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“On a personal creative level, it’s how we got to Random Access Memories”: Thomas Bangalter on Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy score
Before their official retirement in 2021, Daft Punk were known for their mysterious presentation as much as they were for their unmatched electronic hooks. The two members, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, practically never showed their faces in public. When they accepted their Album of the Year Grammy in 2014 for Random Access Memories, they donned their iconic robot helmets.
Well, during a new interview on the A24 podcast, Bangalter admits that until that album, their creative process was just as shrouded. It took them engaging with the vast collaborative process of writing for an 85-piece orchestra on Tron: Legacy to open things up.
“Before Tron, all the music we had made was just the two of us in my bedroom, and on a very super intimate level, not letting anyone in the process, even until it’s mastered,” Bangalter says. “The benefit of the Tron score, on a very personal creative level, was how we got from Tron to Random Access Memories.”
The proof is in the pudding in terms of how collaboration influenced Random Access Memories. While all three previous Daft Punk albums were completely without features, the final album had a star-studded cast including Pharrell Williams, Julian Casablancas, Panda Bear, and even fellow pioneer of electronic music Giorgio Moroder.
Bangalter and de Homem-Christo were actually working on Random Access Memories before Tron: Legacy, but they were initially unhappy with the demos. Scoring a movie and seeing how numerous musicians could contribute to a larger whole expanded their vision for the album.
“Tron was this kind of collaborative process… film work,” says Bangalter. “That’s what Random Access Memories was – I really consider that Random Access Memories was like a film without cameras, basically the entire process of it. And somehow, at the same time, Tron happened in the middle of this process.”
“After the Tron thing, there were all these demos, and we were like ‘OK – maybe we can go to LA and have these amazing session musicians turn it into something.”
Thomas Bangalter’s new ballet soundtrack, Mirage – Ballet for 16 Dancers, is out now.
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