Thomas Bangalter’s ‘Mirage’ Is a Sharp Turn from the Dancefloor

Thomas Bangalter’s post-Daft Punk trajectory keeps bending. Mirage – Ballet for 16 Dancers is a score that premiered this year at Geneva’s Ballet du Grand Théâtre, the fourth collaboration between choreographer Damien Jalet and visual artist Kōhei Nawa. Where Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo has largely stayed silent since the duo’s 2021 split, Bangalter has moved through film soundtracks, B2B sets, and art installations. This latest work pushes him into new, unpolished territory.

The music was built in the studio—eight movements piped in for the dancers rather than performed live. What emerges is confrontational and resolutely abstract. Sections of randomized, glitched high-end notes drift across tuned percussion and low woodwind-like drones. Arpeggiated synth tones bump against textures that feel lifted from decaying library vinyl. Rhythms surface and dissolve; the formless, beatless sequencing has little in common with the French touch that made his name.

That distance is the point. Mirage isn’t even Bangalter’s first ballet score, but it’s his most extreme. The electroacoustic palette and ambient drift recall artists like William Basinski, not any dancefloor lineage. Isolated from Jalet and Nawa’s stagecraft, it reads as tough, ungainly music—even within avant-garde circles. And yet, it apparently works. Bangalter has moved in a straight line away from the mainstream reputation he once shared, into something far less eager for approval.