Thomas Bangalter Says Daft Punk Was Always More Than a Band
Thomas Bangalter is revisiting the border between music and visual art with unusual clarity. Since Daft Punk ended in 2021, the French musician has moved through ballet, performance, and public art projects that suggest a practice less interested in genre than in atmosphere, image, and structure.
His latest release, Mirage, arrived last week as an album of minimal electronic music created for another ballet with choreographer Damien Jalet and visual artist Kohei Nawa. It follows earlier work on Mythologies in 2022 and Chiroptera in 2023, the latter a large-scale performance project with Jalet and artist JR at the Place de l’Opera in Paris. Bangalter also contributed sound work to La Caverne du Pont Neuf, JR’s public installation in Paris, in which the city’s oldest bridge was wrapped in a faux-rock fabric as a tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The work’s opening was delayed after storm damage, and a new date has yet to be announced.
Bangalter will next appear at the Tribeca Festival on June 8 to discuss a 20th-anniversary remaster of Electroma, the Daft Punk film. Later this month, he is set to present a rave-minded installation as part of Art Basel in Switzerland.
In a conversation from his Paris studio, Bangalter traced that trajectory back to an artistic upbringing in Montmartre. His mother danced with France’s first national contemporary dance company in the late 1960s, while his father worked as a composer and producer of pop music. He also spent weekly hours at the Centre Pompidou library, where microfilms and research became, in his words, a pre-internet encyclopedia.
That background helps explain why he now describes Daft Punk’s robot helmets and gloves not simply as branding, but as a sustained performance art gesture — one that blurred fiction and reality while drawing on Pop art, Andy Warhol, and the Velvet Underground. For Bangalter, music remains the starting point. The larger interest is in forms that sit just outside fixed categories, where art and sound can still unsettle one another.
