The scene takes place in January 1993 in a duplex on Rue Junot, in Montmartre. It is an institution for teens and symbolizes the liberation that carries a musical revolution. In the role of father, Daniel Vanguard, variety producer of Sheila and Ringo or Joe Dassin, but also of disco and West Indian music. The son is Thomas Bangalter, the future Daft Bank. Thomas had his bedroom downstairs. says the father. Being a neighbour, I had sequestered him shot in the wall before he was born, in 1975, for composing music there. When I get home I realize someone touched the settings. It’s a bad moment between us, but I put myself in his shoes. I gave him 8,000 francs for his birthday—for others, it would have been a car or a motorbike—so that he could buy equipment. »
With the money, the son for his eighteenth birthday acquires a Roland Juno-106 synthesizer and, above all, an Akai S01 sampler. It was completed with a father donated Minimoog keyboard, sequencer, controller and compressor. Methodically, the trainee gets used to reading each note in its entirety. Then he connects all the equipment, placed on the trestles, to the ghetto cannon, these huge radio cassettes of their size and sonic power. From then on, his room will be a studio.
The addition of the sampler radically changes the practice of Thomas Bangalter and his friend Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. This generalized tool in rap allows for the possibility of “sampling”, i.e. using pre-existing sound snippets of musical creation, and turning them into a quote and poster verb. in his book a sample! The origins of hip hop music (The Word and the Rest, 2018), Brice Micklet chose New York hip-hop producer DJ Premier, popular in the early 1990s “for his knowledge of chopping and his ability to turn a very short sample into a well-researched episode”. The division is intended to make the loan unrecognizable – thus evading potential legal action.
Daft Punk will excel at this fun activity. But without being locked into it. “From the moment we used sampling, for many it meant that we weren’t composers, we didn’t know how to write music, that we were just DJs with turntables.”Comments by Thomas Bangalter today. But when you see Steve Reich’s work with tapes and samples…” Referring to this American beacon of contemporary music, pioneer of the simple and repetitive stream, is no small feat. Bangalter derives this conviction from this: “Jay Manuel and I have been composers from the very beginning, with more or less complex forms and styles.”
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