the radio to say it by the way…
Host: Go ahead!
Thomas: ACSK. Association for the Conservation of Supertramp’s keyboard. And we’re gonna try, via other associations and movements, to promote this piano, which is a Wurlitzer and try to make that keyboard, which has been left out, come back into music. We try to, we’re only beginning…
Host: Yeah… You’re also creating the ‘DILSTO’: Do I look stupid to you? Well, we’ll listen to some extracts of the new album later, a small question has been chosen, from an auditor who sent us an email, we called him back and here’s the question.
Auditor: Hi Max, hi to the crew and Daft Punk! François from Rennes here, I’m 23 and I’m a huge fan of yours and I’m gonna rush to the store on Monday cause I’ve been saving money for a month to buy the new album and rightly so I heard that with the new album we will have a card that will allow us to subscribe to a site, the Daft Club? I didn’t really copy that so if you could maybe explain, I’d appreciate. Thanks guys!’
Host: So, I have the album, I was expecting like a second CD but no, but it’s like a double CD because there’s the card. So first of, can we unstick the card or do we…
Thomas: No no, you can unstick it.
Host: Ok let’s do this. So there’s a number, it’s like a credit card, it’s a credit card… It’s the same thing, same size…
Thomas: Yeah it looks like one.
Host: So, what is this card? It’s the first thing you talked about when people began to talk about the album. People talked more about that concept, the card, the Daft Club, I think it took place in the south, in Cannes right?
Thomas: Yeah.
Host: You began to talk about the comeback of Daft Punk with that before even talking about music. Why? I mean, I assume it was voluntary but does it matter to you, what is this card?
Thomas: Well, there are several… We explain how it works first and we can talk about it…
Host: Oh no, let’s not explain…
Thomas: Ok, let’s not explain. So you’ve got the card
Host: And you sort it out! You can withdraw money with it? How does it work?
Thomas: So you have the card, in the album and on Monday you go to Daftclub.com and you put your card reference
Host: Ohh right!
Thomas: And then you can download a player, called the Daft player, and then exclusive tracks, remixes…
Host: So it means that tomorrow I have the card, I give the number to fifty people it means they can all use it?
Thomas: Nope, it only works once.
Host: It only works once?
Thomas: Let’s say per computer. Your number/reference is gonna allow you to download…
Host: We’re gonna try now on the site!
Thomas: Go to the site but now…
Host: Of course, it only works on Monday! Not yet. So on Monday, I do what you said, Daftclub
Thomas: Daftclub.com, you log in with the card number…
Host: The longest one.
Thomas: Yeah but don’t say it someone is gonna log in with it! And you’ll be able to download…
Host: Well, I’m not there yet…
Thomas: You choose your type of computer, your language, etc.
Host: What?
Chronicler: We’ll do it for you.
Host: Yeah, I’m not good at this, I can’t even start a Minitel so…
Thomas: You know, you even have a notice in the album! It’s rare to have an album with a notice.
Host: Yes! But y’know, you haven’t seen me in… I’m so clumsy, even to start a Minitel and choose train schedules, it takes me an hour so imagine with a card… That’s true that when we open it, well we can see you, masked!
Thomas: Mhh no no it’s us!
Host: That’s you and the explanation is inside, indeed. So yeah, there’s a notice.
Thomas: There’s a notice but the main idea…
Host: Who got the idea?
Thomas: We got the idea.
Host: You always say everything together really, like you compl… Great. That’s great! No but it’s…
Thomas: We were here and
Host: Because most of time it’s like ‘all together’, all together right but who got the idea?
Thomas: No no, we were more than two to have this idea, we were in the office, we were five and the thinking…
Host: But what’s the principle? Is it gonna give people the eager to buy the album so they can tell themselves ‘I can have a little more than others’?
Thomas: No no, people don’t have to buy the album, if they wanna pinch it from Napster, while they still can…
Host: Yeah, we’ll have a question about that!
Thomas: Well they can! As for us, it was more in the way ‘nowadays an album is expensive, what can we add, what can we do so it can be something pretty cool?’ like, ok we can put music on it but maybe there’s also a way to create things with the internet. Like, ok there are 14 tracks but
Host: Thirteen and a half! (EXCUSE YOU?!)
Thomas: Thirteen and a half?
Host: One of them is not that long!
Thomas: Huh?? (jeez he sounds so surprised and offended I dek how to translate his ‘bah attends…’)
Host: 1’30
Thomas: Huh yeah?
Host: All right 14!
Thomas: Ok… There are thirteen and a half tracks but there’s maybe more, an access to more music, a part of which has already been made, we’re gonna put it online…
Host: What’s the thing when you said we’re gonna get-
Thomas: Eh no no, it’s a surprise, come on.
Host: But e.g. there will be no tracks that could have been on the album..
Thomas: No no, there’s gonna be…
Host: Remixes.
Thomas: Yeah remixes, stuff like that. There’s gonna be stuff progressively but above all, what’s funny is that we’ll be able to make new stuff and put it online a few hours later. And that’s interesting because we kinda break the limits of the physical format that is the CD.
Host: And somehow it allows you to control all of that, I mean you do your thing…
Thomas: No no no!
Host: No but in the way that…
Thomas: No no no no…!
Host: But I’m saying…
Thomas: No control, no control of anything at all.
Host: No but I say control for the principle, instead of hearing like… we’re gonna talk about Napster later, sometimes there are things we don’t want to be released that end up online, at least with this site, we’ll be able to run things yourselves and give things as you wish without having other people doing it for you.
Thomas: But I think there will still be others who will do it for us, like instead of us. There are tracks of the album on Napster, we’re gonna do nothing about that and it’s fine. We use Napster too. It’s not a will to control everything, it’s to distribute and what’s great about it is that we can do it like that and that all the technological partners are with us: we have Dolby, I mean Dolby that’s huge, and a company like Intertrust too, a company of the Silicon Valley that deals with those rights, digital rights management, and to manage to do something that is an experience, it has an experimental side, to do that large-scale and free, I mean everything will be free, there will be no need to give your email address, no marketing you know we’re not doing that, but it’s interesting for us cause we’re gonna keep creating and use the internet for its flexibility and its instantaneous trait, and have fun like that.
_
So I’ve been asked something the other day and I answered the person but then I realized I could answer even better but I can’t contact this person SO I’m gonna do it here. So SenseofSolace, if you read this, I think Thomas and Guy-Man do change their voices 'naturally’, I mean they have no gadget or whatever, I listened to the itw again after replying to you and I heard something I didn’t before, when Thomas says 'We try to have robots’ voices from time to time’, then the host is saying some shit as usual but Thomas is talking at the same time, saying 'And it hurts’ (lol) so I think now it’s pretty clear :D
Also, thank you to everyone who has liked, reblogged or just read the translations I’ve made so far or just listened to the itw, you’ve no idea how happy that makes me (that sounds cheesy idc) not because I’m the one who translated and therefore posted the whole thing BUT that makes me happy for DP (and that sounds lame lol) I mean it’s pretty cool to see there are people who care what they have to say even if they’ve been silent for like 5 years (I know.. TRON.. but you know) like I said, I’d do anything to share what I know, what I can share about DP so that’s really cool :)
Anyway. I didn’t mean to write a novel, feel free to remove that part lol. And thank you to the people who started to follow me?? I don’t do that to have followers but still, that’s cool! Hope you enjoyed!
Daft Punk - Fun Radio Interview for the release of Discovery (3.09.2001) Part 2/8
Host: How did they take it? Was it like adventure for them? Did they take it seriously or were they taking it more like, let’s be honest, a gadget and like ‘yeah it’s gonna be fun and original, we’re betting on electro music with artists who don’t wanna be seen and control everything’ or did they take that really seriously thinking ‘there’s a future for EDM, for you in particular’?
Thomas: I think they took it seriously but I also think we didn’t know what was gonna happen and that we were just happy that we got to keep our integrity and that, at the same time, we had the chance to get our album a pretty good distribution.
Host: It was the case so you were pretty satisfied.
Thomas: So we were all happy and we all kept our integrity and for once we had the opportunity to do things with a lot of freedom, we’re doing that again with that album.
Host: Yeah total freedom for this one too I guess! It took some time… It took like 4 years?
Guy-Man: To make the album-
Host: Well hello Guy-Man!
Guy-Man: How are you doing?
Host: I’m cool, you?
Thomas: Oh hey Guy-Man!
Host: Hey you’re here! Even Thomas didn’t notice you!
Guy-Man: It took two years and a half to make the album. We toured right after the first album, then we took care of the DVD, which was kinda of a new thing back then, for musical DVDs anyways.
Host: Right! We’re gonna talk about it later by the way.
Guy-Man: And then we took like two years, two years and a half to create Discovery which is-
Thomas: Two years and a half. Firm.
Host: Two years and a half, after getting the ideas together and then going to the studio.
Thomas: Yeah. And we also slept at night so as we sleep like 8 hours per night which equals 1/3 so you can take 1/3 off of 2 years and ½ which…
Host: You sleep 8 hours per night?
Thomas: Not at the moment.
Host: You’ve got circles under your eyes, you should have a 12 hour sleep.
Thomas: No no! So yeah, we might have worked like 6 hours a day, 6x4= 24…
Host: Not even the 35-hour working week?!
Thomas: No no 6 hours to make music, in the studio, but besides we both have production companies.
Host: True, true.
Thomas: But yeah, it might have actually taken… Nine months.
Host: Nine months, a baby. Aww that’s so cute! He’s gonna make you cry. That’s the goal for tonight, he’s gonna make you cry. Ok so we’re gonna take a little break and after that we’ll be back with a few questions on the album and of course we’ll talk about things album and clip related, Captain Harlock…
(Thomas/Guy-Man singing the soundtrack)
Thomas: I don’t remember much.
Host: You don’t know the lyrics??
Thomas: Nope.
Host: Aww shit, I had prepared a blind test and even a karaoke… I’m kidding.
Thomas: No, please, do.
Host: Ok you’re gonna take a break and what I can suggest is that we can either broadcast a sample from the album or you choose a song from the stuff you brought with you tonight and we broadcast it when we’re back from the break.
Thomas: As you want.
Host: No, you decide.
Thomas: We’re gonna try and pick a song then.
Host: Don’t be too long, the break isn’t gonna last 10 years.
Thomas: How long then?
Host: I don’t know, what would be good for you, 3 or 4 minutes?
Thomas: Perfect.
Host: Ok so a 3 – 4 minute break and we’ll be back with Daft Punk after that, live, with questions that we selected, ready to be asked in a few minutes and some music too so don’t go anywhere… / Welcome back on Fun Radio, we’re on Friday and Guy-Man and Thomas are here with us tonight, the two members of Daft Punk! “Daft Punk” comes from the English press…
Thomas (without the mic): Malicious English press.
Host: It’s better with the mic ON. It’s ok, it’s a job you know
Thomas: (mic on) That’s right.
Host: If you wanna be a radio host you have to turn on the mic. So it was when you guys were called “Darlin’” right, another band.
Guy-Man: We were like 17/18 and we created a small band with Laurent, who’s a member of Phoenix now.
Host: Yeah, we might welcome them soon, Thomas made me invite them!
Guy-Man: They’re great.
Host: Maybe they’re listening now… So yeah guys, I’m gonna invite you, make you come here… Anyway so with a member of Phoenix and?
Guy-Man: And two songs, pretty short, came out, on a 45s compilation so a really small thing, limited to 2000 copies back then, I think, with the help of Stereolab, which is a English band, and two other French bands…
Host: And the press just…
Thomas: Called us daft punks.
Host: Yeah daft punks, stupid punks and you thought it was funny.
Guy-Man: We thought it was legitimate you know, instead of like worrying about having to find a name…
Host: And in the mean time another adventure had begun, what happened that one day those words came back to mind?
Thomas: Oh no it was only a few months later actually-
Host: How did the transition happen between “we drop Darlin’ and now we’re Daft Punk and we’re gonna make EDM”, how did the transition happen, go?
Thomas: Well… We used to go to some rock concerts and people were like falling asleep during the show
Host: During your shows??
Thomas: No no not ours, rock shows in general. Our concerts… We didn’t perform that much, only twice.
Host: Well that’s good, bravo!
Thomas: Thanks.. And it was like everybody just kept getting sadder and sadder…
Host: At your concerts?
Thomas: No, no, concert in general, and we just wanted to have fun and we thought music was made for having fun, we were pretty young, like 15/16 back then. And when we were 17 we saw something, “Rave” and we were like “wtf is that”
Host: A party?
Thomas: A party. And so we went there.
Host: Do you remember what, where? Both of you?
Thomas: Yep, both of us right?
Guy-Man: Yep.
Thomas: You okay?
Guy-Man: Yeah yeah.
Host: Do you remember where it was?
Thomas: Yes, it was on Nov 10th, of 198-
Host: I mean where did it took place?
Guy-Man: Beaubourg.
Thomas: Yeah, on the top of Beaubourg and we were literally blown away, to see all of those people having fun, all this energy, this very dynamic music that we knew a little about..
Host: Yeah you knew a little about EDM back then?
Thomas: Just a little.
Host: How? By who or what means?
Thomas: Thanks to the radio! There was S’Express…
Host: Oh yeah alright! Towards ‘88-’89 then. The 49ers, MARRS and “Pump up the volume”, Lil Louis..
Thomas: Lil Louis!
Host: Lil Louis, essential! Ok so all this period then. Milli Vanilli!
Thomas: Yeah. But we only knew about them because of the radio, we were too young to go to…
Host: Damn, back then I was already here, it might be thanks to me!
Thomas: Yeah, thank you Max!
Host: There was this show called ‘Electro Fun and Super Electro Fun’, there were dudes who were playing some new beat, there was Confetti’s and stuff like that.
Thomas: Yeah all of that!
Host: All of those old things! That was funny. And so then MARRS and ‘Pump up the volume’, S’Express… And so it was like love at first sight and you went towards this music..
Thomas: Yeah, it was like love at first sight, for this energy and especially when we saw..
Host: Energy we can find in the first album!
Thomas: Yeah, exactly! When we saw that we could make this music at home, with just a drum machine and a synth and not only didn’t we have to go to a professional studio but this kind of music wasn’t made in professional studios so it was beginning to be normal and possible to make music at home, just like you can make movies nowadays with just a camera… So we thought ‘that’s fucking awesome’
Host: And you released the first 45s, if I remember correctly it was ‘Alive’
Thomas: That’s it, ‘Alive’
Host: And on face B..
Thomas: ‘New Wave’.
Host: ‘New Wave’ and it was released by Soma, the one and only Scottish record label, which is still working really well, and it is true that in ‘Homework’ we find a lot of – well I mean there’s not just that but there’s a fusion between rock n’ roll and techno on several tracks, like in the essential anthem ‘Rollin’ and Scratchin’” or stuff like that where you can frankly feel the aggressive side!
Thomas: Angry!
Host: Yeah, angry! Very aggressive.
Thomas: We were very angry!
Host: And so now to go back to the new album, which is clearly different, I read the reviews and my first thought when I first listened to it, cause I had the chance to listen to it already, in this amazing condo… Little detail, I was explaining to the auditors that I was gonna listen to Daft Punk’s newest album in a loft.. I read in the press – if I may change the subject – the loft is like 2152 sq ft, is that true? (in French it’s 200m², I hope I got it right for the square feet :s)
Thomas/Guy-Man: I don’t know, we weren’t there.
Host: You didn’t even see it?
Thomas: Nope.
Host: I heard it was one of you friends’, that’s bullshit?
Guy-Man: Yeah.
Host: That’s all bullshit.
Thomas: No no no! Yes!
Host: Yes??
Thomas: Yes, it was a friend’s flat!
Host: A good friend’s flat but you never went there.
Thomas: Oh the flat, we went there.
Host: Ok alright, because I was wondering, I don’t know where the journalist saw 2152 sq ft… But I listened to the album..
Thomas: But there was a big kitchen, I heard!
Host: Yeah, American one.
Thomas: Yeah American.
Host: 2152 sq ft, we’ll both go there and we’ll see if it’s that big! Anyway. After listening to the album and I thought ‘it has some pop-y tunes’… A little hardrock but also pop.
Thomas: Yeah… I don’t know.
Host: You don’t know. Well I’m telling you. It was my first thought. There’s not just that but I felt it was like quieter… Do you feel there’s more maturity in this album, that’s the next logical step…
Thomas: We do know the artwork and the CD…
Host: I’m showing it to them I’m so dumb. That’s right, I forgot you guys were the Daft Punk.
Thomas: Well, is it the next logical step? I don’t know. See, four years ago, raves, EDM, all of that wasn’t really accepted nor understood, at all, and there was in the first album this will to only make this kind of music whereas our influences and tastes in music are very wide and go beyond house music…
Host: Yeah we heard that, Earth Wind and Fire, didn’t expect that!
Thomas: Yes!
Host: That’s great though!
I’ll try to get part 3 done in the weekend, got a lot of work to do though… Hope you enjoyed :)
Daft Punk - Fun Radio Interview for the release of Discovery (3.09.2001) Part 1/8
So I don’t know if any translations have been done before but I felt like translating some old interviews so here is part 1! Also, there might be some mistakes, I haven’t re-read and I don’t have the time to do it now (boo-ooo I know) so my apologies for that. There are 8 parts, hopefully the rest will come very soon.. I’ll try my best. I put the audio file along with the post, I know if I didn’t understand a word I’d still wanna listen to the thing - and it’s not like we get to hear them talk a lot and all the time sooo yeah. ANYWAY, don’t pay attention to the host, he can be annoying as fuck sometimes. Hope you all non-speaking French Daft Punk fans will enjoy that - I sure did enjoy doing it, I think I’d do anything to share my love for those two fuckers :’)
Host : all right let’s do this, the Daft Punk on Fun Radio, live, they are at the cafeteria, they’ll be here in a few seconds… I’ve been filling in and talking at random for 8 minutes. Ah Thomas’ coming and Guy-Man is gonna take a seat too. They came… You came with all your travel stuff or what? With he number of discs they came with, they’re gonna mix till 200AM… They’re sitting down it’s gonna be good – yeah fruit basket
Thomas: hello
Host: how are you?
Thomas: I’m fine
Host: Thomas is here. They’re gonna change their voices. We already don’t know what they look like so if they begin to tamper their voices it’s gonna be complicated. Ok then so that’s for you, first gift
Thomas: Thank you very much
Host: You’re welcome. So it weights 25kg (55 lbs). Anne-K give it to them, you’ll see how strong she is… I had the smartest idea and opened it, it’s starting to fall off…
Anne-K: well done…
Host: Sort this out, don’t piss me off. Put this up front, hurry up. You know, she walked half a mile with that thing, she bought that at “Le paradis du fruit” which is near the “Barfly”, for those who know it’s pretty far and came back here, all alone carrying it, just for you guys.
Guy-Man: Thank you, thank you very much!
Thomas: oh that’s so sweet, we are very pleased!
Host: huhh I’m wondering if my guests aren’t imitators tonight! Can you imitate Tatayet (Belgian muppet) Thomas?
Thomas: No I can’t do that…
Host: You can’t do Tatayet?
Thomas: No, no.
Host: If everything goes well maybe we’ll reach a friend of mine, Michael, who’s a great imitator, he can do Patrick Bruel and Tatayet like you’ve never heard it before.
Thomas: I’d love to hear Michael…
Host: You’re not gonna spend the night talking like that, are you? Otherwise we’ll do it too and I’ll imitate Kermit the Frog and we’re all good!
Thomas: No but we try to have a robot’s voice from time to time
Host: yeah no problem it’s cool
Thomas: And it hurts!
Host: Guy-man, any imitations?
Guy-man: HELLO!
Host: Haha ok! Well that’s too bad I unplugged I could have imitate Yves Mourousi (nevermind). OK they’re here tonight and while filling in, I said you didn’t kill yourselves on the artwork right? That’s the same one but with a different color.
Thomas: Yep.
Host: It’s a concept.
Thomas: Yep.
Host: Well that’s great!
Thomas: No but if you look closer you can see all the colors behind.
Host: Where? Behind
Thomas: No no behind, in front. In front, behind.
Host: In front, behind… Wait wait, you have to explain.
Thomas: Look there, it’s white, metallic and when you look closer at the metal
Host: When I look more closely at the metal… Maybe I need more light, that’s why
Thomas: Voila…
Host: I need more light, switch it on… Voila! So…
Thomas: So, here it’s white, it’s metallic and silver…
Host: Oh yes! I get it!
Thomas: And when you look closer you can see the multicolored spectrum.
Host: I get the concept now, tell me if I’m right: so it’s released, I go to the store and “OHH Daft’s album!” and so I look closer and I’m like “yeah, that’s the new one”.
Thomas: That’s multicolored.
Host: And therefore I buy it.
Thomas: No, you don’t buy it.
Host: No only giveaways tonight! Anyway it’s here, it’s out! You came with a lot of vinyl, that’s what I’ve been telling the auditors, if you feel good and begin to mix…
Thomas: Well we’ll see…
Host: We’re gonna have to go live til 200AM. Did you eat well?
Thomas: Yes we did, the food was good.
Host: They feasted! They’re nice, they’re being polite saying they enjoyed their meal.
Thomas: Thank you very much
Host: But I told them, you only come here once, come every day, you’ll see… What did you eat?
Guy-Man: Some brandade!
Host: Some brandade! And I asked Guy-Man if it was tasty and he had the cheek to tell me it was!
Thomas: No it was good…
Host: It was cold huh.
Guy-Man: I’m being polite.
Thomas: I ate a goat cheese salad.
Host: It was good but now you don’t feel really good do you?
Guy-Man: I’m fine! Mhh well..
Background: I’m gonna get a bucket!
Host: You’re gonna be ok?
Guy-Man: Nah give me the bucket!
Host: The bucket and it’ll be fine. And you Thomas, what did you eat?
Thomas: I ate a goat cheese salad.
Host: Safe choice.
Thomas: And then I wanted to take some poached eggs…
Host: You shouldn’t have!
Thomas: And they were hard-boiled eggs actually!
Host: And you didn’t want hard-boiled eggs.
Thomas: I wanted poached eggs. And then I thought “is the yolk gonna stay soft/flabby or is it gonna harden?” And then I realized it became tough, turning to green.
Host: That’s what we have every day! That pleases me! At least you observed it, you saw it! Ok then, they’re here tonight, I don’t know how long they’re gonna stay, they’ll leave whenever they want to, we picked up some questions on the internet. The first one is a little dumb – I warned them, some questions, thanks to you on the other side of the radio, I’m gonna ask you not to answer them ok – so the first one I’m dying to ask and unfortunately I kinda let the cat out of the bag cause I told them to be honest and the same question has been asked this afternoon so the answer is gonna be quite simple, I hope there’s gonna be no answer: for when a third album? May I remind everyone that the second album comes out on Monday…
Thomas: The second one isn’t even out yet. And I answered off air, we have a release date for the fourth album, it’ll be in 2005, on March 14th
Host: I know some people will take note.
Thomas: And for the third we’re still hesitating.
Host: 2006, 2007?
Thomas: No no, the third one is gonna come before 2005.
Host: Why not release it after?
Thomas: We could release the third after.
Host: After the fourth. That’s a concept. Think about it.
Thomas: Yeah that’s true.
Host: You need to think about it, now that’s messy. So I’m putting this one away.
Thomas: Wait wait… One, two, th-four-
Host: We’re good?
Thomas: One, two, three, four, ok.
Host: Ok I put it away in the drawer. I prepared a few things too, I hope you’ll succeed, a game called ‘Stupido’ and a blind test. I know you guys are 80’s’ fans, it’s you thing, you’re dope
Thomas/Guy-Man: Not only.
Host: The 80’s!
Thomas: Like everybody else!
Host: 26 and 27 y.o. so it’s your thing
Thomas: You too.
Host: Yes but a little more, I’m 31! I know I look quite young and I wear teenage shirts but I’m a little older than you. WHAT?
Chronicler: Teenage shirt… People don’t see but it’s not quite that!
Host: Wait it’s just a shirt!
Chronicler: Yeah! Yeah!
Host: It’s just a shirt but isn’t it a cool shirt?
Thomas: It’s a beautiful shirt.
Host: I was expecting to see you with golden clothes, shining stuff…
Thomas: Sometimes it shines and sometimes it doesn’t.
Host: And here it doesn’t shine. Let’s be serious now, the album comes out on Monday, big event.
Thomas: Wow, big event, big event, don’t push it, it’s just a record.
Host: He’s so modest… What do you want me to say after that? Let’s be serious, you’re French, it took some time before EDM, made by French artists, truly worked, it’s been a couple years now that there are a few who succeed and it’s been like six months/a year that we’ve been hearing some on the radio but you guys were the firsts..
Thomas: No we weren’t the firsts; there were people like Laurent Garnier…
Host: Yeah but who are broadcast on the radio!
Thomas: There were some on Maximum!
Host: Yeah but it was a Parisian radio but I’m talking like on national radio, where the EDM fan and the normal guy can say “yeah I can relate to that”, you are the firsts!
Thomas: I don’t know.
Host: You don’t have that feeling? At all?
Thomas: We don’t feel like we’re Vets or something.
Host: No that’s not what I meant! But you’re like the firsts who have opened a breach for others, to make it move forward.
Thomas: The thing is that we make our music at home, in a home-studio.
Host: In the living room, the kitchen?
Thomas: Mhh it depends! But everybody in the independent techno scene does that and when Homework came out, it was unusual to see a record produced by a major label which was entirely made at home, without any professional standards where you just do whatever you want, like you take a cable and if it goes into the red you just don’t care and you don’t really read the notice to try to – see here you can talk in the red one LIKE THAT and do anything, here it’s compressed so
Host: So go ahead!
Thomas: AHHHH!
Host: You’re not even at zero! And Guy-Man is at -60000, we don’t hear him.
Guy-man: (whispering) No you don’t hear me.
Host: -20! But the funny fact is that the record label was also taking a risk, cause you were taking a risk going with a major label, you managed to keep your independence but they were taking the risk to let you do whatever you wanted, it could’ve had not worked too, it was kinda of an agreement?
Thomas: Yeah…
Host: Did the negotiations take long before you got to sign a contract? A part from the time where you had to think about it, I guess it took some time, but after that.
Thomas: It is certain at the beginning… Now mentalities… In the end (ok Thomas ^^), the record label as we imagined it, in the 80’s, it’s awful-
Host: They control everything!
Thomas: It’s evil! And then you realize, when you begin to see people who work in record labels, especially now, that they actually are young people, sometimes even younger than you, 25 y.o. dudes, 25-30 y.o. women who want to make a difference, change things…
Host: Do I make you laugh?
Thomas: Come on I’m saying 25-30 y.o. women and you’re like raising your eyebrows!
Host: Because I know where you’re going, I know the record label, I see and I don’t see the pretty women over there! Are there any?
Thomas: Yes, there are! There are!
Host: Doors must open more easily for you than for me then…
Thomas: You bet… But people are ready to change the system, we can change it and there are new mentalities and in the end there are people in record companies who are super cool.
Host: Of course!
Thomas: Five years ago, when we arrived we were like “ok we don’t wanna be photographed, we wanna do this and that”
Part 2 is already translated but I can’t upload the audio file -.-’ Tomorrow :)
Daft Punk - Fun Radio Interview for the release of Discovery (3.09.2001) Part 4/8
Host: Guy-Man you know you also have some talk time right? Thomas is like 10 minutes ahead of you, you have to catch up. We’ll be back in a moment with Thomas and Guy-Man, we’ll talk about the clips, all of the clips’ universe, there will be plenty of questions about that and a little blind-test on the 80’s, I’m sure they’re unbeatable. It’s easy, it’s gonna be super easy for you. Probably one of them will go behind the turntables and mix a bit, don’t go anywhere. It’s “Radio Libre” we’re on Friday and we’re with Daft Punk! There’s Guy-Man here, getting himself ready, he’s writing something, I don’t know maybe he feels like talking, he thinks he didn’t talk as much as Thomas so he’s writing something with his buds, and Thomas is ready to mix, because we ask them to talk but we also asked them for some music, as music is part of their daily lives, you’re gonna play a couple tracks right?
Thomas: Yeah, I’m gonna start with Phoenix, Todd Edward’s remix!
Host: Of course.
Thomas: He sings and he did the track Face to Face with us on this album.
Host: And after you’re gonna go with other tracks.
Thomas: Yeah other stuff.
Host: Vinyl. Ok let’s hear that! Daft Punk live! (AND I DON’T HAVE IT! FDLKFHGLDSH)
Thomas: The end of Too Long, it lasts 10 minutes, we just played the second part, it’s kind of an epic track.
Host: It lasts 9/10 minutes, very long.
Thomas: Yeah too long like really too much, Too Long means trop long for those who don’t speak English.
Host: We’re gonna stop the track cause we can still hear it… Or we can let it be, in the background… Oh Guy-Man is letting it, that’s sweet. Guy-Man you prepared a text?
Guy-Man: Yeah well not yet.
Host: He told me “Max I’ll do it but I don’t have a pen” so he didn’t work on it. Uhhhhhhh where is the little question about the 3, concerning Romanthony? Is it this one? This is from an auditor.
Auditor: Hi Daft Punk, hi Max and the team, Christophe, 23 from Lyon, I’m calling because you collaborated with Romanthony on One More Time, I wanted to know how it happened and another quick question, I assume you love your new album but isn’t there a track that you love more than the others?
Host: So first question about Romanthony-
Thomas: We do not LOOOVE, don’t push it, we’re happy but we do not love/adore Daft Punk.
Host: We’ll talk about that after but I think he meant-
Thomas: No, no, I know, I was kidding.
Host: Haaaaa ! You should’ve told me!
Thomas: I feel like we… like you already did that joke!
Host: No no! So concerning Romanthony, there has been One More Time and a second track in collaboration with him. You wanted to meet him? It’s someone you look up too I guess?
Guy-Man: Well, when we really began to be into electronic music, to really listen to it and discover house music, Romanthony well it was a bit of a shock at the beginning. And really, the emotional and soul touch he puts in his music and the compression, it’s a little technical but this thing where the foot is really… yeah that’s it!
Host: Crushed? (ok so I don’t really know how to express that, hope you know what they mean)
Guy-Man: Yeah crushed
Host: But somehow sustained, that you can hear perfectly.
Guy-Man: Elastic!
Host: That doesn’t hurt the ears.
Guy-Man: We really loved that so we got inspired by that a lot at the beginning and meeting him was…
Thomas: Something big, important.
Guy-Man: Something important.
Host: And he made a new album, I don’t know if someone in your crew came with samples from the album… The album came out some time ago…
Thomas: Yeah, there are 2 albums.
Host: The last one came out not so long ago.
Thomas: This year and the first one Romanworld, which is purely awesome.
Host: And so when you got in touch with him he said yes straight away?
Thomas: Uh no. Well yes. Well it’s not…
Host: Do not mess with me!
Thomas: Yeah I’m taking you on a boat, a huge thing! No, we met him in Miami, 3 or 4 years ago and…
Host: Miami
Thomas: Miami… It’s in the… with Don Johnson…
Host: YEAH RIGHT I’m so done with your shit!
Thomas: So I was with Don Johnson and the dude, what’s his name? The black one in Miami Vice? Patrick.. Thomas Michael (omg)
Host: Yeahh.
Thomas: And so I was with Patrick Thomas Michael and Don, and we were talking.
Host: You?
Thomas: Yeah yeah, just chillin you know and then there’s Romanthony, who just rolls in “hey, whaddup”
Host: So you were like “what do you want man?”
Thomas: Yeah! But seriously, we really became friends before we worked together on those tracks.
Host: He knew your first album of course, did he like it?
Thomas: Yes he did. That surprised us a bit because he’s more soul and stuff like that and our music was more violent but he actually appreciated it.
Host: Maybe he enjoyed the sound, he related to that.
Thomas: Yeah true, he talked about compression right away, the sound a little bit… What we love about compression is the discs/records, vinyl or CD, when you listen to them at home, it sounds like on the radio. One thing that pisses me off: you listen to the radio, it’s awesome and then you buy the CD and you’re like “oh shit why doesn’t it sound the same?”
Host: Sounds smaller!
Thomas: And so, again it’s a little technical, but you do have some freaking great compressors.
Host: We do our job, Thomas, that’s all!
Thomas: The last time I came to Fun Radio, I had a pen and I noted everything.
Host: That’s true! He stayed like 3 hours with the Technical Director!
Thomas: And we took the same machines so that our CD would sound great at home.
Host: That’s funny because maybe without even knowing it at the beginning, you have your own sound, your identity, which matters a lot in the music industry, that allows you to stand from the rest, and we can feel the Daft Punk sound, even if it’s different from the first album, there’s this Daft sound. I mean you put the thing once on the radio, whether it’s with guitars or whatever, it’s you, we know it’s you. For some artists it’s the same, for some rock artists, it’s just the voice, like Kurt Cobain or a band like Pearl Jam, when you hear the voice you just know, or Radiohead for instance, that you guys seem to like, at least you, Thomas. So thanks to that, you did those tracks, he listened to them, loved them and?
Thomas: And yeah, well he listened to the whole album and then we were like why not make music together… We took a coffee and “OH by the way why wouldn’t we make music together??” and voilà! No, no.
Host: Did he take his time to think?
Thomas: No no, he answered pretty quickly, he was very… very…
Host: Happy?
Thomas: Yeah! Really in the… He loved the idea.
Host: He bounced and all?
Thomas: No, no, he loved the idea, we invited him to come to Paris and we began to work.
Guy-Man: Apart from his music and his production talent, he has a voice that we really love so that’s what we wanted to have, really.
Host: In One More Time a little less than in this one cause in OMT there’s more work on his voice, with the machines.
Thomas: Yeah. We made that track, Too Long, first actually, and the three of us were pretty happy about it and we wanted to make a second track with like a different approach and rightly so, maybe modify his voice, have some work on it, something he had never done before, and he said yes. We had fun. And then, as the theme of the track was One More Time we thought it would be fun to release a single called “Daft Punk – One More Time” after three years of silence. It’s quite simple and to take at face value but… but it was honest and something that we wanted… we wanted… like that… That uhhh
Host: You were good, you should have stopped right there! … I’m kidding! Go on… Haaa! He does that on purpose! A half-second blank on a radio show that’s tough! On TV you can. So second question, he asks… Well any artist who release a new album can be not entirely satisfied, a couple of tracks that you listen to after and you’re like “damn you should have done this or that”…
Thomas: Well, with the Daft Club, we were talking about that earlier, but there are some tracks on which we’re already like “shit we could have done this like that or so”, well we’re gonna be able to and people will have the version, we’ll say “Correction”.
Host: There will be no frustration.
Thomas: Exactly, no frustration.
Host: No tracks unlisted, no space, etc.
Thomas: It allows us to say “we didn’t really want this track to sound like that but more like this”, the Daft Club will allow that.
Host: That’s a good idea. In the second question he wanted to know, there are 14 tracks, I said 13,5 but there 14 for real because seriously the one that lasts 1:30 is beautiful, but is there, among those 14, one track that you, Thomas and Guy-Man, really like more than the others? Because it was more complicated to create or, on the contrary, it came up pretty easily? Or because of some anecdote?
Guy-Man: I don’t think so. We took two years and a half to be sure to make, create what we wanted and what we would like and there’s one thing we did on the first album and that we love doing is that we don’t wanna have a B-side weaker than the rest or filling/padding tracks like it happens sometimes on some CDs, you pay 120 Frs and you’ve got like 3 good tracks. We’ve always tried to make each track as powerful.. I mean not necessarily as “powerful” as the others but like they were all meant to be singles you know.
Host: You put the same energy in each one of them.
Guy-Man/Thomas: Yeah.
Host: But there’s not even one that you.. ? No? I’m just asking, I’m not ordering you to answer… But there could be a track that , like “yeah we did this one in a funny concept” or “this one, the melody, there’s a little something, that’s my favorite” no, there’s nothing like that on that album? There are some artists for who, frankly, there are a couple tracks they really love…
Thomas: There are tracks that were made in half a day or a few hours or a couple days and some others on which we worked six weeks, you know, so without naming any of those, you can start wondering ‘holy fuck I spent six weeks on the simple mix of a track, and the programming and stuff” so you live a little longer with that track.
Host: That’s good, no?
Thomas: That’s not because of that that there are our favorites but it’s interesting you know, you can appreciate something you made in half a day and also appreciate it because this spontaneity and this instantaneous trait of music is very appealing too. So we’ve got 14 buds.
Host: Aw that’s cute!
Thomas: And we all hold hands, all 16 of us, because we’re two, right, and we make a round.
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! And bring on March for fuck’s sake! :D
I was very optimistic back then, wasn’t I? Anyhow, HERE IT IS! I fucking did it, just today, instead of working. Because I’ve been reblogging a lot of Arrow stuff lately and I felt bad for those of you who follow me and don’t watch Arrow (or worse, hate it??) - but if you do like Arrow, everything is good in the world, that’s a win-win xD - and because the French did it we’re European Champions - and that made me very happy ok. ANYWAY, I’m sorry it took so long for me to post a new translation. And I’m not forgetting the old ones and the ones I was asked to do (like the one from Le Petit Journal) don’t worry. Hope you enjoy! Spread some DP love before Tumblr explodes tonight because of the Grammys hihi CAN’T WAIT! MDFJSLKJF (feel free to remove my shit huh).
Oh I didn’t re-read so MY BAD if there are any mistake ok (like you instead of we, I do that a lot). Bye now :D
________
Host : We’ve been telling you about this for weeks and it’s happening now on NRJ, on the internet, on the entire planet on NRJ.fr, that’s huge, the french duo number one everywhere, sitting right in front of me in the studio, unmasked, you’re gonna have an hour on NRJ with Daft Punk.. Hey guys !
Both : Yo
H : Hey Thomas, hi Guy-Man. So I know I’m very lucky because not many radio hosts have had the opportunity to welcome you guys in their studio.. It’s like an away game here, you’re not at home but at ours and you are very welcome.. Plus, you allowed some listeners to come along and let them ask you some questions, face to face, I’m gonna introduce them in a little while, I’m just wanted to start with you guys because since May 20th we’ve read a lot about RAM, #1 in over 20 countries, we’ve read many articles, interviews, all written ones but we’ve never heard you properly, today’s june 13th, it’s been a month since the album’s release, how did you experience the album launch and the infatuation like on Facebook, Twitter, everything that has been going on for a month, what do you wanna say about that, to your fans who are listening tonight?
Thomas: I think we’re really happy to have worked on that album for the past 4/5 years and that we finally get to share it with people and to witness the enthusiastic reaction from them. We made that album with a lot of generosity and enthusiasm, small-committee like, with a lot of musicians and we had a blast doing it and that makes us really happy and surprised too to see that people haven’t forgotten us (dude, like that’s ever gonna happen) that on the contrary, people seem to enjoy the music and it’s the music above everything else..
H: Guy-Man, after so many years, is it still scary to release a new album? Even when it’s Daft Punk.
Guy-Man: Scary no, I wouldn’t call it that. Let’s just say we take our time to make something worth releasable, to us, to be sure we’re ok with it, so whether it works once it’s out or not… As long as we’re happy with what we created, that we’re sure we wanna share it with the rest of the world, whether it works or not.. I mean I’m not gonna say it’s better if it works, well it’s certain we’re surprised and happy it does but it’s not fear because we accept that it can whether work or not at all, the important thing is that Thomas and I are happy, proud of our passion.
H: What’s the most vivid memory you have from the making process of that album? I mean there might be a lot of them but if you had to pick one?
T: That’s tough. The weird is that these are several years of work condensed in 74min so there’s like a crazy side of it, not reasonable.. To be in a studio with Nile Rodgers for instance, who is Chic’s producer, and to just make music with him whereas we grew up listening to his own as kids, it kinda felt surreal, it was totally pleasurable but surreal, that really marked us. Now, I think the entire creative process, all these years, can be filled with fear, angst, doubts, questions about what we’re doing, once the record is made, as Guy-Man said, that’s not really fear, we would be pretty curious and excited just to tell ourselves, that’s it we made an album that doesn’t really fit with the rest of today’s music, with what can be heard on the radio, so like a couple months ago we were pretty curious to know if people would connect with that kind of music where you can find a drummer, some guitar when it’s a time where, especially dance music, isn’t really made that way nowadays so we felt like suggesting, offering something different, not at all in opposition with it, we usually take ice cream flavors as an example, like there’s strawberry and you take pistachio or chocolate, that doesn’t mean you don’t like strawberry but the truth is we had a desire to put some variety, diversity, eclecticism and to be musically open-minded, in that album and we are very happy today and surprised to see that people accept that.
H: So Céline’s here with us. Hi Céline what’s your question?
Céline: I just wanted to know why such a change of style, in comparison to Discovery?
T: We don’t really feel like there’s a big change, not that much. The big difference however, in comparison to Discovery, even with the previous album, is the replacement of the drum machine by an actual drummer. If you take for instance, a track like Around The World, which was very influenced by the disco era and Chic and Nile Rodgers and whether it’s that track or One More Time, we feel like today we’re making the same kind of music but not the same way. And we wanted to try different things, we’ve always tried, for each record, to change the style a little bit – or not, to express our music in a different way, like the album we did before, the TRON soundtrack, which was for a movie, with an orchestra.. We don’t feel like doing the same thing twice.. It was also kind of a childhood dream for us, we’ve always worked in a bedroom, at home and now we have the opportunity to work in a studio, with actual musicians who are not that young anymore of course, and just tell ourselves that we wouldn’t have been able to do that ten years prior and we probably won’t be able to do ten years from now… So the making process is different but it is still our music, it’s still the same energy, the same emotion we try to capture and put into this music.
H: Enjoy all of this, that doesn’t happen everyday folks, they’re right here in our studio, Daft Punk, Guy-Man, Thomas, special hour with them, let’s get started with Get Lucky to welcome y’all. (…) Yeah that’s right that’s the event the entire planets wants, Daft Punk is here in our studio. So thirteen new tracks on the new album RAM, so Gonzales worked with you on the track Within and he compares you guys to movie directors when in the studio, what does he mean and how does it work between you two, like each one of you has a specialty, who does what, how does it work?
GM: Let’s just say Thomas is more technical, he’s more into that kind of stuff, but the rest, whether it’s the youth of the tracks, ideas, initial directions, we do everything together actually, we’re always together, working together no matter what stage in the process we’re in, we’re together and we keep moving very “tennis table” like (lol thanks GM on our ideas but we’re never too far from each other ‘s ideas anyway, we’re almost always on the same page, I mean after 12/13 years, it’s like we’re a married couple. But really, from beginning to end, we just carry the baby through all stages.
H: Cinema talk now cause there’s clearly a bond between you guys and this industry, Thomas you did the soundtracks for some of Gaspard Noé’s movies, Irréversible and Enter The Void, Guy-Man you produced Kavinsky’s Nightcall which became Drive’s music theme in 2012, you talked about it earlier there’s also TRON, also on the track Touch, there’s Paul Williams, who played in Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise so there’s this cinema touch in your duo and also in this new album.. In the end, your collaboration with Giorgio Moroder was inevitable wasn’t it? This big guy of both music and cinema industry.
GM: I don’t know if it was inevitable because he’s the one who got in touch with us one day to grab a cup of coffee, we were in the US, so it was something that we would’ve.. I mean he offered to have coffee and we said yes but we probably wouldn’t have had the initiative to go to him in the first place, he’s one of our idols, but he made the first step and one thing leading to another… We had this track, waiting on a shelf, a demo we had kept for years that could match his whole world, his style and we ask him and it just clicked. But it wasn’t.. all the collaborations on the album, all the singers, all those people we worked with, they were all chance encounters really, like we met Pharrell in a hotel at 2:00AM one day in London, we met Panda Bear because he wanted us to do a remix of his album Tom Boy two years ago and we suggested a collaboration instead because we didn’t do remixes anymore, for him to maybe sing on a demo we had.. So it never was like “we wanna work with X or Y” but more luck and chance encounters and the result is that we’re really happy.
H: Yeah the result is really nice, let’s hear a bit, that’s called Giorgio by Moroder, a track on RAM. So Giorgio Moroder that’s 3 Oscars, we can only wish you the same for the future, Midnight Express, What a Feeling for Flash Dance and Take My Breath Away for Top Gun, Scar Face too, so Giorgio Moroder that’s pretty heavy, with you guys on the album. Giorgio Moroder who was pretty impressed, he said in the video (The collaborators) he was impressed with your attention to the details, specifically when he came to the studio once and there were three different mics, that’s right Thomas? Like a mic from the 60-70’s, another from the 80-90’s and he was like “why are there so many mics?” and the sound engineer was like “you might not be able to tell the difference but Thomas will”.
T: Yes that’s a funny story but yet again we’re back to this “we’re taking so much time too make so little music” kind of thing, we come from the House music and Chicago House music scene that is a music where we learned to just experience things, we kind of feel like we’re permanent beginners, that album is the real first album we made in a studio and that’s what we’re looking for, to just not tell ourselves “that’s it, we have that much experience now, we’ve been through this before” and if we’ve been through this before then let’s do something else. When we did the TRON soundtrack, it was also a first and we kind of felt like we were interns, during the whole year, at Disney’s, trying to understand how to make music for a movie, trying to put our touch into it and that’s what we’re looking for, that’s what we looked for in every step we took for that album, so what Giorgio says might make us seem like people who have a lot of experience but no really, if we put like three mic, try to do something with three mic it’s with lots of candor, simplicity, naivety, like “let’s try this it could be fun, it be has different results”.. But this attention, this perfectionism, that’s also the sense of a job well done.
H: That’s rewarded by the success of the album. That’s a good thing to tell yourself that this perfectionism has paid off. That’s good.
T: Yes. I mean it’s a matter of elegance. To work on that project for so long and to see it’s successful, you just tell yourself “yeah well maybe we weren’t that crazy after all” and it was worth it in the end. Seen like that, it allows you to not become completely crazy.
H: The album’s called RAM, it’s a Daft Punk hour, don’t go anywhere, there are five listeners who won their seat in here, facing Daft Punk, who are unmasked, we’re gonna get to the Q&A part soon, do go anywhere. (DA FUCKIN FUNK PLAYING). (ONE MORE TIME PLAYING TOO JEEZ (Romanthony tho L)). How wicked is that, you get to spend an hour with DP on NRJ, you’re that lucky, we’ve waited eight years for that, big comeback, but there are even luckier since some listeners are here with us in the studio, facing DP, the number one duo. Fela is here (is that even a name???) from Belgium, hi Fela.
Fela: Hello.
H: Let me introduce you to Daft Punk, Thomas, Guy-Man, this is Fela.
Both : Hello Fela.
H: Where are you from in Belgium?
Fela: Brussels.
H: Brussels all right. Please, ask your question.
Fela: I wanted to know if you were planning on remixing your album.
GM: We already started. We already made a remix of Get Lucky. So that’s where we are for now.
T: Yeah we did say we were gonna make remixes but for now we’re like doing that track by track, and we’ve finished a remix of Get Lucky that’s gonna be released soon..
H: For the summer?
T: Yeah, I don’t have the exact date.
H: But what kind of mood for the remixes? Because there was a question : “do you have a jazzy or classical project, like the Jeff Mills one with the Philharmonic of Montpellier or the one of the German record label Kompakt, where Gregor Schwellenbach had to play techno tracks in classical mode. Is that something possible?
T: Everything is possible but here no, it’s a remix and also another version of Get Lucky that lasts 10/11min and where we take the time to explore a lot more.. We try to do things with a minimum of surprise effect. There’s gonna be a DP remix of Get Lucky soon and then we can imagine, maybe, other remixes from other tracks on the album. And concerning the orchestra part and jazz projects, that’s what we tried to with this album, we recorded with orchestras, in the US and also studio musicians who are experimented jazz musicians but we always try to do things we’ve never done before and sometimes, things that people haven’t done yet either, we’ll see but yes, everything is possible, that’s the approach and the idea, like to give the feeling that you can expect literally everything and anything.
GM: And that’s what we love about it.
H: So a question popped up on the internet “when will we see you live again?”. Last time we saw you on a stage, it was at the Madison Square Garden, with Phoenix… WHEN will we get to go to one of your concerts?
GM: There’s a real answer to the real question, nothing’s planned for now.
T: There’s no answer.
GM: No answer.
H: Nothing?
GM: It’s not “there’s nothing” but the album was just released, we took five years to work on it and now it’s available and we keep on working on it with all the promo, we don’t really doing two things at the same time.. Like Thomas said, we have only released four albums since the beginning of Daft Punk so that’s a very slow pace (that’s an understatement bby), I think taking the time is our thing.
H: Yeah but we, fans, always want more of coure
GM: Yes that’s for sure, everybody’s waiting for the album, Get Lucky is released ok but you need the album and then you need concerts
H: Yeah, we pictured the Stade de France right away
GM: Everyone always wants more and more but we have our own pace and for now… I mean of course that’d be awesome, but step by step, the album just got released and we’re in the middle of it right now.
H: Ok, so I brought the first album I bought with my pin money when I was 15/16 yo, thanks mom by the way for giving me pin money so that I could buy it back then, that’s Homework, 1996
T: 1996 yeah but some tracks are from 93
H: You can see it lived, the case is broken but I kept it, I told myself MAYBE one day I’ll get to meet DP and I’ll ask them to sign my copy (fanboy much?). We talked about Giorgio Moroder earlier, it seems when he listens to the tracks he produced for Donna Summer, the ones he composed, Love to Love You Baby, I Feel Love, he like freezes on certain parts of the track that’s why when he worked with you he said “damn those guys have that perfectionism I didn’t have back then” and so I wonder if when you listen to some of your old tracks, you just freeze too, on something?
GM: Well like I said, we always try to be satisfied 100% but that is not possible of course
T: When you know, deep down – and he told us a funny story about that, on Love to Love You Baby, which was Donna Summer’s first big hit, which lasts like 16min, and the thing is that he made a 4min version – way before the computer era, cause that can sound weird – anyhow he makes that 4min version and the American lablel, Casablanca at the time, well Neil Bogart, the boss, tells him “ yeah that’s great but you should make 16min version” and back then it was.. I mean you couldn’t loop the thing for 16min, it really was about making a 16min version and he only had those 4 minutes. And so he explained to me how he got back in touch with all the musicians, like 3 or 4 months later, and so he did that sort of break where the rhythmic just goes away (hope it’s understandable) and then the bassist just plays the bass line again followed by all the musicians playing their part again and he stretched, he remade like this additional 10/12 minutes but he said “we never truly managed to find the drum sound again, especially the bass” and there’s a moment where the bass changes a bit and that really pissed him off back then, it still does. That’s what we tried to do in this album, we would tell ourselves we’re not gonna use technology as a crutch to just erase the imperfections but more like we’re gonna try to capture the magic in the moment, the magic that lies in the musicians’ performance.
H: So before we get to listen to other tracks from RAM, I just wanted to listen to a classic from Homework, that’s gonna remind me of a lot of things and I think it’s gonna bring a lot of memories to you too, listeners, that’s Around The World (tootootootootoo tutututuuu BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM) (HBFS playing BYE) Yes that’s the biggest comeback of the year, DP on NRJ, an exceptional moment, that’s extremely rare to have you two in front of a mic like that, unmasked. So, about that, the craziness on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, that didn’t exist for the previous albums, is it still easy or is it harder to stay discreet?
T: That’s very easy.
H: What’s the move? The DP method. I heard about a thing in NYC, you were heading out of a radio station, you were like 10, with the staff and since there were photographers, you all put a cardboard mask on and just scattered in the streets of Manhattan. Is that true?
T: There are plenty of ways to do that, we learn everyday. The truth is we love that culture of secrecy, to be more and more discreet so we can create to art we wanna create and to be able to share it this way
GM: And just keep having a life that might not be like everyone else’s but that we can keep interacting with people, anyone, to have sane relationships that aren’t distorted by that celeb side. It’s important to be able to the baker’s, to just be around people and interact with them, we never wanted to be like in an ivory tower, cut from the rest of the world. We’re all the same.
H: And I admire that. But when you’re not DP, when you put down the helmet, when you’re not longer Superman but just Clark Kent again, what do you do? You said going to the baker’s, do people recognize you? I mean is McDonald’s possible for DP?
GM: Yes it is. Let’s say that since the release of RAM, there’s this expectation and fuss around you, so with Twitter, FB, there’s a lot..
H: That didn’t exist before. The photos now just pop up on the internet
GM: Yeah and since the album is available we do not hide more but we are recognized more but we keep on living our lives you know, we’ve been doing that for like 20 years now and I think people have accepted that, that it was an artistic move and that it was more interesting, that it brought more surprise that we decided to be robots, just to be able to create and bring those robots into stories, different contexts, movies, videos, to create – because we’re not dancers, singers, we play instruments but not perfectly either, we’re not performers – but by creating those robots and putting them in different situations/contexts that allowed us to be a little more creative, in addition of our music and people like that.
H: But do people come to you when they run into you in the street?
T: Yes, a little bit.
GM: They come very discreetly too, that’s funny.
T: But of course it’s harder than before to keep the surprise, the secret lies on that surprise effect, the idea to keep the surprise concerning the music too. It’s how to keep on being able to wrap the presents really and sometimes we could just be like “we don’t need to wrap it up” there’s a side less poetic maybe.. And we really try to keep – and that’s really what changed because the rest, the music and the process during those 20 years, it hasn’t changed much, this instinctive nature, this spontaneity.. But when you think about when Discovery was released and that the coders… like Mark Zuckerberg was listening to it while creating FB, so before FB was born, and that even Human After All was released before Instagram and Twitter, the world just lives way faster than we do and we communicate every five or six years, people communicate every 5 seconds so we feel a little jet lagged, like we’re disconnected.
H: That’s what we wanna know like, do you go to the cinema, what’s the last movie you watch in a actual cinema?
T: I watched The Bling Ring yesterday, in an actual cinema.
H: Cushy?
T: Cushy.
H: Going to the grocery store that’s ok too?
T: Yeah of course.
H: Like there’s no stress
T: Not at all. Take the subway too. And the Velib, we don’t have cars.
H: That’s crazy.
T: No it’s not.
GM: As long as it works you know.
H: You guys go to soccer games or is it like FIFA and gaming
T: No we’re too ol-…
H: You’re too old to be playing FIFA! So there’s Jamel here, lucky listener who’s here with us.
Jamel: hello robots! Well just a thing, I ran into Guy-Man once, at a ticket booth it was funny..
H: Your question?
Jamel: Yeah but first, in the name of all your fans I just wanna say thank you, for your music, sincerely, it motivates us, it makes us generous and carry us through tough times and all fans thank you for that and they followed you and the turn you took with that new album, with passion, I’d like to know, in the long run, what will be your projects, like cinema…
GM: You know, being a fan of ours yourself, you know we’ll always keep it a surprise.
H: And then there’s Thierry, from Lyon, last question but just, you were spotted in NYC with Karlie Kloss, what was that for?
T: That’s totally top secret.
GM: That’s a surprise.
T: Another surprise.
H: Yeah but we saw you so there’s no need to keep it a secret, what was it? A clip?
T: Top secret.
H: Oh come on! Just one tiny.. Spit it
T: The only thing we can say is that it was, in fact, us. Because that could’ve been like cosplayers or something.
H: Come on… Just…
T: No we-
H: The boss’ listening you know
T: We signed a contract so we can’t say anything.
H: When do we get to see the result then? Soon?
T: You’ll see.
H: You won’t spit a thing! We don’t know if there’s a tour coming up, we don’t if there will be movies or collaborations in Hollywood.. Hollywood contacted you for some movies? French are hype, like Oblivion it was M83, you it was TRON..
T: Yeah.. No..
H: Nothing new? You’re gonna tell me you sign papers with the Americans right
GM: There’s always a lot of propositions, coming from everywhere..
T: We talked the surprises, the gift wrap, that’s really how we do our thing, it’s just funnier thus
GM: I think the fans, the audience in general likes surprises
H: I tried.
GM: We managed to keep the album intact, without any leaks
H: I don’t people to tell me “damn it Lionel, they were in front of you and you just sat there, you screwed up big time”
T: No, it’s all on us. We don’t wanna answer.
H: Ok. Let’s end the show with a quote from Nile Rodgers that sums up what you were saying Thomas “when you see a world around you that’s in turmoil, some of the best artists make you feel good”.
GM: That’s exactly what we feel and I’m happy, grateful for those people who like the album, I just hope we brought them…
T: Happiness
GM: A little sunshine and some warmth in those hard times.
H: Well that was great to have you guys
Both: Thanks.
H: That was Thomas and Guy-Man, give them a round of applause, thank you.
From the December 2007 issue of Q magazine (Kylie Minogue on cover)
Somebody posted this article on tumblr a while back, don’t remember who though. I’m sorry that it’s not really legible, but it’s a good interview with nice pics. Guy-Man says that he goes f*cking crazy when he has to talk to someone, especially when something goes wrong onstage, because he’s shouting and nobody can hear him through the helmet, lol.
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