As you already probably know, Daft Punk are getting ready to drop their next opus, Random Access Memories. And while we’ve heard more from the collaborators on the album than from the French producers, the duo sat down with Rolling Stone for a rare interview to talk RAM and much, much more. This includes the announcement that they have worked on a pair of tracks with Kanye West and here’s how it was described:
“At their Paris studio, they laid down a combination of live and programmed drums while Kanye worked out rough vocals on the fly. “It was very raw: he was rapping – kind of screaming primally, actually,” Thomas [Bangalter] says. “Kanye doesn’t give a fuck,” Guy-Manuel [de Homem-Christo] adds. “He’s a good friend.” Director (and longtime Daft Punk compatriot) Michel Gondry says that Kanye recently played him “two songs” that sprang from the session. “One of them, I told him it sounded solid and powerful – I envisioned a cube when I heard it,” Gondry says. “He told me, Chris Cunningham’s already directing the video!”
Oh … man. OK, I’m going to try and hold my excitement in, if only because I’m equally enthralled by what they had to say about RAM, which they describe as being inspired by the ’70s and ’80s.
“We wanted to do what we used to do with machines and samplers,” Thomas explains, “but with people.” Except for a snippet of “an Australian rock record” that opens the final track, “Contact,” Daft Punk foreswore samples entirely, and they limited the role of drum machines to just two of the album’s thirteen tracks. The only electronics come in the form of a massive, custom-built modular synthesizer that Daft Punk played live on the album … and an arsenal of vintage vocoders on which they manually manipulated factors like pitch, vibrato and legato.
You can read the full article at Rolling Stone and watch a fan-shot clip of their upcoming “Get Lucky” video below. It features Pharrell and Nile Rodgers and it sounds awesome. [via]