When Daft Punk ended, the news did not arrive as a conventional announcement. There was no long explanation, no final interview, just a cryptic video, a handful of images, almost no words. Even in disappearing, the duo added one last layer to the myth.
Then Thomas Bangalter, one half of the duo, dropped off the radar, as if the man behind the mask also had to disappear for a while before stepping back into the world on different terms.
Over the past few months, that reemergence has looked nothing like a rollout, and nothing like a comeback spectacle. It has taken the form of small, almost furtive gestures that added up to a flurry of activity: a few records spun without the helmet; improvised appearances; Mirage – Ballet for 16 Dancers, his dark, ritualistic electronic score for the ballet created by Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa; and the renewed afterlife of Daft Punk’s films, from the 4K restoration of Interstella 5555 to the 20th-anniversary 4K restoration of Electroma. He turned up in Paris, for the closing of the Centre Pompidou, the landmark modern-art museum Parisians call Beaubourg, and two decades of Because Music, the label that looks after Daft Punk’s legacy; in London, alongside Fred again.. at Alexandra Palace; and, most recently, in New York on the Lot Radio, for an impromptu set. A handful of tracks, played in the spirit of what he might have done 30 years ago, but with one essential difference: This time, he says, he could do it “without being a robot anymore,” as a human being, free to interact with complete simplicity.
Maybe that is where life after the myth takes shape: in these unplanned gestures, in the movement between club music, ballet, contemporary art, electronics, and the symphonic; in this way of leaving fiction behind without disowning it, of moving from controlled image to presence, from legend to improvisation. That is where the conversation begins, in the shifting space where the former character now moves unmasked, free of assigned nostalgia, and with little desire to fit into anyone’s box.
Lately, you’ve been showing up behind the decks again, unmasked, often in unexpected settings. Did that feel like a way to reconnect with music, and with people, without the whole Daft Punk machinery around it?
I think I was trying to come back as a human being in the simplest possible way, without making a spectacle of it. With Daft Punk, hiding was an aesthetic statement, but also an ideological, political, and artistic one. I still stand by all of that. But it was fiction too. I needed to make a very simple claim to my own humanity again. Funnily enough: You hide behind a mask because you want discretion, and then, somehow, the mask creates its own mythology.
Your surprise appearance at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, without the helmet, set off a global buzz. It was your first DJ set in 16 years. What was it like to see that reaction?
I was genuinely surprised. I assumed people were mostly interested in the robots, in Daft Punk, in what all of that represented. I tend to keep my distance from that kind of media attention. Something similar had happened to me before, at Coachella, with the pyramid stage. Before that, our last show had been at the Élysée Montmartre, a Paris club, back in 1997, for crowds of about a thousand people. Ten years later, we came back with this almost sci-fi staging, and I watched an audience step into that narrative on a scale I hadn’t expected. When Daft Punk ended, I was completely at peace with the idea of being the little old man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz — a middle-aged average guy. I was ready to go back into research, into more private, underground work.
Why did that moment at the Centre Pompidou feel right, between the museum’s closing celebrations and Because Music’s twentieth anniversary?
As a Parisian, I belong to a generation for whom the Centre Pompidou was formative. As a kid, that place shaped the way I educated myself, the way I discovered the world, and later, electronic music. Taking part in that celebration felt very personal. There was also Pedro Winter, who’s been with us for a very long time and now co-runs Because Music, the label that looks after Daft Punk’s legacy. Everything made sense: Beaubourg, Because, Pedro, that shared history, and this very simple, almost accidental gesture. The audience’s reaction moved me, of course, but talking afterward with the Beaubourg staff may have struck me even more. They had gone through something powerful, deeply emotional. There was a connection there that went beyond the club, beyond music.
Another moment felt almost surreal: mixing a speech by Jacques Chirac, the former French president, speaking about culture and the Centre Pompidou, with a Daft Punk track. Hearing those two things coexist surprised even me. I remember that in 1995, when we put out a record, I felt our music was set against Chirac, against the idea of a political party co-opting our sound, something I wanted no part of. But the world has changed. Politics has fallen to a much lower level. You can listen to things differently now, combine them differently, without staying locked inside your own principles.
How do you choose the tracks you play in these kinds of sets?
I love music, but I don’t really think of myself as a DJ. I’ve listened to a lot of different things, at different moments. So I don’t really see borders between them. These days, I feel freer creatively, more willing to follow my curiosity instead of putting it off. In practice, I move from one thing to another by association. Even 30 years ago, I always played whatever I wanted. For some people, there was almost something daring about it — “You’re putting that track next to that one?” — when really it’s just about playing one song you love, then another.
You describe yourself as a music lover. What shaped the way you listen?
For a long time, music had a somewhat peripheral place in my life, like the soundtrack to whatever I was moving through. My relationship to it was fairly accidental. Over time, I learned to respect it, to recognize its unique power compared with other forms of expression. Music is nonverbal, mysterious, addictive. It has to do with repetition, with pleasure, with a kind of conditioning very different from literature or cinema, which I may have loved more. There’s something almost shamanic about music. I think I understood that gradually. It wasn’t at the center of my life, but it had magical powers I was willing to keep exploring, without going through theory.
The Velvet Underground hit me at a certain point, but there were many stages: Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix … Then one thing leads to another. You listen to the Velvet Underground, then Suicide, Alan Vega. You pull the thread. I’ve always loved the way disco, punk, New Wave, and rock could coexist without forcing you to pick a camp. I love things that are extremely niche, extremely sharp, and things that are very mainstream, all at once.
When you bring music from a ballet, or pieces from Mythologies, into a set, what happens?
I’m looking for surprise, for a break in the expected flow. When I mix John Carpenter, Sonic Youth, Chicago house, contemporary music, symphonic music, or other forms altogether, I’m drawn to that eclecticism, that sense of unpredictability. We live in a world that is increasingly programmed, increasingly algorithmic. Algorithms are very good at calculating what is most likely to come next. The idea is precisely to throw something into that continuity that doesn’t belong, to create something that escapes it. There is a freedom in surprising the situation itself, but also in surprising yourself. I’m not trying to control the unfolding of a narrative. It’s more about being both the first spectator and the actor inside an interactive movement: very spontaneous, very intuitive, fairly visceral, not theoretical, completely in the moment.
Is that unpredictability a form of resistance to artificial intelligence?
For me, it happens on a much less militant level — more instinctive, more connected to desire. I’m not saying, “Join the resistance” [smiles]. AI brings you very quickly back to the problem of language. Its interface runs on verbal prompting: You have to articulate an intention, describe an objective. My own process doesn’t work that way. It runs more on association, on intuition, on pulling a thread without always knowing where it leads. There’s something vital about moving toward the unknown — a joyful excitement, almost exhilarating. As feeling beings, in order to live in society, we tend to impose a logical structure on ourselves: on the way we make decisions, the way we build our principles. At a certain point, letting those structures come apart a little brings you back to spontaneity, to searching, to surprise, and above all, to simplicity. We’re always trying to analyze — “What’s happening? What does it mean?” But some things don’t really translate into words. They have to be lived.
When you write for ballet or contemporary dance now, how does it change your relationship to music, bodies, and images?
Writing ballet music recently was a conscious attempt to break a cycle. Making music can be a fairly solitary process. Working with other artists brings you into collaboration, but also into something more tangible, more physical. Choreography, contemporary dance, ballet — they have always been ephemeral forms. They force you into the present tense. Everything happens in the moment.
In a world where so much creation is becoming virtual, working with installations, dancers, and physical presence is a way of returning to something concrete. With Daft Punk, I was in a world full of fiction, always on the edge between fiction and reality. So much of it also became intangible: billions of views on YouTube or on platforms, which in the end are not physical, and were always very difficult to grasp.
For me, writing starts with tableaux, with visions. In the club era, I imagined an audience, of course, but that audience already belonged to the scene I had in my head. I wasn’t composing to meet some outside expectation. Even with Daft Punk, it remained a very personal projection: a scene, an energy, an almost cinematic fiction. House and techno still came with a set of rules, almost like an exercise in style, as if you were writing in verse rather than prose, or stepping onto a stage. There was a certain classicism there, a certain academicism.
At times, you want to follow the rules; at others, to destroy them. I’ve always been caught between an avant-garde impulse to explore and, artistically, an impulse to preserve: craft, skills, historical memory. I never thought those two impulses were incompatible. That balance appeals to me: following the rules, moving away from them, sometimes breaking them. It’s also why I love that range between, on one side, symphonic or neoclassical music, and on the other, drone, atonal, microtonal, noise-based music. That coexistence interests me more than any single genre.
With Mythologies, you wrote an orchestral work for ballet. What does that title mean to you? Is there one mythological figure that keeps coming back for you?
When Angelin Preljocaj asked me to work with him on a ballet, I was reading a lot of Joseph Campbell. The Hero With a Thousand Faces is one of those books I return to again and again. Campbell looks at what the world’s stories have in common, at what crosses cultures and might define a kind of universal myth. George Lucas famously drew on his work when writing Star Wars. I discovered Campbell through The Power of Myth, the PBS interview series filmed at Skywalker Ranch in California. Around that same time, I also wanted to experiment with symphonic forms. Angelin, I think, had imagined something much more electronic at first. I was working on several musical sketches; I played them for him, and they fed into this idea of mythological tableaux. That’s how we started, through a back-and-forth.
There isn’t one mythological figure that stays with me more than another. What interests me more is the thread running through all these stories, and why they still move us. I find it fascinating that a story like Star Wars can be built on this shared understanding of myth, and of what might define our humanity.
With Mirage, you return to ballet through a dark, minimal, almost ritual form of electronic music. What were you looking for in those sonic textures?
For me, music for ballet is almost like film music. I watched the images created by Damien Jalet, the Franco-Belgian choreographer, and Kohei Nawa, the Japanese visual artist, and tried to stay as close to them as I could: to score them, and to remain faithful to the impression they left. In those moments, I’m there to serve the experience. Mirage is a dark, atmospheric work, very connected to ritual, with a strange stretching of time. It begins with an arid, almost postapocalyptic vision of the world, as if everything had come to a halt. Then you move gradually into a shimmering, hypnotic, glittering metamorphosis, shot through with shifting states and a great deal of abstraction.
What I was trying to do, in a sensory way, was to create texture, right on the edge between the electronic and the acoustic: sounds where you can’t quite tell how they were generated, or where they come from. As if you could almost picture instruments that don’t exist. I wanted to go back into electronic sound and ask whether there was still something to feel, to create, to modulate differently, without that sense of “I’ve heard this before.” There’s something hypnotic and ritualistic in it, something that can become almost shamanic, almost therapeutic — like a sound bath.
What’s coming next for you?
I’m working with the Swiss artist Julian Charrière and Rampa on an installation we’ll present at Art Basel later this month.
Your path often seems to move between worlds that aren’t supposed to sit together: electronic music, ballet, classical music, contemporary art, but also hip-hop, like your collaboration with 113, a landmark French rap group. Does that idea of circulation feel true to you?
Yes, totally, and that means a lot to me. Take Mythologies: Today, a platform might tell you, “You listened to that, you might also like Justice, or Prokofiev.” Maybe there’s a way to hack the algorithm constructively, to create virtual synaptic connections that don’t quite exist yet.
For established artists who are able to do that, there may be a kind of responsibility. Emerging artists can probably open those passages too, but it’s much harder. We’re in a kind of sorcerer’s-apprentice situation now, a Pandora’s box, where even the developers of streaming apps no longer really control how the algorithms make their choices. And yet there is a possibility there: opening things up, widening the categories. I deeply admire artists who keep exploring, who keep moving toward other spaces. They bring listeners along into that discovery, into that expansion of the limits the algorithms, or sometimes the audience, seem to impose. It’s a way of saying, “We can take these barriers down together and explore something else.” It comes back to the Lot Radio set. Same idea. As if jazz musicians only listened to jazz, as if there had to be a wall between what you make and what you listen to. That openness has always fascinated and excited me in the act of creating. I’m always on the lookout for art forms I don’t know.
You’ve said you like the idea of being a beginner. What are you still looking to discover?
What’s interesting about being a beginner is that you don’t know yet. I’m one of those people who believe that the further you go in life, the less you understand, and the less you know. I have fewer and fewer certainties. I’m looking for surprise, for the unknown. I’m happy not knowing what comes next. I’m lucky not to have a bucket list, with goals laid out in advance. What I do less and less is put off the things that interest me. I’m more in a mode of action: doing it. But discovery interests me more than learning. The idea of being a beginner isn’t only about learning, because learning already places something on a timeline. It’s almost a state: being an amateur.
In the sense of someone who loves?
Yes. There’s wonder in it, and there’s the word “amateur” itself. In French, at least, it comes from the Latin root for “to love.”
Do you now have the luxury of moving toward freer, quieter, harder-to-classify forms?
It’s also the luxury of a bohemian life. As an artist, being able to do what you want to do, not having your path dictated by outside decisions, whether you’re broke or privileged, is, I hope, something one can still aspire to. In a world so fixated on results, on output, there’s something precious about trusting your instinct more, staying faithful to your ideas, aligning your actions with what you’re really after. You see more and more people reinventing themselves, changing their lives.
It’s more accepted than it was 40 years ago, when it might have been seen as some misunderstood rejection of the neoliberal, capitalist system. For artists, paradoxically, it can sometimes be harder, because they remain caught inside systems. You see it with music-distribution platforms, or with what’s happening in film. I know how fortunate this position is. But I feel I haven’t lost control of my freedom, or of what still interests me.
You helped push the French Touch, that wave of French electronic music that took over the world in the late Nineties, onto the international stage. Does the energy of that era — labels, clubs, the underground colliding with pop — still exist in some other form today?
Back in the Daft Punk days, with Guy-Manuel, we were perhaps more inward-looking, inside a very private, very secret collaborative process. That story also belonged to a moment when a scene was emerging. I started Daft Punk when I was 18. We were young, part of a movement, part of a kind of creative emulation. I’ve always found it hard to get the distance you would need to study all of that as a system, the way a journalist might.
I’m 51 now. I have my own projects, but I also collaborate with choreographers, musicians, directors. Obviously, I’m no longer in the same scenes, or the same dynamics. I feel like I’m carrying on a certain movement, while now working among very multidisciplinary artists, people experimenting at the edges of forms. Mirage, for instance, is a ballet with a visual artist and a choreographer, but also a work on the border between installation art, choreography, living sculpture, almost a kind of magic. Moving outside the usual codes has become a path of exploration. It brings me back to that little Lot Radio form — I love those community web radios — that asked, “What kind of set is this?” There were 50 genres: ambient, New Age, experimental, footwork, techno…
And what did you check?
I had no idea. I could have checked “soundtrack,” because it was simply the soundtrack to my day. But instead I asked, “Do we really have to check a box?”
[He smiles.]
Alma Rota is publisher and chief digital editor at Rolling Stone France.
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