Cole Cuchna

This studio craftsmanship was something that Daft Punk felt was disappearing from modern music.

By the 2010s electronic music had exploded into the mainstream, an explosion Daft Punk themselves helped ignite.

But the way electronic music was being made was changing.

Physical samplers, drum machines, and synthesizers were no longer the center of the process.

Rather, production had largely moved onto laptops, with producers building entire tracks inside digital audio workstations using emulation software instruments and presets.

In other words, the computer itself had become the instrument.

And while this shift made music making more accessible, it also came with a cost.

As Guimon explained, quote, For the last few years, with this laptop-generated music around us, whether it's E-pop, EDM, or even pop music, all the genres that have been done with these computers, what was really lacking to us is the soul that a musician player can bring.

Toma added, quote, Technology has made music accessible in a philosophically interesting way, which is great.

But on the other hand, when everybody has the ability to make magic, it's like there's no more magic, unquote.

So Daft Punk set out to find that magic again.

As Tomas put it to Rolling Stone, To achieve this, they did their best to recreate the studio craftsmanship of recorded music's golden era of the 1970s.

They booked time in the same legendary studios, brought in some of the same world-class musicians, and directed live jam sessions based on sketches they had composed themselves.

Those sessions became their source material, approached with the same mindset they once applied to samples.

Only this time, the material was original and human.

In a world increasingly flattened and homogenized by technology, Random Access Memories was Daft Punk's attempt to give life back to music.

The album opener, Give Life Back to Music, operates as Random Access Memory's clear thesis statement.

But before we get too far into the details of the track, I want to take a moment to just absorb the sound of what we're hearing.

It's a quality that's a little hard to dissect without getting overly technical about studio techniques and equipment, but I want you to just listen to how warm, full, and rich everything feels.

Every instrument is crystal clear.