Random Access Memories by Daft Punk
Random Access Memories is the upcoming fourth studio album by French electronic music duo Daft Punk. It will be released by Daft Life under exclusive license to Columbia Records on May 17, 2013 in Australia, May 20, 2013 in the United Kingdom and on May 21, 2013 in the United States. Work started on the record concurrently with the Tron: Legacy score, without a clear plan as to what its structure would be. Shortly after Daft Punk signed with Columbia, a gradual promotional rollout began for the album including billboards, television advertising and a web series. Random Access Memories pays tribute to the late 1970s and early 80s era of music in the United States, particularly the sound of Los Angeles recordings of the period. Daft Punk recorded the album largely using live instrumentation with session musicians, and limited the use of electronics to drum machines, a modular synthesizer and vintage vocoders. The album also features collaborations with Panda Bear, Julian Casablancas, Todd Edwards, DJ Falcon, Chilly Gonzales, Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers, Paul Williams and Pharrell Williams. Critical reception to the album has generally been positive.
There is an early Daft Punk track named “Teachers” that, effectively, served as a roll call for the French duo’s influences: Paul Johnson, DJ Funk, DJ Sneak. Within the context of 1997’s <i>Homework</i>, “Teachers” presented the group as bright kids ready to absorb the lessons of those who came before them. But it also marked Daft Punk as a group with a strong, dynamic relationship to the past whose music served an almost dialogic function: They weren’t just expressing themselves, they were talking to their inspirations—a conversation that spanned countries, decades, styles and technological revolutions. So while the live-band-driven sound of 2013’s <i>Random Access Memories</i> was a curveball, it was also a logical next step.<br /> The theatricality that had always been part of their stage show and presentation found its musical outlet (“Giorgio by Moroder”, the Paul Williams feature “Touch”), and the soft-rock panache they started playing with on 2001’s <i>Discovery</i> got a fuller, more earnest treatment (“Within”, the Julian Casablancas feature “Instant Crush”, the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-The-Doobie-Brothers moves of “Fragments of Time”). The concept, as much as the album had one, was to suggest that as great as our frictionless digital world may be, there was a sense of adventurousness and connection to the spirit of the ’70s that, if not lost, had at least been subdued. “Touch” was “All You Need Is Love” for the alienation of a post-<i>Space Odyssey</i> universe; “Give Life Back to Music” wasn’t just there to set the scene, it was a command—just think of all the joy music has brought <i>you</i>. “Get Lucky” and “Lose Yourself to Dance”—spotlights both for Pharrell and the pioneering work of Chic’s Nile Rodgers—recaptured the innocence of early disco and invited their audience to do the same.<br /> There was joy in it, but there was melancholy, too: Here was a world seen through the rear-view, beautiful in part because you couldn’t quite go back to it. “As we look back at the Earth, it’s, uh, up at about 11 o’clock, about, uh, well, maybe 10 or 12 diameters,” the sampled voice of astronaut Eugene Cernan says on “Contact”. “I don't know whether that does you any good. But there's somethin’ out there.” This was the Apollo 17 mission, December 1972. It remains the last time humans have been on the moon.
