It’s true: Daft Punk’s Homework and Discovery were both recorded in a bedroom
Thomas Bangalter confirmed that both albums were mixed and recorded with a JVC boombox in his bedroom.
Image: Kevin Winter / Getty
The rumours are true – Daft Punk have officially confirmed that both Homework and Discovery were recorded in a bedroom, with none other than a JVC boombox.
Homework, which landed in 1997, was the duo’s debut album, with their second LP Discovery landing post-millenium in 2001.
Rumours have always flitted about as to where these records were made, and in a new podcast, one half of the duo, Thomas Bangalter, confirmed how the famous records were crafted.
“The myth is that Homework was all in your bedroom, is that true?” asks Matt Everitt in The First Time… podcast episode.
“It’s true,” Bangalter replies. “Homework and Discovery were done in the bedroom, in the same flat as I was watching [TV show] Modern Times and we had [Stevie Wonder album] Songs in the Key of Life constantly on the turntables. This small bedroom, [and] my parents had given me this small boombox for my 11th birthday, a JVC boombox with a little graphic equaliser, and I kept this thing.”
He adds, “One day when we plugged in a few keyboards and samplers, I found that boombox and I put it on the stack of machines. And that little boombox is what we mixed and recorded both Homework and Discovery on. That was the magic one.”
Discovery is of course the album where their famous track Face To Face lies. Contatining a mighty 70 samples, fans have been on a quest to track down each one used. Producer Todd Edwards recently presented the actual floppy disk which houses all the samples in an Instagram post.
“Did you ever wonder why on Daft Punk’s Discovery album most of the samples they used for their songs were from disco and R&B, except for one song in particular, Face To Face, where they used folk music and soft rock?” said Edwards.
“That’s because most of the samples came from my sample library. The thing is, for years before, I did sample disco and R&B but I got kind of tired of it…
“The day Thomas [Bangalter] and I worked on the track, the night before I sampled up 70 samples, they came in the next day and they sampled up 70 samples. And all those samples were recorded on this zip disk.”
Listen to the full podcast with Bangalter on BBC Sounds.
