Daft punk discovery7/25/2023 ![]() ![]() The tour’s curtain-raiser at Coachella festival in 2006 was as significant for dance music in the US as the Beatles’ 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was for rock’n’roll, breaking the mainstream’s stubborn resistance to DJing as a valid medium.ĭaft Punk playing Coachella in 2006. The cockpit was loaded with state-of-the-art equipment and touch screens, enabling the duo and a team of remote engineers to synchronise a graphics display in perfect harmony with a microscopically reconstructed mega-mix of their own anthems – something that had never been done before at scale. Across the 48-date, 19-month world tour, Daft Punk performed atop an enormous LED-fronted pyramid. Yet it was their Alive 2006-07 tour that shifted the cultural needle – a quantum leap in the possibilities of concert-as-spectacle and the most consequential live event of the digital era. ![]() ![]() A victory lap came later, with Daft Punk’s 2013 hit Get Lucky and 2016 collaborations with the Weeknd earning wedding-disco ubiquity. Enhanced by this playful theatre, their first decade gave them huge cachet in electronic circles the filter-happy frolic of the French touch dance style they helped create also propelled artists such as Bob Sinclar, David Guetta and Cassius toward stardom. They told me I personally was one of the reasons they started to make house – shit was pretty damn touching.” In the late 90s, you could already feel they were geniuses with real vision Maya MasseboeufĪt 9.09am on 9/9/99, they transformed into their robot alter egos, never willingly again showing their faces in public. “From 1995, we became close, hanging out and playing parties instantly. One of the teachers was Chicago-based producer Paul Johnson, who held court “in the living room of ’s father’s place” and was treated to a rendition of his own song Feel the Music on a grand piano to show how much the duo revered his contributions. Working with these teachers on Discovery brought out some of Daft Punk’s most irresistible songs, including One More Time, Face to Face and Digital Love. On Homework’s Teachers, they shout out a roll call of elite innovators to whom they owe their art: the intergalactic audacity of George Clinton, the low-end thump of Dr Dre, and numerous pioneers of house and techno from Chicago and Detroit. Although some commentators queried how much inspiration could actually be bound up in recycling, Alkan thinks that in Daft Punk’s case, “the references are strong and familiar, and there is enough of themselves in there for it to always remain theirs”.Īs well as a jackin’ house meteorite strike, their 1997 debut album, Homework, was a show of their values, full of the aesthetics, language and sonic grit of the US midwest. Daft Punk’s magpie approach to songwriting and visual art was a dominant story of early 21st-century music, similarly colouring the work of MIA, 2ManyDJs, the Avalanches and other sample-stitchers. “They were a gateway into so much music that I love, and a big part of that admiration comes down to their position as outsiders,” he says. ![]() Yet those albums were met with a mixed reception – audiences and critics alike had to learn to trust Daft Punk’s vision of the future.įor British producer-DJ Erol Alkan, whose fan forums were an essential incubator of the blog house movement that swept through club culture in the 2000s, the Parisians had a “deeply profound impact” on a generation, including Alkan. Perhaps they’re sitting next to Prince, whose pirouetting falsetto funk and emotional vulnerability inspired the duo’s 2001 masterpiece Discovery, and Led Zeppelin, from whom they cribbed double-necked guitars and 10-tonne drums on 2005’s Human After All. F ollowing their split this week after 28 years, Daft Punk have ascended to pop Valhalla. ![]()
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