Thomas Bangalter breaks silence on Daft Punk's split
Thomas Bangalter, one of the founding members of Daft Punk, has revealed the real reason that the duo split up in 2021.
Speaking to the BBC in a recent interview, Bangalter explained that he and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo had overdone and worn out the robot characters.
“Daft Punk was a project that blurred the line between reality and fiction with these robot characters,” he said. “It was a very important point for me and Guy-Man[uel] to not spoil the narrative while it was happening.”
“Now the story has ended, it felt interesting to reveal part of the creative process that is very much human-based and not algorithmic of any sort," he added.
The French producer also told the BBC that he was worried about the rise of AI and explained that he wanted the relationship between humanity and technology to be “absolute”.
"It was an exploration, I would say, starting with the machines and going away from them. I love technology as a tool [but] I'm somehow terrified of the nature of the relationship between the machines and ourselves."
"My concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence go beyond its use in music creation," he explained. “I almost consider the character of the robots like a Marina Abramović performance art installation that lasted for 20 years," he says.
Daft Punk's story has been traced in a new book by Disco Pogo. The magazine's predecessor Jockey Slut published Daft Punk’s first ever interview back in 1994, their first ever magazine cover and featured them on the line-ups of many of their Bugged Out nights over the years.
The 250 page hardback book, titled ‘Daft Punk – We Were The Robots’, covers the duo's earliest days right up to their unexpected split in February 2021. The book will ship in Spring and is available to order here.
Read next: Daft Punk return with archival Todd Edwards collab 'The Writing of Fragments of Time'
