A few year’s ago a DAT tape was uncovered in the Soma Records office during a clear up, the forgotten tape turned out to be a demo of an early Daft Punk track called ‘Drive’ that the label had never gotten round to releasing. For the label’s 20th anniversary, back in 2011, the gut-busting techno track was finally released.
Fast-forward to today and Soma is now celebrating its 25th anniversary with a new compilation that includes a brand-new Slam remix of Daft Punk’s ‘Drive’.
Speaking about the remix via NME, the techno duo said: “This is a remix of one of their tracks we never got round to releasing at the time for whatever reason. We were having a clear-out of the Soma offices and we came across a bunch of DAT tapes, this track being one of them. We wanted to completely reconstruct the track and our inspiration for it was to make an interpretation that captured that raw spirit of the first music we heard in that flat in Paris when we first met them! It’s very raw with modular synth sequences and that repetitive vocal hook repeating ‘Drive’. Current Daft Punk fans will probably be at best confused by it and at worst hate it. Looking forward to the response, haha.”
On whether the duo are still in touch with the secretive duo after all these years, Slam confirmed that they met up with Thomas just last year. “Yeah, we kind of are still in touch. Ironically when we were in Paris to play at the Rex Club recently and to film for the Daft Punk Unchained Documentary we hooked up with Thomas for dinner. He’s still the same guy. Loves talking about geeky stuff like technology production and that kind of thing. I remember him telling me way back that they were going to cover their identity so they could go to a supermarket and nobody would recognise them. This is before they were actually famous. That’s how much belief they had they were going to make it. Thomas’s dad was in the industry as a disco producer so they had a great mentor to start with.
Speaking about the direction the duo might take for their next album, the duo said they were none the wiser to what they might do: “In the future who knows where they will go musically – what they do now is mainstream pop really buts its still very unique, it’s so well respected within that world. I would like to see them maybe do something a bit more esoteric but who knows?”
