Daft Punk have shared a previously unreleased track that’s set to appear on the 10th-anniversary edition of their final album, Random Access Memories. Among the 35 minutes of unreleased music is “The Writing of Fragments of Time,” a documentary track that dives into the writing and recording of the duo’s Todd Edwards collaboration “Fragments of Time.” Find the song’s Cédric Hervet-directed video below.
According to the press release accompanying the song’s announcement, “The Writing of Fragments of Time” follows in the tradition of “Giorgio by Moroder,” the album track where Giorgio Moroder tells a story over instrumentals.
Edwards discussed the release of the new song in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 today. “You’ll hear me laughing because Thomas [Bangalter] came up with some really damn witty lines in it,” he said. He also talked about his reaction to Daft Punk’s breakup:
I wasn’t shocked by the news because it’s, again, I know them on a personal level, so I know the inner workings of.… There’s the friendships there. It’s almost like when you think about it, it’s like a partnership can be like a marriage to a certain extent. And you have your ups and downs, and it’s just like if the chemistry isn’t there anymore, if it’s just not that you’re not melding together the way you used to, that it’s better to not force something and then come out with something that you feel is subpar, than to just make it finite.
When asked if he thought the duo might get back together at some point, Edwards remarked, “I wouldn’t count it out.” He continued:
You don’t know what’s going to happen five years from now. You don’t know, maybe the time away will bring them back together. The one thing that I can say, and I’ll leave you at this, is that the amount of people that yearn for Daft Punk to get back together to lead the way for music shows how much the world needs more Daft Punks out there to lead the world in music. There’s a lot of followers, but not a lot of people that are willing to take risks and be innovators. I hope that’s a lesson that producers and musicians alike take away from that and say, you know what? I’m going to take a chance and not worry about failing because they did everything confidently in what they did, regardless of what the public said, they just did it. And they knew there could have been a possibility this album failed. He even said, he’s like, “This’ll be a test to see what people are open to hearing and believing in.” And you know what? It didn’t fail.
