According to Bangalter, “Daft Punk was a project that blurred the line between fact and fiction with our robots. It was very important to me and Guy-Manuel not to break the narrative while it was happening. I love technology as a tool, but at the same time I am terrified by the nature of the relationship between machines and ourselves. Now that the story is over, I find it interesting to reveal that the creative part of the process was human-based and not anything algorithmic.” Hence, in his last job, the millionaire “Random Accesss Memories”the duo bet on sounding more human than ever, approaching funk and disco with real instruments and not only with technology.
Bangalter credits the rise of Artificial Intelligence with having distanced himself from electronic music, considering that technology is marking the path of creativity too much. Although he also points out that: “My concerns regarding Artificial Intelligence go beyond its use in music creation. With Daft Punk we were trying to use machines to express something extremely exciting that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always next to humanity and not technology. Although I love the character, the last thing I want to be in the world we’re living in right now, in 2023, is a robot.”
Hence, what we can hear from Bangalter is “Mythologies” –which is published this Friday–, a work that was born as a soundtrack for a ballet and was already performed live with the entire orchestration last July in Bordeaux. “My mother died about twenty years ago, and returning to this sound brings me back to a specific stage in my life. As much as it adds nostalgia to my music, it’s also a new adventure. I’ve loved writing music that is unamplified and that no electricity required. It’s just me and the sheet music.”