Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

lol @ For a man who has spent 12 years pretending to be a robot, he takes a remarkably dim view of digital music.

Great interview Dorian! Stands out compared to the loads of interview I read already!

Yep, it's a good read. Steer clear of the comments though.

I keep hallucinating weird little quotes of familiar music inside the interstices of the new Daft Punk album

for example, the bassline / main melody on "Beyond" sounds uncannily like "I Can't Forget" by Michael McDonald

and there's a little phrase/riff in "Instant Crush" that is eerily like a fragment of "Layla" by Eric Clapton

am I just hearing things, or is this part of the RAM effect?

You're not alone on that one!

The opening of the album makes me go "She's an easy lover!", and in most of the songs there are these musical quotes. I don't mind though, I think it's great that an album with original music can remind me of so many things. So many different tunes, too.

yeah, it seems totally consistent with their intended nostalgia-on-shuffle aesthetic

wish the "weird" parts were weirder and longer though- there's these tasty sparkly drippy efx-heavy concrete moments at the start of "Touch" and in the middle of "Motherboard" that could be extended / pushed further.

Personally, I love the deliberate trolling effect of "Touch"'s Broadway vibe (reminds me of the Dracula puppet theater musical at the end of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall", honestly) and the nastiness of "Fragments of Time"- it contributes to the decadent/overripe/lavish feeling

when Panda Bear sings "If you lose your way tonight, that’s how you know the magics right" all I can think of is "Rudolph with your nose so bright...

the nastiness of 'Fragments of Time'??

(While I don't know what you mean by that, it is with 'Fragments of Time' that I most recognise what LBI is takling about - the subtle microcutting that comes in makes it sound like a bunch of soft & yacht rock classics torn up, thrown around, and pulled back together. And my accidental mental mashups keep pulling me in different directions.)

Has the microsample of "Fragments of Time" been ID'd? This is probably too obvious but I keep hearing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CIKNOiajU4

great interview/history, DL

reminds me of the Dracula puppet theater musical at the end of "Forgetting Sarah Marshall", honestly
― the tune was space, Sunday, 19 May 2013 18:26 (2 hours ago) Permalink

I think of this whenever I hear scott walker

re: Fragments of Time, by "nastiness" i meant that it produces a queasy sensation of funkiness-meets-anachronistic-lurching-back-to-what-just-might-still-be-"bad"-music, a kind of historical panic feeling ala the hapless Simpsons alterna-teen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2QrWzsfghA

where pleasure has a whiff of paranoia and disgust already built-in

or what Elizabeth Freeman called "historical drag"

ah right. I definitely have that with 'Touch'. Having recently felt that I'd lost the sense of what 'cheesy' etc can even mean in a musical context it was nice to have that bracing encounter.

One thing I found interesting from DL's piece, which was probably mentioned elsewhere that I'd missed, was that RAM was self-financed and by implication Columbia was dealing with a take-it-or-leave-it finished product. Doubtless there's more to it but that seems to be key.

I also appreciate how they're not bothering with a tour.

Well noted, and both things deserve to be mentioned on this thread, Ned.

I think I know what Dr3w means, and I have that, just like Merdeyeux, esp. with 'Touch'. But not for it could conjure a feeling of it being "cheesy" (the meaning of that phrase in itself being a "man I don't even know anymore" thing for me), but rather that it brings to mind music, or musical styles I often times dislike (or loathe), like Disney music, or musicals. Yet they spin it in such a way that I overcome that when listening to it, and it becomes a new entity of its own.

"wish the "weird" parts were weirder and longer though"

yes, what this guy says!

i am super curious how much this PR blitz pays off in terms of sales. it's one thing if they're touring cause that's a lot of money to be made but if the bottom line is album sales I wonder what the trade off was in terms of marketing/publicity costs and the number of records sold.

i don't think they committed that much? a few SNL ads, screentime at coachella

seems really efficient actually

i wonder

yeah but the cost in helmet polish alone

marketing costs probably recouped in the itunes exclusive alone

yeah, they probably did a lot of in kind trade; daft punk name carries weight
just wondering who is gonna take a page from this book going forward
kanye already projecting his head on buildings; don't want to see where this arms race ends
http://www.chartattack.com/features/2012/09/13/9-bizarre-artist-merch-items-2/

itunes just delivered my pre-order. sounds a bit clearer than the 320 cd (?) rip.

apparently it's "mastered for itunes", which sounded ominous, but seems to just means the mastering engineer could preview how what they delivered to apple would end up sounding? http://images.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/docs/mastered_for_itunes.pdf

℗ 2013 Daft Life Limited under exclusive license to Columbia Records, a Division of Sony Music Entertainment

All these interviews are making me think of them as Jay and Silent Bob

or penn and teller?

this album (AND the sequencing) is really growing on me.

every damn time I play "Within" I hear "Against All Odds (Take a Look At Me Now)."

Well that was humiliating...thought I'd physically buy an album on its day of release for the first time in an age and realised that there wasn't a wrecka store in about a 10 mile radius...so resorted to going to my local Sainsbury (Sainsbury!!!) to purchase it (I wonder if they do a 'value' version of it)...had a an illuminating conversation with the cashier about the sonic lushness of it and the new Kurt Vile album and then he told me there was a 'special' on all Asparagus...Yeezus wept...

lol, did you buy any asparagus?

Asparagus isn't really what it was in 1997, now it's like Disneyfied asparagus or something. No one who really likes vegetables would even bother with it now.

Has this been posted here yet? http://www.peterserafinowicz.com/blog/mark-e-smith-vs-daft-punk/

haha matt

for real tho, feel like samphire is the headz choice these days

yes xp. can someone start a serafinowicz thread to keep his stuff there? : (

Headed for a US #1.

http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2013/05/random-access-moroder/

sfj: "I replay parts of “Random Access Memories” repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I’ve ever heard."

http://newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2013/05/27/130527crmu_music_frerejones

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18028-daft-punk-random-access-memories/

Am I the only one who's gone from thinking SFJ was a fantastic writer to not really caring what he says about anything anymore?

I generally don't either but he's mostly otm.

in that piece

So Random Access Memories got the exact same Pitchfork score as Kaputt did, which was also reviewed by Mark Richardson. Coincidence? Probably.

had a an illuminating conversation with the cashier about the sonic lushness of it and the new Kurt Vile album

― The Pastiche Liberation Front (sonnyboy), Monday, May 20, 2013 2:57 AM (4 hours ago)

lol, i bought a vinyl copy of the new KV yesterday and am currently listening to it for the first time*. my first thought was "this is at least as good a comparison point for random access memories as kaputt."

* an excellent album, btw, don't know why i put it off for so long

Haven't read the review, but Mark is an excellent writer. Not surprised that he reviewed it, because if anyone can make a strong case for a divisive album it's him. Wouldn't be surprised if the same though was behind the Destroyer review.

Like, if I saw whatever number grade the review got, and it was written by Ian Cohen, I wouldn't bother. But with Mark's name attached, I'm going to give it a read.

that is their highest rating for a Daft Punk studio album by a good margin

The score comes with the preceding cover-story as a package-deal.

In 2007, Kanye West’s single “Stronger” used a sample from the song, and helped nudge hip-hop toward the sounds of the club.

why the fuck do ppl say stupid shit like this

I increasingly don't understand SFJ's approach of describing bit by bit how a track proceeds. Ellen Willis was explaining pop to NYer readers over 40 years ago and she didn't feel obliged to do that. Just get to the big picture argument. It feels here that he's describing tracks in detail in lieu of getting off the fence and saying if he likes them or not. He makes some elegant points along the way but if I were a NYer reader who wasn't particularly pop-savvy I'd have no idea whether to check out the record.

Also smh that he singles out Giorgio By Moroder as a dud. I don't think I've ever recovered my respect for his taste since he said Let England Shake was PJ Harvey's worst album.

The score comes with the preceding cover-story as a package-deal.

― Evan, Monday, May 20, 2013 10:09 AM (12 minutes ago)

daft punk truth now!