Thomas Bangalter Of Daft Punk On Going Solo
Thomas Bangalter – previously of Daft Punk – has spoken to The Guardian about the early days of the pioneering electronic duo and going solo.
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Banglater looked back fondly at the period in which Daft Punk emerged, “It was an amazing time… I was 20 in 1995. There was a sense of experimenting, a lot of possibilities, and also this network of record shops and labels between all these capitals of the world. It was beautiful because it was decentralised. It carried all the optimism and utopia of what the next steps could be, and how the internet started to be this kind of anarchic, crazy, free zone.
“There used to be a lot of barriers between genres of music. I was hopeful there was a possibility to break these. That was part of the message of what we did musically.”
He went on to discuss Daft Punk’s blockbusting 2013 album, Random Access Memories, “There was this ability, because the timing was right, to do something together and to possibly transmit it. It was a record that could not happen before or after. A generational transmission.”
Reflecting on today’s music, Banglater was hopeful, “In some way the world is much more polarised now, but not really musically – musically there is this ability to mix and match and create levels of conflicting aesthetics or clashing ideas. I just hope that the tolerance existing right now in music will exist more in society as well.”
Banglater’s new album, Mythologies, was initially commissioned by the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj for the ballet of the same name and premiered by the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine under the direction of Romain Dumas. The composer previously worked on the soundtrack to the 2010 remake of Tron and compared the two projects. “In Tron, the tough thing was always the discipline, the rigidity of making music to picture,” he said. With Mythologies, “I had more like carte blanche – the choreographer had given me freedom to do it with the timings that I had in my head.”
“It is definitely the opposite of electronic music-making, when you can do things on the fly or work for months on production,”