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Homework: How Daft Punk Schooled Us In The Future Of Dance Music

With their debut album, ‘Homework’, Daft Punk cemented their place in history, even while shaping what that history would become.

There are those who ride the waves of a scene, and there are those who create a new scene in the first place. Daft Punk have always been the latter, particularly in the formative years surrounding their debut album, Homework .

Listen to Homework here

Scrappy, raw and experimental.

Few musical acts have changed so much between albums as Daft Punk did in the four years between the release of Homework , on 20 January 1997, and its follow-up, Discovery . Reinvention is often the key to longevity in music, but it usually comes after years of exhausting the same tried and tested formula. For Daft Punk, however, their first two albums feel like the works of entirely different artists: meticulously detailed and polished, Discovery was stuffed with instant classics that aimed for the big leagues. Homework , however, represents everything that’s exciting about the best debut albums: scrappy, raw and experimental, it perfectly captured the spirit of Daft Punk’s live sets in their early years, with tracks mixing into each other perfectly, building and maintaining energy as if tooled for a club appearance.

Video footage from a live show in Wisconsin, in 1996, demonstrates this perfectly. Claiming to be the earliest evidence of Daft Punk on stage, there isn’t a mirror ball or robot mask in sight. Aesthetically, it could be any boiler-room gig – a small audience going wild as Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo rip through their set with absolute conviction. Sonically, it’s a wild ride: the beat is the only constant; everything else can be thrown in and pulled away again in an instant. Tracks like Homework ’s Rock’n Roll, with its pulsating scratch loop, brought the excitement of these shows to listeners’ stereos.

Hints of the Daft Punk to come

However, Homework isn’t just a recorded version of an early gig. Across its 75 minutes, there are plenty of hints of the Daft Punk to come, particularly with the standout hits Alive, Da Funk and Around The World. The ambition alone of these early singles was enough to change the dance music scene at the time, pushing house back into the mainstream.

Recorded on the cheap at home (a process that gave the album its title), Homework wasn’t truly intended to be an album: the singles are placed between the more experimental tracks in an attempt to form something that felt more traditionally cohesive. Even so, it’s clear there were two very difference sides to Daft Punk, even in these early stages.

Few artists could produce their debut album at home while ensuring it sounded perfect wherever it was played, but, channelling huge amounts of energy and live experience for the recording, Bangalter and De Homem-Christo already knew what would work and what wouldn’t on their limited set-up. It’s this adaptability that made Daft Punk’s journey from club act to festival headliners a smooth one. But while it’s one thing to make an album at home, it’s an entirely other thing to have it cement your place in musical history.

Here are some of the standout tracks that make Homework a lesson in the evolution of dance music…

Homework : the tracks you need to hear

Revolution 909.

There’s a drum sound so industrial it could have been recorded in a factory, landing with such a satisfying clang that it’s hard to focus on anything else. Revolution 909 sits perfectly as one of Homework ’s opening tracks, setting the energy for the rest of the album and leading flawlessly into Da Funk…

… Which is not only a highlight on Homework , it’s a highlight of Daft Punk’s entire career. When a band discovers a truly great riff, they strip down everything else and squeeze every last drop out of it. Da Funk is one of those: instant, direct, and memorable – everything you want from a house track. Also, shout-out to the music video by the masterful Spike Jonze, in which a dog with its leg in a cast gets treated with complete indifference by a load of strangers.

Nothing sums up the early Daft Punk sound quite like Phoenix. Though subtler than some of the Homework ’s later tracks, it’s fully earned its place amongst the group’s bigger hitters.

Around The World

What more is there to say that hasn’t already been said? Around The World remains a juggernaut in dance music. Every part has been tightened to perfection, making it the perfect instrumental for the duo to introduce their trademark robot voice on.

With a twitching bassline that props up an ever-growing beat, Burnin’ is surrounded by all kinds of pops, scratches, slides and squeaks. If Homework builds in intensity as a live set would, this is the peak of that experience.

One of the original singles dropped ahead of Homework’s release, Alive still sounds as huge as ever. There’s a reason they name their tours after this song…

Check out the best Daft Punk song of all time to discover how they got harder, better, faster, stronger.

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By Ben Ratliff

Ben Ratliff

Homework , the french duo Daft Punk ‘s 1996 debut album, relied on sleazy electro-funk hooks and clever thefts of Seventies radio pop: It got you feeling good, though slightly covertly, since you didn’t really know who these people were. Daft Punk wore masks in publicity shots, disguised their voices with electronics, preferred the sound of outmoded gear and left their tracks lean. Naysayers criticize dance music as anonymous product, but here was dance music that slyly celebrated its own anonymity and production.

Since then, we’ve seen an explosion of much-maligned market-driven music: teen pop that’s as nourishing as an oil rag and rappers yelling like angry landlords over Mattel beats. But on Daft Punk’s second album, Discovery , the duo suggests that commodification has its positive side: that a really enormous song, a piece of invincible product like, say, Cher’s “Believe,” is as finely crafted as any obscure dance opus or underground hip-hop track. And unlike with many modern rock songs, there is no self-defeatism in “Believe.” It is a song that drinks from the well of house music, and house at its best is like a church the size of Monaco. You go inside there and you prostrate yourself before something that’s not yours alone.

Daft Punk’s new single, “One More Time,” is that kind of song: a piece of superreligion with an invincible beat and a nailed-to-the-wall vocal by house singer Romanthony. It is stamina itself, an anthem to “keep on dancing” that’s already a huge hit in clubs and on the radio. All those knowing listeners who bought Homework and signed on for the pair’s rascally, nudge-wink grooves now have to figure out what part of “One More Time” is for them. Is there a subversive part of “One More Time”? If so, where does it begin?

In its sheer perfection, is my best guess. This is the moment when the indie sensibility implodes before our eyes: when prank-pulling weirdos, young Frenchmen who hire director Spike Jonze to put dog-people in their videos, try to make honest-to-god hits. Struggling to understand the song, you find yourself analyzing Romanthony’s vocoderized singing — the way he overenunciates words, like “tonigh-tah.” It’s overkill, maybe. Overkill is parody; that’s Daft Punk. But is it generous, Cher-level overkill or the overkill of a smirking weenie? C’est les deux. And now you must give up thinking about it, because they’re playing these docteurs du funk at McDonald’s.

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Discovery helps you get your mainstream on but only for its first half. The songs that grab you are loaded up front. The momentum of “One More Time,” the album’s first track, continues through “Digital Love” — a shameless bite of the Buggles’ Eighties synth boogie — and rolls up to “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” which is Euro dance music at its absolute best: hand claps, a clanking ride cymbal, funky stabs on the Fender Rhodes, vocoder and all. The first five songs are the work of a real band, Daft Punk, whoever the hell they are.

But then the handprint of the maker grows weirdly faint. “Crescendolls,” which is one bouncy two-bar loop over and over, hints at the problems to come; then there’s the short “Nightvision,” which has the eerie, ambient feeling of 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love,” without vocals. Where are we going? As for the rest, it grows anonymous, and not in the artful way that Daft Punk used to capitalize on. The album becomes muddled — not only in the spectrum between serious and jokey but in its sense of an identity.

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Not all of it behaves like house music: On the slow-rolling “Something About Us,” with real bass, they’re setting you up for a love-man balladeer to enter. What you get instead is the vocoderized voices of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo — a nice, knowing bit of playing with an audience’s expectations. There’s some defiantly analog nostalgia, if you’re in the mood to reassess some of Steve Winwood’s synth tones from the mid-Eighties. As for swiping in good taste, there’s some early electro-hip-hop mainlined straight from Grandmaster Flash (“Short Circuit”), as well as plenty of Chic’s rhythm-section signatures, too.

The vocoders are deactivated in the last few songs — “Face to Face,” featuring Todd Edwards, and “Too Long,” with Romanthony again. And what you get is pro-level, soulful singing with pretty thin, narrow musical ideas behind it. It’s not old-DP funny, nor is it new-DP transcendent; it’s just workmanlike. Maybe Discovery is a scattershot triumph, a blow against monolithic record-making; I confess to being a bit baffled by it, and get the feeling I won’t know why for a while yet. What I do know is that not enough of this album delivers on the promise of “One More Time.” Instead of a church service run by heretics, you get inside jokes and reference swapping in a dance-music clubhouse.

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Random Access Memories

Best New Music

By Mark Richardson

May 20, 2013

In the electronica landscape of the 1990s, Daft Punk first came over as a novelty. Funny band name, funny sound, funny masks, and a funny (and incredibly fun) hit called “Da Funk,” found on their debut album, Homework . They’ve come a long way since, but the playfulness remains, and so does their ability to surprise. Every new step in their career, whether positive (the landmark Discovery , their life-altering pyramid live shows), negative (the inert Human After All , their forgettable score for Tron ), or somewhere in between (the film Electroma ) has been met initially with a collective sense of puzzlement: “Now what’s this all about?”

Random Access Memories , the fourth proper studio album from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo , continues the trend. But the differences between their first three albums and this one are vast. RAM finds them leaving behind the highly influential, riff-heavy EDM they originated to luxuriate in the sounds, styles, and production techniques of the 1970s and early ’80s. So we get a mix of disco, soft rock, and prog-pop, along with some Broadway-style pop bombast and even a few pinches of their squelching stadium-dance aesthetic. It’s all rendered with an amazing level of detail, with no expense spared. For RAM , Daft Punk recorded in the best studios, they used the best musicians, they added choirs and orchestras when they felt like it, and they almost completely avoided samples, which had been central to most of their biggest songs. Most of all, they wanted to create an album -album, a series of songs that could take the listener on a trip, the way LPs were supposedly experienced in another time.

Daft Punk, in other words, have an argument to make: that something special in music has been lost. You can’t have an argument without a thesis, and they start the album with one called “Give Life Back to Music.” The song’s opening rush brings to mind “old” Daft Punk, but then come percussive guitar strums courtesy of Nile Rodgers followed by orchestral surges. From the jump, it’s clear that the particulars of the sound are important. In a strictly technical sense, as far as capturing instruments on tape and mixing them so they are individually identifiable but still serve the arrangements, RAM is one of the best engineered records in many years. If people still went into stereo shops and bought stereos regularly, like they did during the era Daft Punk draw from, this record, with its meticulously recorded analog sound, would be an album to test out a potential system, right up there with Steely Dan’s Aja and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Daft Punk make clear that one way to “give life back to music” is through the power of high fidelity.

Another way is to work with artists young and old who have inspired them. Rodgers pops up again on “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Get Lucky,” and on both songs he’s joined by Pharrell on lead vocals. These two songs basically find Daft Punk attempting to make their version of a Chic song, which, in itself, is not a particularly notable goal. But the French duo’s craftsmanship carries the day. Pharrell, despite being the biggest contemporary star on the album, sounds anonymous—his vocals are pretty much just functional. But even that is arguably in line with Daft Punk’s reverence. Disco, after all, was often a producer’s medium, and lead singers weren’t necessarily meant to be the the focus of attention. So it comes back to songwriting and production: How strong is the groove, how memorable are the hooks? “Get Lucky,” a deserved hit, works on both counts. “Lose Yourself to Dance,” on the other hand, is OK, but plodding, perhaps the weakest song on the record and a good example of the potential pitfalls of Daft Punk’s backward-looking approach.

Other songs in the record’s first half—“The Game of Love,” “Within,” and “Instant Crush”—don’t make a huge impression initially but are best understood as part of a broader whole. “Game” and “Within” are downtempo, slightly jazzy robotic soul, delivered in the kind of gorgeous vocoder that Daft Punk have perfected. Musically, “Instant Crush” sounds a lot like a great song by Daft Punk’s pals Phoenix , and the processed lead vocal from the Strokes ’ Julian Casablancas holds a simple tune that’s catchier than anything he or his main band have managed in a while. All three tracks function well in the context of the record, throwing the tour-de-force “Giorgio by Moroder” into sharp relief.

“Giorgio” is a stunning piece of pop-prog that seems partly drawn from the groundbreaking producer’s experiments in long-form, epic disco, like his side-long version of “Knights in White Satin”. Moroder’s only contribution to the song is an interview that offers a thumbnail history of his life as a musician, one that recounts how how he heard the sequenced Moog as the future of music (see “I Feel Love”). The construction of “Giorgio by Moroder” is masterful, moving from easygoing beats to a for-the-ages, chill-inducing synth line, to orchestral crashes, to a brilliantly goofy guitar solo. It’s a fitting tribute to Moroder’s spirit and legacy.

RAM ’s best songs come in its second half, another clue that it’s meant to be heard in full. It builds as it goes. “Touch”, the record’s literal centerpiece, is where things start to get interesting. It’s telling that the songs featuring the two oldest and deepest influences on the record—Moroder and Paul Williams—are the most over-the-top. (Williams’ role in the 1974 cult film  Phantom of the Paradise  became an early obsession for Daft Punk.) These pocket symphonies allows the duo to take their concerns to the furthest reaches of ambition—and good taste. “Touch” packs in a Cluster-fied spacey intro, some showtune balladry, a 4/4 disco section complete with swing music trills, and a sky-scraping choir, all in service of a basic lyrical idea: love is the answer and you’ve got to hold on. It’s strange, disorienting, and emotionally powerful, with a silliness that doesn’t undercut the deep feelings in the least. It encapsulates what makes Daft Punk such an enduring proposition: their relationship to cool. Their vulnerability comes from embracing cheese while also understanding the humor and playfulness in it, holding all these ideas in mind at once.

This quality is also heard in “Fragments of Time”, featuring lead vocals by legendary house DJ Todd Edwards. The laid-back melody embodies another often disparaged musical moment: ’70s singer-songwriter excess that East Coast critics liked to write off as the sound of El Lay—the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Michael McDonald. Conveying the openness and innocence that marked pop radio as the ’70s ended, “Fragments of Time” sounds something like a sequel to Discovery ’s “Digital Love.” Contrasting “Digital Love” and “Fragments of Time” also raises an interesting paradox: though everything about RAM , from the session musicians to the guests to the means of production, is meant to sound more “human,” the album at points sounds more sterile, almost too perfect. To my ears, this quality isn’t necessarily to its detriment, as much of its appeal ultimately comes from its surface beauty, the sheer gorgeousness of the overall sound. But I suspect this feeling is at the root of why, judging from early reviews, some listeners were underwhelmed.

The continual churn of the internet, experience tells us, favors quick connections, conveniences, ephemeral pleasures. But there are areas of culture popping up that seek to slow down, focus on details, and wallow in the kinds of media that it still takes money to create. This is the space that Daft Punk seek to occupy, which in and of itself can be seen as problematic. For those who embrace the more egalitarian approach to music production created by access to cheap tools and cheap distribution, Daft Punk’s mind-bogglingly lush record scans as elitist, possibly even dismissive of the creativity that is happening on a smaller scale.

To really understand where they’re coming from here, you have to go back to the height of the album era, which was really just a blip in pop music history. Three things made it different: 1) it was the time just before MTV; 2) it was the time just before the CD; 3) it was the time just before the Walkman. All three hit around the dawn of the ’80s and had a profound influence on how recorded music was experienced. MTV, in addition to foregrounding the visual presentation of artists, returned music to a singles-focused realm. The CD did its part too, making skipping ahead so easy and allowing for the listener to jump around at will. (It also made artwork less important and introduced the idea of records as “data.”) And the Walkman’s convenience opened up new spaces for listening while decreasing sound quality, a trade-off that has driven the technology behind popular music consumption ever since.

So RAM is best appreciated as a counter to these trends. It’s not that “all music should be this” but that “some music could be this.” By the time you make it to the album’s astonishing final stretch, it’s hard not to think that Daft Punk have succeeded at what they set out to do. The arrangements on “Beyond” and “Motherboard” are breathtaking, and Panda Bear , after many so-so collaborations, aces his vocal turn on “Doin’ It Right,” a terrifically uplifting bit of electro-pop.

And then it ends with “Contact”: It’s the most old-school Daft Punk song here, and it’s also the only one based on a sample, pulling its main riff from a 1981 song by the Australian band the Sherbs. Daft Punk and collaborator DJ Falcon first used “Contact” in a DJ mix in 2002, and now it finds its way on an album about time and memory in 2013. You get a feeling of time collapsing with it, seeing where Daft Punk have been and where they could go. “Contact” will likely close some future live multimedia extravaganza, and people will go insane, and they will return to this album with new ears. You never know, but my guess is that people will be listening to Random Access Memories a decade hence, just like we’re still listening to Discovery now. You’ll forget the YouTube interviews with the collaborators, you’ll forget the day they announced the suits, you’ll forget the day the “Get Lucky” snippet leaked, you’ll forget every rumor, you’ll forget the SNL commercials. But the record will remain, something that channels the past but sounds like little else right now, an album about rediscovery that's situated in the constantly-shifting present.

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Daft Punk – Homework (25th Anniversary Edition Review)

Released as a surprise drop one year to the day since the duo announced their separation, the 25th Anniversary edition of Daft Punk’s debut album Homework , reintroduces audiences to the duo’s early work which kickstarted their critically acclaimed and award-winning discography.

While those more familiar with Daft Punk’s funk and disco based music from Random Access Memories as well as recent collaborations with The Weeknd with ‘Starboy’ and ‘I Feel It Coming’, Homework brings harder hitting electronic music which helped push French House and electronic music into the mainstream inspiring later artists such as Justice, Disclosure and Porter Robinson amongst many others.

The House classic, ‘Around The World’, is certainly the biggest single from this album and still remains on rotation for many 25 years later, however, relistening to Homework, gives opportunity to re-appreciate some of Daft Punk’s lesser known and underrated tracks. Tracks such as ‘Phoenix’ with its thumping kick and humming beat as well as ‘Indo Silver Club’ with its bouncing drum beat and melody, are both underrated upbeat and joyfully addictive house tracks.

Harder and more techno inspired tracks such as ‘Rollin’ & Scratchin’ and ‘Rock’n Roll’, illustrate the eclectic ability of Daft Punk to make both hard hitting techno and funk and disco inspired house. Those harder hitting tracks however may not be the tracks listeners have on repeat for casual listening, rather playing a much stronger role within Daft Punk’s highly recommended live albums, Alive 1997 and Alive 2007 .

To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the original release of Homework, an additional fifteen remixes of songs from the original album have been added to this release. Some of those are fresh unheard remix such as Master at Works’ low tempo and relaxing ‘Around The World – Mellow Mix’, while others are releases of deeper cut remixes which accompanied the original single releases of tracks such as ‘Burnin- Ian Pooley Cut up Mix’ and ‘Revolution 909- Roger Sanchez & Junior Sanchez Remix’. While these remixes are a welcome addition for Daft Punk fans, with eight of the fifteen being remixes of ‘Around the World’ and four being remixes of ‘Burnin’, the 25th Anniversary feels like a missed opportunity. Including  early limited released material such as the Soma Records published singles, ‘Assault’, which was released in the lead up to Homework, and the unreleased 1994 single ‘Drive’ would give listeners music previously unavailable on streaming services, and make the album a must listen.

The release was accompanied by a twitch stream of 1997 Concert from the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles from Daft Punk’s Daftendirektour as well as a vinyl reissue of the live album, Alive 1997 . For those new to Daft Punk’s older work, this new 25th Anniversary  release of Homework certainly worth their time. For Daft Punk fans who are very familiar with Homework , their time would perhaps be better spent relistening to Alive 1997 or seeking out other recordings of Daft Punk’s live concerts.

Homework remains a strong release that should  be regarded as highly as Daft Punk’s later albums, Discovery, Human After All and Random Access Memories . The vinyl release of  this 25th Anniversary edition, coming on the 15th April will be a worthwhile collectors item for Daft Punk fans as it compiles alternative versions of classics that could previously only be available within the now hard to find single releases. The re-release is available for streaming now and is a classic album worth revisiting for any dance and electronic music fans.

Ben Stewart

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The Past, Present, and Future of Daft Punk’s Homework

A track-by-track breakdown that will take you around the world

Editor’s Note: With breaking news that Daft Punk are hanging up their helmets, we’re revisiting several of our relevant features. That includes Lior Phillips’ ambitious look at Daft Punk’s debut 1997 album, Homework, in which she examines, song by song, both the group’s influences and how they impacted the music that followed. This crash course in Daft Punk’s Homework was originally published as an anniversary piece in January 2017.

Homework will be playing as my soul glides into the ether.

These days, Daft Punk announce their superhuman abilities almost immediately — some might argue they’re more ubiquitous for their robotic guise over their actual music — but 20 years ago, when they released their sublime debut album, Homework , they were merely two French tricksters named Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. At the time, they had begun wearing masks to produce an ego-less, universal presence for dance music — a language that could exist without signifiers, if you will — though decidedly not the chromed helmets of today. Rather than mechanic flourishes on the album art, they opted for simple satin.

Though the packaging has ramped up to surreal new heights of whimsy and wonder, it’s now remarkable to see just how much of Daft Punk’s sound has crystallized over the past two decades. Of course, it helps that they chose some valuable inspirational signposts in house, techno, G-funk, and hip-hop. Even so, the two producers were only 22 years old, an incredibly early age given the clarity and grace they had exuded in this complete and timeless masterpiece. In fact, it’s become more or less an instruction manual for current would-be producers, namely how it runs through genres as though they were hyperactive cartoon characters.

For that reason, the album’s connections to the past and influence on the future can be viewed much more clearly. Granted, the genres they twirled into Homework were previously indebted to sampling and remixing, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg to this album. What’s far more intriguing is the matter bubbling underneath, which is why we’ve gone ahead and dismantled each of the album’s 16 tracks piece by piece, searching for particular influences that they might have had and uncovering which artists might have been influenced. It’s an around-the-world study of Daft Punk, and one that requires zero airfare and zero SkyMiles. Dancing shoes are optional.

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The past, present, and future of daft punk's homework.

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It's a fact - Daft Punk's Discovery and Homework really were recorded in a bedroom (and mixed on a JVC boombox): "That little boombox is what we mixed and recorded both Homework and Discovery on. That was the magic one"

We made LEGO models in ours, they made two multi-platinum selling albums in theirs

"You can do some real lo-fi stuff with two drum machines and an old synthesiser" Thomas Bangalter

Yes, we all know the bedroom studio is 'a thing' and that great albums can be created anywhere, these days, right? But 25 years ago? And twice? Damn you Daft Punk, you've done it again.

We knew it. All that time playing with Lego and dreaming about Star Wars in our bedrooms was a waste of time. We should have been building a studio with a couple of old synths and a drum machine, and creating two of the finest albums ever made instead. Taking a leaf out of Daft Punk's book… 

There were always rumours that Daft Punk recorded their debut album Homework out of a bedroom studio, but it turns that both this and second LP Discovery were recorded in just that way and – get this – mixed on an old JVC boombox. And all this was around a quarter of a century ago, when DIY music making was in its infancy. 

There were, admittedly, big clues back in the day that the duo were taking the DIY route with their first recordings for Virgin Records. 

"We're very keen on recording in the bedroom, not going into studios," Thomas Bangalter told Mixmag in 1997. "It was very seductive to do that with a major record company. You can do some real lo-fi stuff with two drum machines and an old synthesiser."

They even told Melody Maker in the same year: "Our album is cheaper than nearly any rock album. No studio expenses, producers, engineers. We're not saying there is a right way or wrong way to go about things, but this is certainly a way."

But no-one really believed the duo's debut album Homework, let alone its follow up Discovery, went anywhere near a bedroom, such was the quality and impact of both long players. However, in a recent BBC Sounds podcast the truth was revealed. 

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"That little boombox is what we mixed and recorded both Homework and Discovery on" Thomas Bangalter

"The myth is that Homework was all in your bedroom, is that true?" asked the BBC's Matt Everitt in The First Time… podcast with Thomas Bangalter as his guest.

"It's true," Bangalter replied. "Homework and Discovery were done in the bedroom, in the same flat as I was watching [TV show] Modern Times and we had [Stevie Wonder album] Songs in the Key of Life constantly on the turntables. This small bedroom, [and] my parents had given me this small boombox for my 11th birthday, a JVC boombox with a little graphic equaliser, and I kept this thing. 

"One day when we plugged in a few keyboards and samplers, I found that boombox and I put it on the stack of machines. And that little boombox is what we mixed and recorded both Homework and Discovery on. That was the magic one."

So there you have it. If only our parents had given us a boombox when we were 11 years old, rather than Kerplunk, then we too could have had two platinum selling albums to our names. 

Bet we'd beat Daft Punk at Kerplunk any day, though, so we're not bitter.

Andy has been writing about music production and technology for 30 years having started out on Music Technology magazine back in 1992. He has edited the magazines Future Music, Keyboard Review, MusicTech and Computer Music, which he helped launch back in 1998. He owns way too many synthesizers.

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