1 At the bottom of the article there are a few footnotes regarding translation issues, misc. notes and bits of commentary. I should really make a PDF when it’s all confirmed okay, otherwise - enjoy!
The final stage has been ignited: Homem-Christo and Bangalter have driven their dirty Sample-House up to stadium-rocking musical heights, complete with live music. For this interview, the two of them took off their robot helmets.
The solution came much later. It came long after the wheels of the budget-airline had hit the runway at Paris-Orly, and I set my eyes upon the two legends who had been hiding in robot helmets for almost fifteen years shortly afterwards - and longer still, since I watched the gigantic yellow autumn leaves falling in the Jardin du Luxembourg and thought: what is all this shit? It was much later, actually, when [I was?] on my own carpet the idea (with a touch of amusement) arose in me to put the Greatest Hits of Queen next to Daft Punk’s Alive - viewing them, giving them a quick listen - that I began to understand a little of the whole picture. 2 The new album by Daft Punk is a live album. There are always two tracks out of the potpourri of the band’s history to create a mash-up. The songs do not sound particularly new - one knows the originals and knows the applied cut-up techniques and filter formalities by now through the current releases of their grandchildren 3 like Justice or Sebastian. But that’s not the point. Alive is backing music, a strict music program, actually like a movie soundtrack. Last year, the French duo Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter traveled most of the world with this music program. They were on tour for the first time in nine years, and the presented music was merely a soundtrack for a visual spectacle that this world simply hadn’t seen before. The two heroes stand during the performance in a huge pyramid of light, upon which a play of colours are arranged with the music and where messages and signs appear. After fifteen years, Daft Punk, the two retro-futuristic quote-machines 4 in robot helmets, are there - where they’d always wanted to be. They make their own musical, modern progressive-stadium rock and perform at their theater of lost things. This incredibly big show, with three trucks in the tour, the unprecedented light show, the complete eye-opener. Music is just a mere small part in this universe. Pink Floyd were famous for the aural-and-visual interplay of their stage shows. On the cover of their most successful album, Dark Side of the Moon, a prism is shown on a night-black background. From the left a light beam is refracted onto the prism; there it is split, and falls from the right-hand side in bundled rainbow colours. Daft Punk are now at the point of the light’s refraction in the center of that pyramid. 5 Instead of a concert, their show turns into a modern trouble, up to the kitsch-illuminated artwork. Actually, one unfortunately thinks that all the time while listening to Alive, near the screech of fans, that a DVD would actually have been the only formatting option that would have displayed properly.
Daft Punk’s first album ‘Homework’ appeared in 1997, and is considered one of the most important and influential albums of electronic dance music in general. This worked especially, because at the start of the 2000s, both House and Techno was radically oversimplified on one hand; but on the other hand, also made compatible for an audience outside of the electronic dance-culture. Because the music rocked. Before, that was not something you said about electronic music. The hybrid-form created by them, their hooks that they produced mainly from samples of old funk, disco, or glam rock records, extended the concept of House to the rock gesture without ever even falling over themselves in that gesture, and Daft Punk set the pace for house music in the last years of the twentieth century.
Homework was produced at home, in the bedroom of Thomas Bangalter. This mode of production changed in the release of five years after that, their second album Discovery, and marked a musical turning point in the duo’s work. Whereas formerly, the upright bass of the TR-909 6 and acid-synth loops were in the foreground, they were now set upon opulent vintage synthesizers, more vocals and more complex arrangements of text and melody. The majority of critics and fans felt betrayed. Too pop-like; too sick; yes, the new Daft Punk sounded strange. No one seemed to want to understand that everything has been thought through in Discovery, what was rawly arranged in Homework. For it is not actually the combination of rock and dance music that made up the merit and great success of Daft punk, but that they smeared techno with nostalgia - the moment of remembrance. Bangalter and Homem-Christo gave techno the button-push that leads directly into the past. In the particular future-obsession of electronic music, they suddenly provide a glance back, developed melodies sounded via homesickness, after the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Kraftwerk. Electonic music production happened already in Homework; no more about the creation of a possible cyber-world, in their sound now, the hidden melancholy steering towards the past. A nostalgia without the presence of escape, however, transfiguration has never sounded more modern than in Discovery. The title track, ‘One More Time’, which was contributed to by the druggy 7 house-legend Romanthony and so, due to him, finally achieved the honour of selling four million copies. Daft Punk wrote a screenplay for the songs of Discovery. Under the direction of the director Leiji Matsumoto, their childhood idol, the 60-minute anime musical Interstella 5555 - The 5story of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem was developed. The visual appearance has always been part of Daft Punk. In the marriage of MTV to Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Roman Coppala, the hits of ‘Homework’ became masterworks of today archived in music-video format. 8 At the start of this year the first film appeared which Daft Punk directed themselves. Electroma tells the story of two robots who wish to be human in meditative images and without a single spoken word. The humanoid-parable is a pastiche of various works; there are obviously quotes of Michelangelo Antonioni or Gus van Sant, and the film is a homage to nostalgic thoughts about filmmaking. The sign-projectile that Daft Punk concurred in an insane stage show could be seen as the elaborate Finissimo. Now they are actually finished - what is still to come?
If one looks again at 'Homework’ today, it is actually clear how little Daft Punk have changed from the aesthetic concept and trademark system that they designed in their youth up to this day. 9 How much of their stage show of 2007 is based on signifiers created in 1996. 10 If one lifts up the vinyl record, one can see a work desk, filled with popular culture. A smorgasbord of items that come from a time, when pop was always just pop. Inside, the room looks like one belonging to a pretty cool mid-seventies youth. A hand-turntable, a KISS tour poster, a 7-inch of Chic, Marvel Comics, Led Zeppelin and Beach Boys stickers, a figure of the American eagle (but also a globe), a small motorcycle-figure - all together in orderly chaos joining a still life of pop, there lies a Playboy, a music newspaper, and over all of it a little exercise book where it is written in calligraphy: Homework. The left and right ends of the desktop-image is limited by the oversized zippers of a shiny black jacket. The zipper is opened like a theater curtain; one is looking at the chest, in the interior, and is simply seeing those objects in which dwells memories - they refer to teaching and knowledge, the glorified past, the nostalgia. The accompanying childhood photos of the two house producers can easily be added to this picture. Only now does it become clear that the cover of the record is the back area of this jacket, and there, 'Daft Punk’ is embroidered in red front. The black jacket on the album cover of 'Homework’ is still the fluffy blouson jacket of the mid-nineties; today, ten years later, it has become the slim-cut leather jacket designed by Hedi Slimane. This is worn by the two heroes in Electroma, and Daft Punk, at their concert. To the large end, there emerges a red light snaking from the top of the pyramid to the whole light-skeleton. 11 It crawls up on the two robots, grasps their suits and helmets. This turns around and appears on their backs in red light-emitting diodes: “Daft Punk”. The light goes out.
Bangalter operates with the typical composure of a pop star. Subdued, cool, polite and approachable. Surprisingly talkative, for someone who so rarely gives interviews. Only once does the red-haired Homem-Christo raise his head from the notepad lying beneath him, on which he scribbles dragons onto while talking. 12 That those two men, in faded T-shirts with Rock designs on them, are the most mythical figures of a decade of electronic music, is something one has to constantly remind oneself of.
De:Bug: How was your impression of the show? Have you met the expectations you had of the world tour?
Thomas Bangalter: We played a lot of shows in 1996. The current tour is of course very different from ten years ago, we’ve got much more hardware on the go - lots of sequencers, drum machines. We now work more with non-linear structures.
De:Bug: What does that mean?
Thomas Bangalter: It was just a completely different concept. Very conceptual, anyhow. After the tour for our first album in 1996 we went back to other activities - back into the studio, produced DVDs… Last year we asked ourselves what we could do live, how we’d go about it. Of course technology has changed a lot and we suddenly had very different ways of doing new things. This little aesthetic universe, what we’ve built up over the years…
De:Bug: Yes, this little universe; I’d like to talk about it.
Thomas Bangalter: It includes every video, the robot personalities, this small micro-world that we’ve built up around our music over the years. We asked ourselves how we could apply that into a live experience.
De:Bug: When you see you own show, do you ever wonder in what way you could have had the chance to intervene? The light technology seemed adjusted and programmed, can you spontaneously intervene music-wise at all?
Thomas Bangalter: First, I want to make this clear: we are the creators of this show. The way we present ourselves in our performance is characterized in the same light as the music; they are of equivalence. So we see that our area of expertise is also located there. This concept [that I speak of] is based more on a total experience - for us, it was mainly about developing a global event. More like a Broadway musical, for example. We also found it interesting that: if you see a big event, such as 'The Phantom of the Opera’ or 'CATS’, it is structurally the same thing every night, but the event does not decrease in its effect as a consequence. It is a spectacle; 13 the show is very structured and precise. We’re the operators of the music system and we’re trying to deliver a constant result. I think the show was not very ordinary. It has shown the future, but maintains a traditional aspect of entertainment. Entertainment, design and programming - and of course, opportunities for improvisation.
De:Bug: If one looks at the characters that play a role in your universe, all the little stories and symbols that pop up in the show - many of which are quotes as well, for example: the pyramid, the dollar sign, the robotics, and ultimately the usage of light. It had retro references, but technically was also in the future. Was it important, that all these symbols and characters of your universe were tied together into a personal story?
Thomas Bangalter: In many art forms, the older generation’s working on the basis of citations is not an unusual practice. Including influences and prescribing [them], as you know, represents a large part of artistic activity. But we are superficially concerned with that, to achieve something contemporary in substance and form. Something that does not yet exist.
De:Bug: Could you say something about the narrative structure of your show? It begins, first of all, with a heavily distorted and unrecognizable vocal sample: “Human Robot”, that increasingly becomes clearer, then followed by things like “Prime Time Story”, later incorporating the robot theme again. And at the end, “Human Together” on a giant light panel.
Thomas Bangalter: We don’t see in a very narrative tradition. You put things - symbols - in a certain order to arouse a predetermined emotional or physical reaction in others. But we don’t want to tell anyone a story as if it was like pictures hanging on the walls of a gallery - rather operating on an abstract, empirical way. 14 It is not very demonstrative of what we do: we want now that you feel it, and that you [also] feel it now. See, if one begins with “Robot Robot” and then a “Human Human Human”, that expands to “Human Together”, then that is at the first time very simple and also cliched, from where it comes and to what it becomes.
De:Bug: For that reason, the show is about shaping a conceptual work that is accessible to everyone, which isn’t barred and rather operates under the name of spectacle/entertainment - is that right?
Thomas Bangalter: Ahhh, I don’t actually know if it really is for the masses. We certainly don’t have the arsenal. At the end of the tour we might have reached three million people live, in fifty shows in two years, without playing on the radio, having a presence on TV or making a promo. It is exciting for us to understand what happened there. What the Internet is doing, and how the people communicate music. You’re right, there are very many people who come to our shows - but we are not represented in any of those charts, we are not present in the consumer system.
De:Bug: If I am correctly informed, you [two] are the artists with the biggest budget-items at Virgin; so how can one ever act outside of commercial relationships?
Thomas Bangalter: We are perfectly in between the underground, and the music system itself. Music for the masses is always subject to rules, and works on the basis of a system that tells people what to buy, what to hear - things that we don’t have anything to do with. I think our audience is mostly on websites; what they want to hear, how they want to be entertained, they are more interactive and self-determined in deciding.
De:Bug: [When you?] looked out into the audience, heard the people clapping rhythmically, singing along - stadium-rock atmosphere, it is, I just noticed, probably a stupid question… 15
Thomas Bangalter: No no…
De:Bug: It seems to me something, where I could imagine, that many musicians would find it uncomfortable if it occurred as a false response to their art…
Thomas Bangalter: I do think that we’re making pretty avant-garde music, but at the same time, there is a certain performance that we have constructed. Normally you have, however you say it no one who’s clapping in electronic music, who attend a spectacle. But we think that we release, especially also with the live album, something that is not so formal nor has ever existed. I think the concept of avant-garde has shifted to that effect, that one is not obliged to be against some position, but make something new - experiment. You see it in the seventies, today that is naturally more difficult; but just because something is underground, it’s just not the same as experimental any more. Take Stevie Wonder, or the Beatles, they are good example for musicians who are experimental and popular - or if one so wants - mainstream, at the same time.
De:Bug: Is it really the case that stories that have robots as heroes must always be sad stories?
Thomas Bangalter: No. If you mean our show, we want to describe nothing there; we also don’t feel that it is sad. We work very much non-verbally, and it is interesting what music does with people, how they touch them without making words, also actually without [needing] harmonies. What actually makes music 'happy music’? These are things above the knowledge regarding the mind.
De:Bug: But there are minor and major [keys], for example, which are already guidelines by means of which human emotions can be purposefully directed, right?
Thomas Bangalter: Yes, but those are only frequencies; I speak of a pure, physical point. Sound is yet only one frequency in Hz - 'cycles per second’. 20 Hz sub-basses are 20 cycles per second. But if you take a oscillator and boost the speed to 1000 cycles per second - or even up to 20,000 cycles per second, that would be 20 kHz. Also, what if you combine a chord, three or four sequencers, cycles, all together - [to create] something that generates a harmony or tones, how do you wish to explain then that something is sad or happy? Things like minor and major are merely second-hand human interpretations, perspectives that were shaped afterwards as a way to explain things or to name them. But they have nothing to do with when things get you to laugh, or to cry. That, no one can explain.
De:Bug: To me, it also seems to be a key point of your music, that one cannot say for sure whether it is light or dark. Oftentimes it sounds very happy to begin with, and first one slowly recognizes nuances, suddenly shines through these undertones, then all becomes very melancholy. For me, this has always produced a connection to a recent French school, to which I would include you beside Air, Phoenix and Sebastien Tellier. (At this point, De Homem-Christo looks up for the first time, an interested glance, somewhat quizzically, not really happy. He is attentive, but the pen has not yet left his hand.)
De:Bug: It seems to me sometimes a predetermined art, laying the finger on the button - an impact - that I explained to myself, most likely, with the minor chord. So what is this, please? 16
Thomas Bangalter: The truth is, as a musician you are only a witness to the effect that you produce randomly. The small lab rat in a cage - that is you. There is no reasonable way to explain what happened. Rationality - melancholy - nostalgia - on which you have ultimately no influence. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a sample, guitar or chords, you’re trying to be as objective as possible to see what this has for an effect, [but] whether it touches you or not, that is before anything a very self-referential and egoistical thing. Maybe the audience is also touched from that, maybe not. Maybe your grandmother was always listening to this one particular song that had a similar sequence of notes, then it works exactly for you. But it is not possible to share all of this, isn’t that right?
De:Bug: Well, one will be able to explain that somehow… (Now he [Homem-Christo] starts up, impressively, almost a little irritated:)
Homem-Christo: It is the music that we make. I think our approach to music is rather a universal one. When you think of Andy Warhol, and of pop art: it’s very easy for all to understand, very spontaneously, but maybe you feel something else later in reference to the art. We like the idea that something develops a language that is easy to understand, but which also can be very meaningful - and rich - and deep. But one that does not explicitly try to be so. We like that, as fans - and fortunately that is what we do, sometimes also what we feel. But all that we do is completely spontaneous. I know absolutely nothing. I know [in advance] neither a note nor a chord - I know nothing. Everything occurs unknowingly; why does one stop suddenly, why does one choose [to do so]? Why does one stop at a certain time? I don’t know, but they seem interesting follow-up questions for me.
De:Bug: Nicolas Godin of Air answered me on this question in an interview, that it has something to do with the sixth arrondissement, St. Germain.
Homem-Christo: Well, he was joking around with you.
De:Bug: It seemed to me that he was very much in earnest, he continued, and it made total sense to me, he said, that it maybe had something to do with it, that all of the musicians I’d spoken to were wearing V-necks. 17 However, you are indeed both robots, and here you’re wearing printed T-shirts with rounded necklines. (Bangalter and de Homem-Christo are now quite annoyed. They speak French to each other, are quick to agree, also a little gloomy:)
Thomas Bangalter: I don’t know, that is all nonsense. 18 Nicolas has certain ideas of his own. Air are a little different from us. They like it, how things look. They are somewhat… delicate.
Homem-Christo: They are more subtler. Much of what we like isn’t subtle any more; we like, for example, melodrama. A high degree of intensity, at the point and from the start. Physical emotion, like Lars von Trier. That is too much for many people, they do not like it because they think it’s not subtle enough. Because it is such an absolute feeling, so complete - we like it more obvious. 19
De:Bug: You have made a movie, now this immense light-show, [but] in the last few years have produced very little new music. Your interest has obviously decreased?
Thomas Bangalter: Yes, quite. 20
De:Bug: It seems that you have found other forms to express yourselves.
Thomas Bangalter: Yes, that’s right. We like the idea of experimentation. The music’s run out, now we’re concerned with rather the combination of different art forms. For us, the question has been put forwards [as to] how we can make music in the first place, also in terms of the form of the musical. Of that I’m not sure. Do you understand?
De:Bug: No.
Thomas Bangalter: We simply try to be as innovative as we were in the past. It seems to us that this is no longer possible on the path of pure music production. Electronic music is no longer the field of innovative developments. It is also, if you like, fully part of commerce, accepted, no longer part of a counter-movement. But it was always interesting for us, getting rid of boundaries and initiating something. De:Bug: In what way were you interested in counter-movement and resistance?
Thomas Bangalter: I think we are keen to make counter-culture a part of culture. Of course we are interested in the counter-culture. With the boundaries of playing something that is fully accepted, that is not very exciting. This is a contrast to the avant-garde artists of whom you have spoken, where it was always about defining themselves based on the counter-culture to what one understood as serious culture. I believe that nowadays it is much more about the edges of those two areas, and therefore, [about] looking at what the symbols of those systems are, and how I can position myself in it. I think it is now less about content, than it is about form and the channels it is received in. At the moment, with their concept of selling (only over the Internet/the buyer decides how much they are willing to pay), Radiohead are probably more experimental and revolutionary than all electronic musicians and their musical approach. Maybe our first album was thus more revolutionary than all that came before, because it was as bedroom-production and not so much because it set new content musical-style wise. Was is the style, or much rather the process, the approach, that was new and exciting about it?
De:Bug: So you mean innovations are found only on a formalistic level today?
Thomas Bangalter: Electronic music is an accepted mainstream genre like rock; at the same time, you have a new generation that takes after [it], that does not want to renew but still produces very, very good electronic music. Ed Banger, for example. Without even aspiring to be innovative or experimental. This is also in order. Just expressing themselves. It merely depends on the approach.
De:Bug: Finally, in all of those years, what was the more important influence: Pink Floyd, or Kraftwerk? (This is the question that Daft Punk thinks about the most intensely [out of all the others] today. For a long time, all is silent as they reflect on it.)
Thomas Bangalter: It depends on the Pink Floyd phase, the time. Actually, one must talk about albums. It’s true that we are very much influenced by those bands, above all, because we aren’t there just for the music, but a more comprehensive approach behind it.
De:Bug: That’s not a definite answer.
Thomas Bangalter: Yes, but it’s also still an answer, isn’t it?
That’s all. There may be edits as better people than I approach this text, and/or additional footnotes - but for now my work is done! Thank you for reading. - 31st March 2015, Translated by Magistralucis
Footnotes
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I should mention that I’ve changed some formatting in the article so that it will read better. Album titles were indicated with double quotation marks in the original text (e.g. “Alive”); because they represent creative output, I eliminated the quotation marks and italicized the titles in question (e.g. Alive). Same goes for film titles. Artist/band names are represented with no quotation marks whatsoever. Place names are not italicized. Sometimes there are words in square brackets that are not literally present in the original text, but are implied/required for better comprehension. Hyphens, semicolons and sometimes entire sentence breaks are present - they are for most part definitely not in the original German text, but I needed them for the translation to flow better. ↩
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I think this is the order of events that the interviewer was going through. (’Viel später, eigentlich erst, als mir im Anflug von Heiterkeit auf dem heimischen Teppich die Idee aufkam, die “Greatest Hits“ von Queen neben Daft Punks “Alive“ zu stellen, sie anzuschauen, ganz kurz reinhörte, da begann ich ein bisschen von all dem zu verstehen’) It’s a bitch of a sentence. I’m sorry. I tried. ↩
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Figurative term for 'successors of Daft Punk’, I assume. ↩
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The word ’Zitate’, frequently translated as 'quote’/'quotation’/'reference’/'citation’ here, encompasses a variety of meanings depending on the context and there isn’t really a single English word that captures exactly how this article uses it. It’s not referring to spoken-word or literary quotations only, but rather a general referencing or intertextuality of signs, symbols, words, musical or aesthetic quotations. ↩
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Dark Side of the Moon album cover here for reference; Alive 2007 pyramid and DP’s location within it herefor reference. ↩
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Roland TR-909 drum machine. ↩
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’… verdrogt’. Huh. ↩
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This is a strange sentence; I think the 'marriage’ bit is meant to be a metaphor. They are the directors who worked on the videos for Homework (Spike Jonze - 'Da Funk’ / Michel Gondry - 'Around the World’ / Roman Coppola - 'Revolution 909’). ↩
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This entire section requires reference to the inside cover of Homework, here for reference. I was struggling a lot with this part. It’s probably the most heavily-rewritten section in this translation because some of the sentences here literally could not work in English without a great deal of help; if somebody can help with a more authentic translation that also is better comprehensible, please contact me! ↩
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Interesting use of 'signifier’ (’Signifikanten’). This word is definitely to be understood in Sassurean terms (I checked), with reference to the signifier-signified relation of a sign. I was interested in the article’s possible implication that those objects laying around in that picture are signifiers that are lacking in a signified, or at least, have lost their signified concepts a long time ago, hence the frequent callbacks to Daft Punk’s appeal to nostalgia. (Does anyone think it could also be the case that, carrying on the semiotic interpretation, that Daft Punk’s creative method is primarily about producing continuous paroles without ever descending into langue?) ↩
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The full sentence is ’Dort schält sich zum großen Ende eine rote Leuchtschlange von der Spitze der Pyramide um das ganze Lichtskelett’. I… I couldn’t do any better. I admit to not fully understanding this part. ↩
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What the christ? ↩
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Thomas presumably means by 'spectacle’ some kind of all-encompassing, but constant display (evident by the phrase 'total experience’) and not Debordian 'spectacle/mass media’. Or he might be, it is like Daft Punk in general to be self-critical. If that’s the case, I’d like to volunteer the term ’Gesamtkunstwerk’… ↩
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Surely 'abstract’ and 'empirical’ are contradictions. This is only one of many sentences that makes me think that Thomas is oversimplifying in this interview, and that their ethos is actually even more complicated than what he’s said throughout all of it. ↩
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This question is muddled in translation, because the interviewer did not finish it. ↩
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Minor scales tend to sound sadder and more subdued. ↩
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I’m really not sure how to parse this entire sentence, or what parts of it were being said by Nicolas Godin. There is nothing to indicate those. I parsed it as ’It seemed to me that [Godin] was very much in earnest. [Godin] continued, and it made total sense to me, [Godin] said, that it maybe had something to do with it, that all of the musicians I’d spoken to were wearing V-necks’ but this may be completely and utterly wrong. ↩
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This sentence is ambiguous to me as well, but most likely it’s just me being dumb. The German is ’Ich weiß nicht, das ist alles Quatsch’; depending on whether you read that as ’I don’t know, that is all nonsense’ (literally) or something more like ’I’m not sure if that is all nonsense’, the meaning completely changes… ↩
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I assume he went back to doodling dragons at this point. Follow your dreams, Guy-Manuel! ↩
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It’s really rather quaint reading this in a post-RAM era. Just a thought. ↩