Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

We got some news:

Confirmed details about Daft Punk’s forthcoming fourth album are few and far between, although producer/Chic co-founder Nile Rodgers recently hinted that it would be out in the coming months. Singer/songwriter/ASCAP president Paul Williams, veteran bassist Nathan East, Feist collaborator Chilly Gonzales and legendary disco producer Giorgio Moroder (via a spoken monologue) are among others who have reportedly collaborated with the duo over the past couple of years, although whether and what form their contributions to the album might take is unclear.

Also, they've signed with Columbia.

well they've been disappointing me* for 12 years now, so i'm not holding out much hope, but hey, they could still surprise me.

*i never did get to see the live spectacle that gave us alive so grain of salt.

Why wait?

This is playing Minneapolis soon

http://www.daftpunkd.com/?m=1

they've said "expect big news in the coming months" for like 18 months now

Paul Williams?!

Williams said, "I have written songs for Daft Punk. This material will appear on their new album, coming maybe June."
http://www.clashmusic.com/news/daft-punk-working-with-paul-williams

blows my mind this. the guy that wrote Ordinary Dream working with the guys that wrote Digital Love.

didn't DJ Sneak write "Digital Love"?

perhaps it's indicative of their proper place in the music world today but I can't help but see "Dad Punk" in this thread's title

dads r cool too

My favorite Paul Williams jam:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_wFEB4Oxlo

Your mama
Soon will be having another son.
Your mama
Promises something to everyone

I am really really excited about the Paul Williams thing - even if they just vocoder "Rainbow Connection".

With people like Paul Williams and Gonzales involved I keep expecting this album to end up sounding like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=Q6dQakD9qOA

http://i.imgur.com/88oZMBA.jpg

new image on their homepage. the hype cycle begins

oh yeah

Unless they end up messing up big time, I expect this album to be huge. Though, that could be wishful thinking on my behalf.

Yeah, I'm not sure about it, tbh.

Oh it'll be huge but then is turning out to be a bit of a year for ridiculous blockbuster comebacks. Not sure it'll be any good. Does anyone listen to Human After All regularly any more?

it'll definitely be a huge event but I can't imagine it being any good!

lol not sure why i continued with that post

anyway I don't listen to any DP outside of Alive 2007 any more. their full length albums always really bummed me out. Discovery is pretty good I guess.

http://ggeeoorrgg.net/wp-content/themes/tumblelog/images/i_want_to.jpg

I think I'm the only one on earth but I like their TRON ost !

The people they're working with suggest an avenue for it that could yield something good, like a kind of back to roots disco/pop record (apart from Panda Bear but that's a v old rumour.)

scared by the collabs rumors (esp Panda bear) but I am ready to believe

i'd like to see an ian brown or a richard ashcroft involved. or perhaps a really old school rap figure, you know, from before rap became about bitches and hos.

MC Miker G?

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbamz6y7SG1r5dalro1_1280.jpg

No Hope Sandoval no credibility.

...or Beth Orton?

When electronic musicians release albums with several big-name guest stars, the results tend to be pretty meh, right? Psyence Fiction, Fat of the Land, Saturnz Return, etc... Seems this stuff is always less than the sum of its parts, or has someone actually managed to pull it off with great results?

That said, I would by a Daft Punk/MC Miker G collab single in an eyeblink.

Another collab I would love to hear is between Thomas Bangalter and his dad, it's weird that this hasn't already happened? Daniel Bangalter/Vangarde has written and produced many awesome disco tunes that are better than any Daft Punk track.

That may well be true but I just have a reflex cringe at the idea of any musician collaborating with their dad.

But there are many examples of this producing great records! Frank & Nancy Sinatra, Serge & Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Staple Singers, etc...

would his dad wear a helmet ?

I think I'm the only one on earth but I like their TRON ost !

I hope this is isn't the Daft Punk album Gotham wants,

but the Daft Punk album Gotham needs.

(quietly repping for Contino Sessions as a good album w'guest vocalists)

^ good one

the new DJ Koze is the collab-heavy dance album it's ok to like

((has it leaked))

???

the koze...

yup

When electronic musicians release albums with several big-name guest stars, the results tend to be pretty meh, right? Psyence Fiction, Fat of the Land, Saturnz Return, etc... Seems this stuff is always less than the sum of its parts, or has someone actually managed to pull it off with great results?

Basement Jaxx's Kish Kash?

Ha, excellent point. I'm not sure Daft are close enough to their prime to give us a Kish Kash at this point, but we'll see.

http://pitchfork.com/news/49754-daft-punk-air-mysterious-advertisement-during-saturday-night-live/

sounds exactly how i'd expect a Daft Punk/Nile Rodgers collaboration to sound
http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxakggLCkn1ql1xs6o1_500.gif

"let the games begin"

Sounds promising to me, once they stay towards disco/pop and away from blurping techno then I trust them.

goddamn that sounds like nile fucking rogers to me.

Yeah, Contact and Motherboard are good in themselves but they can feel like interludes/fillers/surplus in context.

Contact is like a Mogwai 2000-style post-rock builder. It doesn't really fit in with the rest of the album, so I can see why they tacked it on the end. Motherboard is a contemplative interlude that also gives me early-2000s chillout vibes, or like something off of 10,000Hz. I do like it though, it's really lush.

Trying to rework the tracklist hammers-home how long a lot of these songs are, and how much more I'd love this album if they'd been trimmed down to about 3-4 mins each. Both the above tracks would fit nicely if they were much shorter.

I think "Lose Yourself To Dance" is a good song ("GUITAR!"), but does it need to be 6 minutes long? By the time the robot voices start singing "Come on, come on, come on, come on", it feels less like they're encouraging me than imploring me to dance. "Everybody's dancing on the floor", no everybody's got tired and gone to the bar.

More positively, it reveals just how diverse the album is - yes, there's the much-mooted post-disco/funk thing, but there's a huge amount of other influences from post-rock to jazz to chill-out to electro to musicals to prog etc. The only problem is that it tries to pull the same tricks twice. There are a lot of "twins" here: Game of Love/Within; Instant Crush/Doin' It Right; Motherboard/Beyond; Give Life Back To Music/Get Lucky etc...

I think fondly toward this album but haven't played it since 2014: would probably enhance the fondness more by listening to a supercut than the whole thing

Okay, after a bit of thought and as per candyman's suggestion, i've culled "Contact" and ended on "Get Lucky", ending the album on an upbeat note and implying that the music will carry on all night. Also means you don't have to skip it if you're ABSOLUTELY TIRED OF IT. Also means the album comes in at 55 mins which is ideal album length in my book.

Touch has to be right before Get Lucky imo because the last quiet piano chord on Touch flows into the Bmin7 at the start of Get Lucky

who let the nerdlinger in

i love "contact," but tbh it's been a long long time since i've listened to this front-to-back, and i hardly revisit anything beyond "giorgio by moroder"

Touch is clearly the centrepiece and also makes a lot of sense as track 1 of the third vinyl disc (and when sequencing I expect they had vinyl most in mind).

third vinyl disc lol I mean second

oh right, i remember loving the deliberate cheesiness of "the game of love" and "within."

Both the instrumentals and Giorgio follow the same structure and seem to have only one destination in mind,a big noisy, screech blowout.

I'll throw this in here:

Daft Punk was both a revelation in their own right and a gateway to so much music that shaped me.

Here's a mix from 2013 that relaunched Musicophilia after a hiatus, in tribute to their 'Random Access Memories,' of music that might well have shaped them:https://t.co/3xeLBPjztS pic.twitter.com/1DhWvRwIK8

— Musicophilia (@musicophiliamix) February 22, 2021

Probably like this mix better than 'Random Access Memories,' but I still like the album.

i love how somebody hears mogwai on "contact" when what I hear is a launching rocketship piloted by Omar Hakim going bugshit all over the kit…

For damn sure.

Contact would have been an amazing live encore.

Need to find the stuff about the drum gate. This album was an issue of tape op.

Kind of sad they never did an Alive 2017 tour because it would have probably redeemed some of the weaker moments in this album. Also if this is really the end it would’ve been a nice wrap.

Did they play this album out live much? It would definitely have been a great thing for a live context

their only performance supporting it was at the grammys

i got to see moroder behind it, so i'll be grateful for that

Pharell's vocal on Lose Yourself to Dance is pretty bad. But beyond the sounds of his voice, the grammar grates horribly for me:

"I know you don't get a chance to take a break this often"

I don't feel there are any circumstances that would lead to one human uttering that sentence verbatim to another human.

"That often" or "too often" would make so much more sense...

Furthermore: the guitar does pretty much the same thing throughout the track, so it sounds silly when he calls out "Guitar!" and it just carries on doing what it was doing.

I anticipated this album like crazy, enjoyed elements of it when it came out, but now it is firmly my least favourite Daft Punk album.

I also hate the album cover. This logo from the promotional videos would have been 1000x better:

https://i.imgur.com/4KZONGd.jpg

I always heard it as "or something" rather than "this often", not that that makes the lyric any better.

DP aren't exactly known for their perfect grammatical flourishes ("We're up all night for good fun", "The kind of feeling I've waited so long").

It's acceptable and kind of amusing when sung by a gallic robot, but not so much when Pharrell does it

Agree on Pharrell’s vocal on that one being pretty lackluster, sucks because the instrumental is great.

I once heard an edit that cutted out his vocals and just left the vocoder “robot voice” and it improved the song greatly imho.

Also agree on the album cover. Always irked me that they decided to break the tradition of having the logo only as the album cover.

I like the boxset edition with only the title better. Hell, I even like the fan edits that parody Thriller better:

https://imgur.com/gallery/FkNA0yF

how has the term "new jersey" never once been used itt

This first came out just after I was made redundant, and it genuinely "helped me through a difficult time" - I remember thinking of it as referencing the past to offer up a prayer for the future. I'd never been much invested in DP as an album act before, so didn't have any weight of expectation, and was soothed/invigorated/intoxicated by what I experienced as a unique sound-world.

I ended up playing it too often, and got to the point where I no longer got anything from it. So when I read some of the recent criticisms upthread, I wondered whether I'd been over-investing in what had turned out to be a weak piece of work.

Seeing that the vinyl is now worth a decent amount on Discogs, I listed it for sale a couple of days ago, then gave it a farewell play... only to find that it had almost completely renewed itself, and that what had worked as a life-beyond-redundancy soundtrack now worked as a life-beyond-lockdown soundtrack. Now as then, there's something deeply reassuring at its core. None of the songs felt too long or too repetitive (although I've certainly sometimes felt that with some of their all-electronic work), and I luxuriated in its textures. "Touch" into "Get Lucky" still felt like the fulcrum of the whole set, and the positioning of those two tracks on Side Three still felt just right.

Halfway through Side Four, the record sold. If it hadn't, I might have withdrawn the sales listing.

Daft Punk reveals tenth anniversary edition of Random Access Memories with unreleased materialhttps://t.co/wLoXkPxDAn

— Resident Advisor (@residentadvisor) February 22, 2023

...includes nine unreleased tracks totaling 35 minutes. Among the bonus material are alternate versions of "Get Lucky," "Lose Yourself To Dance" and "Give Life Back To Music," unfinished demos and other behind-the-scenes recordings. There's also the 2021 version of "Touch" used in the duo's farewell video.

01. Give Life Back To Music
02. The Game Of Love
03. Giorgio By Moroder
04. Within
05. Instant Crush
06. Lose Yourself To Dance
07. Touch
08. Get Lucky
09. Beyond
10. Motherboard
11. Fragments of Time
12. Doin' it right
13. Contact
14. Horizon (Japan CD)
15. GLBTM (Studio Outtakes)
16. Infinity Repeating (2013 Demo)
17. GL (Early Take)
18. Prime (2012 Unfinished)
19. LYTD (Vocoder Tests)
20. The Writing of Fragments Of Time
21. Touch (2021 Epilogue)

Columbia Records will release Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition) on May 12th, 2023.

10 years? Jfc I'm old

Wait til you find out how old Homework is this year

Homework does feel like a long time ago tho, RAM feels like about 3 years back

A song called Vocoder Tests by Daft Punk excites me.

GLBTM (studio outtakes) out today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiZfLvLU5Jc

oh, and this was out a Month ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYKekR6661o

A song called Vocoder Tests by Daft Punk excites me.

― Psychocandy Apple Grey (Pyschocandles)

It’s not a song. It’s literal vocoder tests for “lose yourself to dance”

why the hell aren't those strings on the actual "Give Life Back To Music"

They are released a "drumless" version of this album. Seems pointless to me, but maybe the drums were a late addition to the album? might as well just put up all the mixing tracks and see what people can do.

Drumless and no-vocals would be interesting

someone's got a contractual obligation to fulfill with Columbia!!!

Discovery (sample less edition) coming up

This idea is wack tbh.

Random Access Memories (4’33” mix)

Within version is out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLa3JlGANuU

^ tbf, that's a pretty great version

I'm weirdly and unexpectedly really digging this version. Sounds like the best produced muzak ever, highlighting stuff i'd never noticed on the original. A bit of an odd flex but nails what it's meant to achieve - making people listen to the album with fresh ears

As I said upthread, if they took the vocals out too, that would be even better

"We took all the music out." "Ah...excellence."

Also most of the music

I also like this version more than I expected to, but I also wasn't feeling especially cynical about it to begin with

Unsurprisingly the uptempo stuff doesn't work that well - Lose Yourself to Dance is agonizingly long and dull - but the maudlin stuff at the beginning sounds really nice, in a 1986 aging yuppie kinda way