A DJ in England has released a Daft Punk mix that sat unheard in his tape collection for close to three decades. Ralph Lawson published the hour-long recording on October 21, two years after he found it among tapes he had stored away. The cassette was moldy and tore when he first tried to play it in 2024, so it went to Great Bear, a Bristol audio and video digitizing firm, for restoration.
Lawson says the French duo sent him the tape around 1997, while they were promoting their debut album Homework, for broadcast on a radio show he hosted. When it surfaced again he feared the worst: that the tape held the BBC Essential Mix the pair made that same year, already widely circulated. Listening through and digging for any record of it, he found no trace of the mix anywhere. In the video accompanying the release, he called the material fresh and guessed it had been exclusive.
The recording carries the sound of the source. Lawson says Daft Punk built the mix from vinyl, and the crackle is audible across it. His only intervention was a small lift in volume to bring it up to modern playback levels. He declined to compress it, citing the duo's well-known command of sidechain compression, the technique that gives Homework tracks like "Around the World" their pump and breathing room. The restraint is the point: the mix arrives with its dynamics intact, which is how it would have sounded on the radio in 1997.
That year is the useful frame. Homework arrived in January 1997, and the Essential Mix followed in March, so Lawson's tape belongs to the same short window when Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were still club DJs as much as recording artists, moving between Paris and the UK circuit. ROMBO traced Bangalter's later instinct for structure on Mirage; here that instinct is raw, a working DJ's selection with no production gloss. The tape is a document of the duo before the helmets, and its value lies in the unglamorous details: the mold, the tear, the volume nudge, the crackle left in place.
Lawson's find lands as Daft Punk's early chapter is being revisited in other formats, including a full-scale LEGO partnership. More of the duo's history is available through ROMBO's Daft Punk coverage.
