![]() They amassed a band of engineers who would keep pace with Bangalter’s cultured ear (“the best in the business,” says DJ Falcon, despite lingering hearing damage sustained from a misfiring speaker in 2002), then spent years rotating between premium studios-including one, Henson B, that required an enormous crystal to be spotlit 24/7 because the ghost of Karen Carpenter was said to lay within. ![]() Bangalter, de Homem-Christo, and their creative director (or, according to those closest to the nerve center, silent third member), Cédric Hervet, were in agreement: Pro Tools, plug-ins-anything their clubworld peers might avail themselves of had to be ditched unless unavoidable. Midway through Alive 2006-07, the tour that reshaped live electronic music's potential, they hatched a plan to pivot sharply. The plan for RAM materialized at a point when Daft Punk’s stock seemingly couldn’t go any higher. Among not only their team but also a small auditorium’s worth of affiliates, the same giddy perspective recurs uncoerced: They were all nestled in the belly of a magnificent Trojan Horse bedazzled with Hedi Slimane sequins, knocking at the gates of the big leagues. Having conducted extensive interviews about the duo’s universal influence for a forthcoming book, After Daft, I was surprised by how much was left to discover about one of modern pop’s most pored-over records. The next installment in a post-dissolution push to gild their legacy, Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition) supplies 35 minutes worth of unheard or hard-to-acquire bonus material, as well as a wormhole back to 2013-an era of buzz, naivete, and fortune-cookie wisdom that good times can last not just all night, but forever. This was an undeniable event record, but does the lore supersede the songs themselves? Where Homework and Discovery teem with eternal youth, RAM’s unyielding devotion to the past can fix it in time. RAM is slow, it’s said, a long 75 minutes the airlocked grooves are linear and the opening run sags under the weight of treacle. Yet Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s fourth and no-fooling final album is their only one to see its reputation stall, or even backslide when put under scrutiny-unlike the rest, which all traveled from varying shades of skepticism to being regarded as either significant, genius, or both. ![]() On its 10th anniversary, the duo is reissuing the album with a raft of unreleased demos and outtakes, as well as a new mix in Spatial Audio.Random Access Memories, which swept into homes 10 years ago on the back of the most fulsome rollout imaginable, arrived with “Classic!” practically etched into the lacquer. It remains the last time humans have been on the moon. But there's somethin’ out there.” This was the Apollo 17 mission, December 1972. “As we look back at the Earth, it’s, uh, up at about 11 o’clock, about, uh, well, maybe 10 or 12 diameters,” the sampled voice of astronaut Eugene Cernan says on “Contact.” “I don't know whether that does you any good. There was joy in it, but there was melancholy, too: Here was a world seen through the rearview, beautiful in part because you couldn’t quite go back to it. “Get Lucky” and “Lose Yourself to Dance”-spotlights both for Pharrell and the pioneering work of Chic’s Nile Rodgers-recaptured the innocence of early disco and invited their audience to do the same. “Touch” was “All You Need Is Love” for the alienation of a post-Space Odyssey universe “Give Life Back to Music” wasn’t just there to set the scene, it was a command-just think of all the joy music has brought you. The concept, as much as the album had one, was to suggest that as great as our frictionless digital world may be, there was a sense of adventurousness and connection to the spirit of the ’70s that, if not lost, had at least been subdued. The theatricality that had alway been part of their stage show and presentation found its musical outlet (“Giorgio by Moroder,” the Paul Williams feature “Touch”), and the soft-rock panache they started playing with on 2001’s Discovery got a fuller, more earnest treatment (“Within,” the Julian Casablancas feature “Instant Crush,” the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-The Doobie Brothers moves of “Fragments of Time”). So while the live-band-driven sound of 2013’s Random Access Memories was a curveball, it was also a logical next step. But it also marked Daft Punk as a group with a strong, dynamic relationship to the past whose music served an almost dialogic function: They weren’t just expressing themselves, they were talking to their inspirations-a conversation that spanned countries, decades, styles and technological revolutions. Within the context of 1997’s Homework, “Teachers” presented the group as bright kids ready to absorb the lessons of those who came before them. There is an early Daft Punk track named “Teachers” that, effectively, served as a roll call for the French duo’s influences: Paul Johnson, DJ Funk, DJ Sneak.
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