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When Daft Punk released its last proper album, "Human After All," in 2005, Facebook was still just for college students and Twitter didn't exist. To return to cinema comparisons, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo are electro-pop's Terrence Malick: Taking their time with new projects, mostly staying out of the press and keeping their faces anonymous so they can live relatively normal lives. (Both have homes in Paris. Bangalter also has a house in Los Angeles.) It's gone according to plan: Their music is known, while their personalities and personal lives are not. "People seem really to get it," de Homem-Christo said. "We've been doing that for a while and everybody approves apparently. The star system, the idol, the cult of personality is not the only way to be in entertainment." Sitting at a courtyard picnic table at the Jim Henson Studios in Hollywood, site of their Daft Arts production offices, Bangalter responds thoughtfully to most questions posed to the duo; de Homem-Christo is quieter, less comfortable conversing in English. Both wear basic shirts, ripped jeans and scruffy beards. "We're like regular blokes," de Homem-Christo said. "I think people are really more excited to see the robots than they would be to see ourselves," he added. "It's like C-3PO or Chewbacca. ... I'm a big
'Star Wars' fan but I never wanted to find out who was behind (the characters). And if I did it right now, I would forget his face. It would not interest me. ... The robots are far more trippy and opening your imagination than my face or Thomas' face, and the way we live, which is not even a crazy celebrity lifestyle." Could that ever change? A late-career unmasking of some kind? Not likely, says Bangalter. "We are artists that go by the name Daft Punk," he said. "If we put ourselves in the forefront, obviously we are appearing as robots. The idea is to reinvent these characters. We don't really want to feel like they're at the end of their existence. But at the same time, if we were to make a film or another project or a book or pictures or anything that would not have the robots, (they) could just be behind, hidden in some sense. That doesn't mean we would replace the robots with our real faces." It's unclear when fans will next be able to see those robots up close again. "We are not considering touring right now. We'll see when that comes," Bangalter said. And as for a sequel to their "Tron" work, he won't rule that out: "We usually don't want to do the same thing twice, but it doesn't feel like we've explored every aspect of what film scoring can be either." ___ Online:
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