A Chat About Daft Punk, EDM and a Few Other Things
a.k.a. Revisiting an interview with electronic music writer Gabriel Szatan.
I have a book coming out. If you read this newsletter regularly, you likely know that already, and based on the response to last week’s initial announcement, folks actually seem rather excited about it. (Is it a good sign that my Instagram post about the book got more likes than my wedding announcement did a few years ago? I’m not sure.)
Anyways, I promise to try and keep the book-related self-promotion at a tolerable level during the next few months, but in the meantime, I do have a very real deadline coming up. Simply put, I need to buckle down and finish this thing, so in the interest of carving out a little extra breathing room, I’ve decided to revisit a piece from the archives in today’s edition of First Floor.
A quick scheduling note: The regular Thursday First Floor mailout (i.e. the one with the weekly news round-up, track recommendations, etc.) will be published according to the usual schedule.
The First Floor archives go back more than three years, but with my own book weighing heavily on my mind these days, I thought now would be a good time to look back at my conversation with fellow electronic music journalist Gabriel Szatan, whose forthcoming title After Daft—which can be preordered here—has been mentioned many times here in the newsletter. The first time it was discussed at length, however, was in my extensive First Floor interview with him back in September 2021. A few things have changed since then; the book gained a proper subtitle (Daft Punk & The Rewiring of 21st Century Culture), its release was pushed back to March 2024 and Szatan himself moved from London to New York, where he’s spent the past months writing and interviewing literally dozens of artists, many of them certifiable legends. Much of his working process (along with various odds and ends that won’t make it into the final book) is being documented via a dedicated newsletter, The AD Files, where Szatan recently unveiled a festival-like lineup of more than 60 people whose words and perspectives will appear in After Daft. (Apparently even more contributors will be revealed in the months ahead.)
Back in 2021 though, After Daft was largely still just an idea. Even so, Szatan had plenty to say about it, and while Daft Punk are obviously the central characters of his forthcoming book, we talked about a lot more those very famous French robots. Over the course of a long conversation, we touched upon the mass commercialization of electronic music during the past few decades, and how that commercialization shaped—not always fairly—the way in which the history of the genre has been told. (Spoiler alert: many of the house and techno originators—the proverbial “Teachers” named by Daft Punk themselves—wound up being left behind.) We also discussed the rise of EDM, the current state of electronic music journalism and what prompted Szatan to want to write a book in the first place.
In the 18 months since the interview was first published, electronic music has continued to evolve, and having seen the return of Skrillex, a widespread embrace of mainstream pop sounds / tropes (even in the genre’s most “underground” corners) and what seems like the beginnings of a critical re-evaluation of EDM, I do feel like this interview with Szatan is perhaps more relevant now than it was back in 2021.
Give it a read and see what you think. I’ve temporarily removed the subscriber paywall and the piece will be remain open to everyone until this weekend.
Shawn Reynaldo is a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter, or you can just drop him an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or potential work opportunities.