Daft Punk: Machines for Life

Pitchfork interviews Daft Punk about the “old school” process of making their new album, Random Access Memories.

To be clear: Daft Punk are not anti-technology, or even anti-computer (they readily admit that RAM could not have been made without them). But they do have a certain amount of ire for the normalizing aspect technology can have upon music, how lines of code are unable to recreate the variables that sprout from relatively organic techniques.

“We were never able to connect with using computers as musical instruments,” Bangalter shrugs. “We’ve always relied on hardware components – old drum machines, synthesizers – but it was more like a chaotic electrical lab with wires everywhere. We tried to make music with laptops in the mid 2000s, but it was really hard to create from within the computer without putting things into it. In a computer, everything is recallable all the time, but life is a succession of events that only happen once.”