For all the discussion around the backward-looking facade of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, there was one aspect most people could agree on: it felt expensive. There were echoes of a once-thriving industry in there, harking back to a time of money being endlessly funneled into lavish studio complexes, sometimes in aid of wild vanity projects. RAM added a whole other level of expenditure in service of the concept of retro. You can buy all the vintage amps and instruments you want, loot endless thrift stores to get just the right period ruffle on your shirt. But can you hire the guy who played drums on Michael Jackson's Off the Wall? In a sense it's a grand folly, an ill-fitting match for the way music is mostly consumed at this point in time. You're not likely to hear the nuances of Bob Ludwig's mastering job through tinny laptop speakers, crappy earbuds, low bitrate MP3s, and streaming YouTube clips.

Of course the sheer ambition of RAM is a large part of its appeal, a big group purposefully acting big to flesh out the music as they imagine it in their heads. Nicolas Jaar's Darkside project, here renamed Daftside, take all that aspiration and siphon out every drop of it from the original source. This album, really just a series of clips uploaded to Soundcloud, remixes RAM in full, deconstructing it to resemble a thin, hollowed-out version of its original self. It's an internet-redux model of Daft Punk's work, a scratchy counterpart that sees virtue in the kind of ultra-low production values and consumption models that RAM veers away from. The first half of Daftside's "Give Life Back to Music" is positively emaciated, its drums falling flat, its cymbal splashes resembling old Casio presets caked in cheap distortion. It's the kind of thing John "J.R." Robinson, Daft Punk’s ludicrously accomplished drummer on the original track, must have nightmares about.

It's difficult to judge exactly how long Jaar and his musical partner, Dave Harrington, spent on this work (probably not much, considering how quickly they turned it around). So the tweaking is minimal at times, with pitches shifted resolutely down and that crackly flimsiness recurring as a theme. There was already something of a sad-robot motif to some of RAM, and the downturned atmosphere here emphasizes it further. "Get Lucky" sounds positively bluesy at times, with Pharrell's vocal reduced to a drunken slur, making its central refrain sound more like a lost hope than a promise of good times ahead. It's indicative of this project's inclination for taking big moments and making them small, pushing them inward. Even RAM's centerpiece, the Paul Williams-fronted "Touch", is pulled out of its its wide open space, given a minimal techno makeover, then shunted to the penultimate slot in the running order.

Daftside's ability to find something else in this music doesn't just stretch to them reducing the mood to a set of internal post-club jams. At times they're looking for the direct inverse in mood, turning the gloomy "Game of Love" up in pace so it resembles a shuffling disco tune. For "Contact" they open with a gnarled take on the noise bursts at its close, placing it at the start of the tracklisting in a move that mirrors Oneohtrix Point Never's positioning of the similarly bracing wake-up call "Nil Admirari" on Returnal. Surprisingly, the material that seems more in Jaar's orbit-- the slow-build electronics of "Motherboard", the pulsing "Giorgio by Moroder"-- produce less satisfying results, with the former a mess of runaway electronics and the latter a tangle of empty loops. "Doin' It Right" is better, taking Panda Bear's escalating vocal and turning it into a wonderfully ugly set of belches.

Amusingly, for something that often deliberately drags so hard, Daftside simply brush over one of the RAM tracks that taps into that mood, turning the indifferent "Lose Yourself to Dance" into a two-second vocal passage then moving on. That sense of play, resembling Jaar and Harrington poking Daft Punk with a stick then gleefully running away, is partly what makes this a far greater work than standard remix albums. At times they're looking for nuances in the original, small threads they can pick up and take somewhere else. Elsewhere they're just having fun, acting on instincts, never over-awed by the material. Certainly there's an overall feel of taking all of Daft Punk's expansion and turning in a low-rent version of it, an Off-Off-Broadway version constructed in a cardboard pyramid patched together with tape and glue. Jaar's Space is Only Noise worked from a similar mix of nuttiness and constraint. Somehow, he found a way back there through a most unlikely route.