Panda Bear: Daft Punk Make Old Sound New
Animal Collective‘s Panda Bear is among the many collaborators who worked on Daft Punk‘s new album, Random Access Memories, and the multi-intrumentalist found special inspiration from the way the electronic music giants sought to join old sounds with new by recording live instrumentation. “Instead of sampling an old piece of music, it was like recording things in an old way to make something that kind of sounds like it was sampling something old, but which in turn kind of makes it sound new,” Panda Bear said in the latest entry in Intel and Vice’s Creators Project series on Random Access Memories.
Panda Bear was intrigued by the combination of sample-inspired clips and live instrumentation. “It’s very repetitive, like a sample or a short piece of sound, but it’s also got these little sonic details that come from the live performance when you’re playing an instrument,” he said. “It’s kind of this weird combination of machine-like and robotic, but also has these imperfections to it.”
Daft Punk Reveal Secrets of New Album – Exclusive
After getting turned down by the French dance duo for both an Animal Collective remix and a remix for his solo album, Panda Bear was eventually invited by Daft Punk about a year and a half later to meet up in Paris for a three-day session. At the last moment, they found something they all liked and went with it.
Panda Bear also described the first time he heard Daft Punk and his personal relationship with the band. “I saw the ‘Around the World’ video,” he said of discovering the group. “I sort of had just gotten wind of electronic music and was hearing a lot of stuff I had never heard before.”
Random Access Memories is due out May 21st. Daft Punk last week released the first single, “Get Lucky.”