Thomas Bangalter, one half of influential electro duo Daft Punk recently sat down with Billboard. In the interview he had a few choice words for EDM producers of the day and explained why you won't find any samples on their new album Random Access Memories.
Bangalter claims that he and bandmate Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo took a long hard look at the sampling culture that has been built up since the 80s.
"What is the magic in samples?" Bangalter asked. "Why for the last 20 years have producers and musicians been extracting these little snippets of audio from vinyl records? What kind of magic did it contain?"
They first considered the actual musical element of the samples, and found that answer to be lacking.
"Because harmonically the samples are just an F minor or a G flat, something not so special. It occurred to us it's probably a collection of so many different parameters; of amazing performances, the studio, the place it was recorded, the performers, the craft, the hardware, recording engineers, mixing engineers, the whole production process of these records that took a lot of effort and time to make back then."
Bangalter said he soon realized that the magic lay in the hard work and stellar performances that went into these recordings.
"It was not an easy task, but took a certain craftsmanship somehow cultivated at the time."
This was what intrigued Bangalter to experiment and move away from samples.
"We really felt that the computers are not really music instruments, and we were not able to express ourselves using a laptop. We tried, but were not successful."
Later in the interview, Bangalter chastises EDM producers for not experimenting themselves.
"I think they might be missing the tools," he says. "Now you can create very successful records on a laptop with very little money; what would prevent us from experimenting?... more established artists don't do it."
The whole interview is really worth a read. Here's a link again unless you missed the one at the top.
Random Access Memories drops May 21.
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