2023-04-27 10:31:57
It’s been two years since Daft Punk broke up. We wondered what they were doing with each other. Bangalter draws the first with music for a ballet by Angelin Preljocaj.
Photo caption: CHEW_Thomas Bangalter portrayed by sketching ace Stéphane Manel.
Go back a quarter of a century, to the time of Homework. On the track “Teachers”, the Dafts pay homage to their masters: Lil’ Louis, Jeff Mills, Green Velvet, Derrick Carter… The names parade and we don’t hear those of Vivaldi, Mozart, Bach or Stravinsky. Water flowed under the bridges. Since 2013 (ten years already!) and the smashing Random Access Memories, Daft Punk released almost nothing – two tracks with The Weeknd, one with Parcels. And then the duo split in 2021. Solo, Thomas Bangalter composed the soundtrack of the Climax by Gaspar Noé and produced two titles, the clumsy single “Everything Now” by Arcade Fire and the funky ditty “Superchérie” by Matthieu Chédid – bad company unworthy of him. What else has he done, besides losing his hair? It was known from friends of his that he had bought himself a splendid harp from a Dutch collection, and that he had begun to play it. The same friends said he was worried, borderline paranoid, distressed by the evolution of the record industry. Was he going to come back with a Stanley Kubrick-style bang, or sink into madness like Howard Hughes?
PURE GRACE
Last year, surprise: Angelin Preljocaj announced the creation of a new ballet, Mythologies, at the National Opera of Bordeaux. The choreographer had already collaborated with Air twenty years ago, and Nicolas Godin more recently. This time, he was teaming up squarely with the mastermind of the French Touch: Thomas Bangalter, ladies and gentlemen! For those who were not invited to his birthday, note that Bangalter has just celebrated its 48th birthday. A good age to leave aside the synthesizers and the vocoder. Having to relearn everything, the robot teamed up with composer and conductor Romain Dumas to carry out this project. Which Dumas specifies: “As we know, Thomas worked for a long time with electro-acoustics and electronics without necessarily having to ask himself questions such as the length of a breath in the woodwinds, how each register of a instrument, how it all comes together… That’s how I arrived on this project, then gradually, we found a way to move forward together so that it remains fundamentally Thomas’s piece. » In 2010, Daft Punk had taken up the challenge of the film soundtrack by tackling that of Tron: Legacy. The result had not lived up to expectations.
This project of Mythologies might leave one skeptical: were we regarding to witness a surge of acute megalomania? Let the fans be reassured: the bet, inflated, is more than successful. We bathe for an hour and a half in the universe of Tchaikovsky, nothing to do with Romanthony or Nile Rodgers, and that goes well with Bangalter. The album, classic in every sense of the word, contains moments of pure grace, such as “Danae” and especially “Treize nuits”. Obviously, the genius of electronics has managed to tame the length of a breath in the woods. Sometimes it’s only a step from Chicago house to Swan Lake.
Mythologies
(Erato/Warner Classics)
By Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld
1683432084
#Album #month #Mythologies
