(BangalterвЂ™s father, a Seventies-era disco artist and producer who recorded as Daniel Vangarde, is Jewish, but the Bangalter household was not religious.) When BangВalter is feeling relaxed, his eyes twinkle and his body language grows demonstratively warm: HeвЂ™ll lean in close, nudge you heartily to emphasize a point. He has a long, bearded face and curly brown hair grown into a modest Jewfro.

Tall and bony, BangВalter, 38, is wearing a gray sweater and skinny jeans with a hole in the knee big enough to toss a tennis ball through. Pharrell Williams on Daft Punk: вЂThe Robots Are LeadingвЂ™ вЂњThatвЂ™s not what artists are supposed to do.вЂќ

вЂњElectronic music right now is in its comfort zone, and itвЂ™s not moving one inch,вЂќ BangВalter says. Another act in a similar position might have coasted вЂ“ selling out bigger and bigger venues, pumping out the same throbbing beats вЂ“ but Daft Punk quit the road after 48 shows, and when they started on their new material, it was with a fidgety desire to reinvent themselves. Daft Punk had first broken big during the Nineties electronica boom, but the tour вЂ“ a hallucinatory spectacle of pop stagecraft without precedent вЂ“ made them several orders of magnitude more popular, transforming them from survivors of a bygone fad into unwitting pioneers of a dance-music craze that has since swallowed the pop world whole. On the road, theyвЂ™d transformed packed amphitheaters, baseball fields and soccer stadiums into euphoric raves, manning an arsenal of Вcustom-built supercomputers from within a 24-foot-tall aluminum pyramid covered with screens and centered within an Atari honeycomb of glowing LED beams. BangВalter plucks a key from his pocket and unlocks the room вЂ“ it was here, in April 2008, on the heels of a world tour, that Daft Punk withdrew to write songs for their fourth album, Random Access Memories.

Daft punk alive tour compilation