Live from Fondation Beyeler: Thomas Bangalter

0:02Daft Punk and the robots, it was really performance art. I had absolutely no intention of making music as a living. After 30 years of playing with tools and technology, was I just a product of technology or could I be a musician without any of that technology? To go back to the personal process of your 12-year-old self, you didn't come from classical music, but there were some piano lessons, I believe, that were formative. Can you tell me about the origin story, the hero's journey, and the 12-year-old Thomas? What were you listening to and what was guiding you as you and Guy took that journey together?

0:40I guess what drove us together is the love of art. What is very interesting is that we met at 12 years old. I mean, I was 12, I was 13. This is Guy Manuel de Oman's Christo. Yes, Guy Manuel de Oman's Christo. And for five years, we pretty much didn't create anything together. We just like went to the movies. Because you were in high school, because you were 12. Yes, but we didn't have a creative, I mean, it was the love of art in general and the love of pop culture. And eventually, I think five years later, when we were 17, we said, oh yeah, let's try to do a rock band. Just Darlene. Yes. Short-lived Darlene.

1:21How long did Darlene last? A few months, a few months. But we did it also with Laurent Bankovit, who ended up creating Phoenix with his friends as well. So speaking of surprise, you know, all of this was completely unexpected and very surprising because even at that time, I had absolutely no intention of making music as a living. And so it felt like a short era, but actually there was a review of Darlin that might have defined the name of your future band. Can you tell us about that insult, perhaps? And what did that insult give you? There was in the Melody Maker a really bad review of this Darlene record that we had released on Diophonic, which is a Stereo Lab's label.

2:04And it really said something like, it's daft, punky trash. and so this is when we decided to stop making electronic music after that moment at the Centre Pompidou after discovering that music and looking at these people that were dancing and this energy that was around this music without knowing what music was being played the energy was very different than in the rock concert at that time and we didn't have any names and we just we basically turned this bad review into something good, you know. Never let a good crisis go to waste is a very useful lesson for musicians, artists, humans. And I think 10 years after that faithful meeting with Guy, the album Homework arrives.

2:53Yeah. With Around the World and Defunct, and suddenly a very specific French-Parisian club sound becomes a global language. But then we move through discovery, of course, into random access memories. And what I found interesting is that happens two years after Spotify launches. And this is an interesting moment, I suspect, in terms of the advent of Spotify and Apple Music. Get Lucky, five Grammys in 2014. How did the advent of Spotify and the streamers perhaps evolve the way you thought? Or again, were you just not thinking about the distribution or the audience? You were just making magnificent music that was widely celebrated.

3:32The interesting thing is that as much as not thinking about the audience, any creative act, I feel, is the response to the environment around you at a certain time. So if you're asking me to go back in my mindset in 2010 or the years leading up to random access memories, I feel that there was both a desire to think that, okay, we are at a time where the technology is allowing a lot of things musically that you can create in very easy way. And that there was this opportunity to pay a certain respect to a certain craftsmanship that was really fading both generationally, because there was a lot of people that were very good at creating a lot of these records that we loved and they were aging.

4:29and there was this desire to interact with this older generation. And then there was really this idea of almost creating a film without camera for an album as well. Random Access movies, there are 150 people that worked on the record and somehow it really felt we were directing this album, almost as a director, which was very different from the process of the first Daft Punk 3 albums that happened very intimately in my child's bedroom where we were just working in a very reclusive way. And here it's the totally opposite being in Paris and Hollywood and with orchestra. And there was something, I felt it was a little bit nostalgic on one hand, but it's almost also the idea of saying, okay, you look at the eras in the 70s, you had on Sunset Boulevard these huge billboards with these iconic albums.

5:28And rather than taking a time machine to say, okay, I want to live in 1977, there was more desire of saying, okay, we want to take what was magic there and kind of take it and bring it in 2012 or 2013. And it feels like that's a way of turning the nostalgia or the romantic side of, oh, things were better before into something very hopeful, which is no, no, no, no. Actually, things were not better before. For so many people, it was worse. But there's actually great things that are disappearing and there's an urgency to look back. Doing Get Lucky, we were working with session musicians, but not recording them at the same time.

6:14So we had Nile Rodgers. And I remember working with each musician and I could see the excitement in the bass player and Nathan East playing. And that excitement would translate to the sound engineer, that would translate to the people in the studio, that everybody translated to the audience. And this was obviously, at that point, it's an accident. All of these things are completely accidental, but you can only witness that if there's something genuinely communicative, there's really this unlimited potential of it. Since choosing life after the robot suit of Daft Punk, it's been fascinating to see the context in which you've chosen to appear.

6:57So personally for me, the last time was at the Pompidou. That was another moment in an iconic setting. Amongst the Wolfgang Tillmann's exhibition, after 16 years not DJing, what brought you back to Beaubourg for that final moment before it closes for five years? All of this is very personal. The Centre Pompidou was really the place where I discovered art and culture. This was before internet, when I was a teenager, with Guilman, my partner in Daft Punk. I think we would go every Saturday and every Wednesday to the BPI, the Bibliotheque of Information, and we would basically surf the different alleys of the library, and going through microfilms and making Xerox copies, cut-ups and really discovering Andy Warhol, the factory, architecture, Richard Neutra, I don't know, like anything, that it was really this process of this web of culture.

8:01And that was really almost, yes, around 12, 13, 14 years old. And then a few years after, in 1992, at the sixth floor. That's really where I discovered electronic music. And there was this rave organized with a few hundred people. So there was definitely this connection of this place, which has been so important for me on so many levels as a Parisian. And when this closing happened, it made sense to do this. It reminds me of the Winston Churchill quilt. this is not the end. This is end of the beginning for the Pompidou. So I think we're so excited about what happens next. But when I interviewed Nile Rogers last year, I remember him telling me that with the immediacy of streaming services, he felt what devalued was the actual physical listening experience.

8:54And he said in the old days, you had to be where the music was. Was there an invitation from Laurent Lebon that brought you physically into that moment? What brought you back after those 16 years to that physical place? I've always been interested in the ritualistic nature of art. And it's true that a lot of the technology and distribution systems over the last 30 years have devaluated this ritualistic power and the symbolic power. I was never interested in the economical value of things, of art, rather than the symbolic value of art. And so I feel it was an opportunity here because this place is a temple, you know, and it's a temple of beauty, of culture, of thoughts, of ideas, of arts, and understanding also the relationship between society, technology, all these things that I've been interested in all these years.

9:45And it made also sense because, again, you know, Daft Punk and the robots, it was really performance art. I really, I've always thought this was just like a very elaborate, 20 years long Marina Abramovich act where, okay, we dress as robot. And at that point, you just don't want to spoil this game or this line between fiction and reality. So there was not an opportunity to be able to do this. And it's not something that I would have loved sometimes, the opportunity to have these things coexist. But this was a dispositive which required a lot of discipline and a lot of secrecy. the secrecy enhanced the mystique, but it had also some limitation on the inability to be there with people right now and to be able to communicate because it's not just about creating through opacity, you know.

10:42And this removal of the human face, when you came back to the Pompidou, there was unmasking. It started the project with a very high sense of this anonymity manifesto, which you had in the underground dance culture. You know, my favorite dance music act is from Detroit called Underground Resistance. And this was a DJ collective that would just hide their face. And it's true that there was really this idea at the beginning to go within the corporate music industry and to just like hide your face as a way to bring these ideas of electronic music and to stand against the obligation to be, okay, you're an artist, you need to show your face.

11:27So this was the first step. After the first album, it felt like, you know, we had run out of ideas of masks, you know, we'd use all these things and we said, okay, it's kind of, it's becoming boring. And that's where the idea of working with filmmaking techniques and science fiction and special effects, practical special effects came about where it was probably the main inspiration is Fritz Lang Metropolis, you know, when you have that robot. And obviously you have it in George Lucas' Star Wars with C-3PO, which is very inspired by Metropolis and Darth Vader, which is very inspired by Akira Kurosawa and Samurai movies.

12:06So what really was exciting to me during these robot years was filmmaking production. And you're almost doing this 20 year long feature film, but it's the audience which becomes the director. And there's no camera because the camera becomes the society itself and how popular culture is connecting and making that choice. You know, it's only an offer, but everything that grew after completely out of proportions with the amazing attention and unexpected success was really the choice of the audience itself, but the audience was the director. So it felt a little strange because you're not in control at that moment.

12:49You just are creating a series of situations. We're here at the Fondation Beiler in Switzerland, the heart of Art Basel. And Saturday, thousands of people, some of them undoubtedly here, came to watch you at an immersive event you created with Julian Charrière and Rampa as the finale of Art Basel Week. I know that there were no phones allowed. I did hear by word of mouth that the set list included fame by Irene Cara, anthems from Daft Punk and Chic, and 10 minutes of Eleanor Roosevelt reading. Can you please tell us a little bit more about warehouse artifacts? What we wanted to do is to put in context the Declaration of Human Rights in these very polarized times that we live right now with the principles of house music and how there was a parallel between the rave culture, the cleb culture that originated in Chicago, and how we could create this dialogue between these texts We used a recording of Eleanor Roosevelt's voice in 1948, which is reading the Declaration of Human Rights.

13:58We put this recording on a tape machine with almost a distress amplification system, and it was enclosed in a glass monolith. So we sealed this recording in this glass monolith, almost a four meters high glass monolith, about 10 days ago. And for 10 days, it was continuously rolling nonstop. You couldn't really hear the signal because the amplification was being obstructed by the glass monolith. And it was a lot of sound that we had created around mostly the drum sound, which is the TR-808 drum sound, which is basically this most single important sound in techno and electronic house music. and we took that sound, which was like, boom, and we stretched it about a thousand times and made it circulate around.

14:50It is an artifact. It is a sonic artifact, and it's also a cultural artifact. That was the part of the installation. The second part was really on Saturday where 4 ,000 people came and pretty much danced around this structure. They couldn't really hear it because it was enclosed, and at some point there was another tape machine on stage, And we were able to press play and to listen to this beautiful reading. And eventually people started to dance again. It was neither a rave, neither an art installation. It was maybe both at the same time. I'd love to move on to the stage. And dance, which is something that both of us are very passionate about, became something very prominent in your life.

15:40So I'd love to ask you where that passion from dance came from and also explore both mythologies and mirage. My father was a music producer and composer, and my mother was a ballet dancer, both classical and contemporary. And so I was really raised in the world of ballet. And this was really my life as a child. So somehow after an overdose of technology, maybe, I really felt that I wanted to go back to something that is extremely tangible and extremely physical. And there's nothing more physical and tangible and ephemeral, I feel, even in art forms than choreography and dance, because it's just in the moment.

16:26I mean, you were here at the Fondation, you can have all these masterpieces there on the walls. But if you think about Mercy Cunningham, about Pina Bosch and all the greatest choreographers, it really forces you to enjoy something that cannot be captured in the moment. And also, we're really in this fight right now between technology and virtual worlds and human beings. But it feels when you think about ballet that it's simple. You know, there's not really competition. And as a dancer, you're there and you just live through the motions of your body in the most essential, essential way. So there was this really ritualistic aspect.

17:09Mythology was the first project that I did after Daft Punk. It was for me an intention of wanting to make music and it was an experiment. I was asking myself after 30 years of playing with tools and technology, was I just a product of technology or could I be a musician without any of that technology? So this was, I feel more a test and I ended up stopping to use any machines for two years and reading orchestration. And really, I don't have a classical background from Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov and just like trying to really go in this almost retrofuturistic way of thinking, but doing things from the 70s like we had done.

17:58But here it's more like the 1770s or the 1870s. So it was a different way of retrofuturism. And when the Bordeaux Opera commissioned this mythology piece, it was really by looking at that venue, which is a 900 people venue with the 20 dancers, the 55 piece music orchestra, the 40 technicians. And I felt, OK, here I'm interested in this ritual because I feel here that it's actually much more heightened, you know, in some way, the ritualistic nature of it, rather than other ways of distributing music at a certain time that can be diluted. So this was really a combination that brought me towards that.

18:43And speaking about ritual, the Damien, Jalet and Kohenawa project Mirage was even more radical way of going in that direction because the nature of the Mirage ballet is a ritual in itself. So it's a very ritualistic aspect of these 16 dancers. And we did it initially in a workshop and it premiered in a primary forum in the south of Japan, in Fukuoka, in a theater for just 100 people. And so, you know, I've said it before, but the dafting like billions of views of numbers on YouTube or on the Internet, these billions of views on the Internet. I cannot assimilate this thing. It remains something that I cannot really apprehend.

19:28And whereas I can be here and apprehend that moment in a much more tangible way. We're talking about the physical space. We're here in this incredible Renzo piano building. And I know that one of your mentors, perhaps, Yanis Zanakis, or an influence, also was a disciple of Courboisier. And I'm curious to really think about the built environment and what discoveries you've made or what is exciting to you about architecture of today. You know, in some way I said that filmmaking is the ultimate creative form, but I think probably I am wrong. You know, I think architecture probably goes above filmmaking because architecture is probably the creative form of all art forms where there's no more limits between fiction and reality.

20:15And you've crossed it and you actually were able to put that fiction and make it a reality. We are so fortunate to be able to enter into the fictional mind of these creators and to be able to inhabit those spaces. It's hard to put it into words, you know. Again, it's interesting. My relationship to creation and my relationship to art is mostly happening at a deeper level which does not express itself through words. And that's probably why I'm not really interested in the creative usage of artificial intelligence for many reasons. But the main one probably is because it goes through a verbal expression, which is prompting.

20:59And I feel really the most interesting part of the creative process is happening not at all on an intellectual level or on an expressive level where you're actually going through a process, which is about understanding your feelings. And I feel it's the same, you know, where we're sitting here about architecture. So I like this idea when I was taking some time to answer you that I'm actually at a loss of words because it's exactly that thing that I'm trying to feel. I just had the pleasure of also speaking with Linder, whom you and I were with together in a small Kyoto nightclub listening to Richie Houghton somewhere late one night about a month ago.

21:39And Linda said that among her boxes where she creates collages, she likes to have the flowers and she likes to have the trees. And sometimes she will put in a rocket ship or an octopus image just so when she reopens the box, she manages to surprise herself. So that feeling of discovery feels like one that you are chasing or seeking. Would that be fair to say? Completely. I feel that is the number one goal of this entire process is surprise. People ask me sometimes what was with that reaction or interaction with people's expectation or with the idea of an audience. And I've always answered that I've never thought about an audience at any point of the process in the most respectful way.

22:27I think in the creative process, it's an experiment. There's this altered states from Ken Russell where you have the protagonist, which is creating all this weird experiment on himself. And I feel I've been able to do that for the last 35 years, you know. I remember when I interviewed Feral Williams for this podcast, apropos collaborators, he said, if you have all the ideas and you have all the answers, well, how boring is that? And so I wanted to ask you in terms of how you choose your collaborators. You've had some of the most magnificent collaborators across film, music, dance. You mentioned Nile Rodgers, Georgia Marauder, The Weeknd, J.R., Damien Jalet, choreographers, filmmakers, orchestras.

23:08Fred again, most recently. What makes a good collaborator? It's this unexpected encounter, you know. I think it's, I mean, it's a combination of fantasies from your childhood, you know, when we got the opportunity to work with Giorgio Moroder and with Nile Rodgers. And there's really this thing, it's like there's a one in a million chance to be able to have that interaction. And at the same time, I mean, the last five years of the series of projects I've been doing have been happening completely organically and flowing into these surprise encounters. And with not having any kind of like technology in between, almost always like face-to-face encounters as if, you know, there was not even like a post office needed or an email service needed either.

24:00So it's really a combination of both. But the surprises, you know, the ability to not knowing where this creative process will take me and not taking anything from granted, you know. That's something that AI with prompt decidedly can't do. The surprise is why we feel so smug sometimes as creative people, but the surprise is harder to reach. Yes, I think this is definitely something that AI really focuses right now on the results. On the result. It's all about the output. My creative process is absolutely not about the output. I don't decide anything. You know, I think the artists that have the idea that they're in control and I'm deciding, you know, this is my master plan.

24:46I think it's bullshit a little bit, you know, because I really think it's not the way to respect the fact that we're not in control of anything and that this feeling drives the process. And then the output is really the whole journey to maintain that process in the most spontaneous, intuitive and instinctive way. That's what I think. And the orchestral music, was that a way of removing the machine? I'm thinking of Mythologies and Mirage, or going back to the piano. What was the prompt or discovery or catalyst that drove you to the orchestral music, which was so surprising for the audience? I mean, we had worked with Daft Punk for the Tron Legacy score with orchestra, and also in Random Access Memories, there were orchestra.

25:39The very hard thing, and that's why it took a lot of time sometimes to make music, is that it's actually, I find it very hard to work with machine and put soul in the process with electronic instruments. And it takes sometimes days, months, or years, and you can't really match the delicacy and the nuance of expressivity of the human hand and the human sensibility. So what I found amazing as a producer, as an arranger with an orchestra, is that you can write an idea compositionally on one piece of sheet music and have an orchestra played, and it can be an amazing moment to do the same thing with machines can sometimes take much, much more time.

26:25At that point, I was also asking myself, who am I the advocate of? What do I want to emphasize? And it all comes down to this tension between technology and human, where at some point there was no more, for me, purpose or comfort in being in this robot avatar. I love that tension that you're currently manifesting in Paris on the Pont Neuf with some live corroborators bringing forward the spirit of Christo, who I had the honor of realizing his final project with at the Serpentine. And I remember Christo, when Hans-Holmert Goldbrist and I brought his final work to life, always felt like we couldn't extend it for a couple of months as we pleaded and begged.

27:11He said it's like a tent that goes up in the desert. You have to make the pilgrimage to go see it. And it was that ephemera of chasing the physical moment, which I feel probably connects you to Christo and bringing the Pont Neuf work back to life 40 years on. Can you take us back to Paris for the final moments of this podcast and tell us how the Pont Neuf project with yourself, with JR, that is currently on for those who can still visit it in the last couple of days. Can you tell us how the Pornhub came to life? And when was it you first saw that project in your youth? Well, going back to the Pornhub wrapped, I was 10 years old in 1985 when the Pornhub wrapped happened.

27:52And it is by far my most important memory of art as a child. And it really defined what was the, yes, the most impactful art piece I've ever seen. First, It's Not For Sale, which I thought was so pure. And then it was really the ultimate feeling of this tension between fiction and reality on an unprecedented scale, and also so minimal. And the minimalism and the radical aspect of it was so important for me. So when JR, I had worked with him on Kéroptera, with Damien Jallet, he told me about this opportunity with Vladimir, Chris's nephew, to pay homage to Point Off Wrapped and he had this idea of creating this cavern on top.

28:41He asked me for some ideas on the sound approach to the music and I told him right away, there is not an option for music here. And I told him, look, I have this idea to really wrap this structure with one synthetic sonic fabric. And what worked, I went in the big warehouse in Orly, the airport warehouse in January, on site. We had a tenth of the scale, full scale, but a tenth of the structure. And I arrived with a synthesizer equipment. I wanted to be synthetic. So I said, OK, I'm not going to record any real sound, but I'm going to use a modular synthesis technology from the 60s. You know, no computer to create the sounds.

29:22And I was just like a foley artist in front of this, you know, cavern facade, like the Georges Méliès black and white silent film and just trying sounds and created gradually, you know, from this kind of rumbling tones, low frequencies to give depth to those. these inflatable structures are very airy. So I said to Jia, we need to have this kind of to make it feel more mineral. But I remember having done some interviews before and the journalist was asking me, so when it's, how it's going to be, how it is. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know because it's not done yet. And it's not done because any of my preconceived ideas and logic and theories and process, again, they have to be confronted with the result.

30:13And if the feeling is not there, then the output needs to change. And going back to the AI, that's why AI, I feel, doesn't work in the creative process for me. Because this is, again, focused on the output and a way to bypass the creative process, where it is actually the creative process which I find the most interesting. And why would I want to bypass the moment that I'm passionate about? That's such a beautiful and human place to get to the final moment of our time together. And if I can leave you with some final questions that you can either pass or answer, I promise I will not ask you about unrealized projects because there's still decades and decades and decades for that.

30:55And so if I may end with a quick fire round of questions. What are you listening to or what are you reading? Last night I listened to the new Jeff Mills album, A Trip to Vega. Right now I'm reading this book about improvisation called Free Play by Stephen Nakmanovich, which Keith Jarrett, I was reading on the backside and Keith Jarrett loved it. He said it was the best book about improvisation. So that's what made me pick it. What sound do you never get tired of? What sound do you dislike? The sound of my alarm clock, I dislike. And then the sound I never get tired of is the voices of my family.