Thomas Bangalter on Daft Punk split: “The last thing I would want to be, in 2023, is a robot”
“The line between humanity and technology should remain absolute”
Image: Daniel Boczarski/Redferns
Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter has explained the reasons behind the Daft Punk split with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.
In an interview with the BBC, one-half of the former Daft Punk revealed the French duo’s creative process, concluding that it doesn’t translate to 2023.
“The line between humanity and technology should remain absolute,” says Bangalter. “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.
“Daft Punk was a project that blurred the line between reality and fiction with these robot characters. It was a very important point for me and Guy-Man[uel] to not spoil the narrative while it was happening.”
He continues by explaining how new technologies blur that line even further: “My concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence go beyond its use in music creation,” he says in the interview.
“We tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology.”
“As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot.”
Despite this, producer Todd Edwards says we shouldn’t “count out” a Daft Punk reunion.
When asked about the potential for the French duo to come back together on the Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music 1, Edwards told Lowe, “I wouldn’t count it out… You don’t know what’s going to happen five years from now. They might decide we’re going to put on a tour, or maybe they get a stroke of… You don’t know, maybe the time away will bring them back together.”
However, after Bangalter’s discomfort with AI and robots, perhaps a reunion in robot-form isn’t looking so certain.
