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Q&A: DAFT PUNK
(EXCERPT): Highlights from Issue 36: Expatriate
Highlights from Issue 36: Expatriate
Photograph by DAVID BLACK / Set Art Direction by PETER KLEIN
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The complete Stop Smiling Interview with Daft Punk appears in the Expatriate Issue. What follows is an excerpted portion of the interview.
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DAFT PUNK: ELECTROMA THERAPY
BY MATT DIEHL
By 2007, the robots had conclusively taken over. Just two years earlier, however, their fate was not so certain. In early spring 2005, Daft Punk, the mysterious, iconoclastic French electronic-music duo comprised of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo released Human After All to a resounding critical thud. Pitchfork gave the third album a pathetic 4.9 rating, dismissing its ugly, repetitive grooves as “not just a failure, but a heartbreaker.”
It’s not surprising that expectations were running high. Daft Punk’s previous album, 2001’s Discovery, proved a masterpiece to both hipsters and the masses: Finally dance music had its own Sgt. Pepper’s. Discovery’s infectious lead single “One More Time” became a global smash, pushing the album to sell nearly three million copies, but it was the eerily perfect post-mod popcraft of tracks like “Digital Love,” along with a witty use of samples and contributions from underground house heroes Todd Edwards and Romanthony, that cemented its status as a pop-culture event. With Discovery, Daft Punk surpassed the standard for classic electronic albums they had set themselves with their 1997 debut LP, Homework, driven by instant-classic club hits “Around the World” and “Da Funk.” That Daft Punk refused to be photographed out of their new robot-mask costumes only added to their allure; the paranoid-android gambit proved simultaneously sublime and ridiculous, heightening their provocateur mystique.
Human After All’s malaise would not prove fatal, however, as proven by Daft Punk’s now-legendary comeback set in late April 2006 at the Coachella Music Festival, where they revealed an ingeniously kinetic multimedia light show built around the hypnotic pulsations of a pyramid grid, along with music revitalized with new techno logic. Even the disturbing Human After All material inspired blissful paroxysms on the dance floor.
The robots finally had their revenge, with Daft Punk’s legend multiplying exponentially via the resulting YouTubed-to-death tour. Paris was now burning with genre-irreverent club kids like Justice, SebastiAn and Kavinsky who clearly worshipped at the Daft Punk altar (many godfathered by Daft’s then-manager Busy P). Across Europe, acts like Soulwax, Digitalism and Boys Noize dutifully absorbed Daft’s signature vocoder vox, squelching Eighties synths and electro beats; the trend spread as far as Australia via the likes of Cut Copy, the Presets, Midnight Juggernauts and Van She. Every day seemed to send a new Daft Punk bootleg remix exploding across the Internet; even in dance-music-resistant USA, indietronica gurus LCD Soundsystem and hip-hop royals Busta Rhymes and Kanye West all paid tribute. When Daft Punk performed onstage with West at the 2008 Grammy Awards, the robot revolution was finally televised, landing in the living rooms of mainstream America.
Daft Punk hadn’t run out of provocations, however. The new goodwill threatened to be tossed out the window with the premiere of Bangalter and de Homem-Christo’s feature film directorial debut, Daft Punk’s Electroma, at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Audience members exited en masse; the scene repeated itself in 2007 at a series of midnight screenings across America. Electroma divided audiences: Many viewers were repulsed by the shocking images; others were dulled by the narrative’s glacial pacing and long silences. The film’s biggest offense, however, appeared to be the utter lack of Daft Punk music on the soundtrack, replaced instead by a grab bag of tracks ranging from Eno and Curtis Mayfield to Chopin and trippy Seventies folk oddity Linda Perhacs.
Despite its confrontational surface, Electroma — just released stateside on DVD in late July — may prove to be a masterwork on par with Daft Punk’s other efforts (including Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, their underrated 2003 feature-length musical anime collaboration with famed Japanese director Leiji Matsumoto). Electroma hangs its willful weirdness on a plot with the linear simplicity of Greek tragedy: two robots (actors Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich sporting Daft Punk’s stage outfits) set out on a journey to become human, only to find themselves cast out of society, left to wander the harsh California desert contemplating their destiny.
Wall-E it ain’t, but Electroma improves greatly after repeated viewings, revealing artfulness under uncompromising experimental indulgence. Just as Daft Punk transforms music samples, in Electroma Bangalter and de Homem-Christo cunningly remix any number of challenging art films, cult obscurities and B-movies. In a single scene, Electroma might simultaneously reference Jean-Luc Godard’s breathless jump-cutting, Terrence Malick’s magic-hour meditations, Brian De Palma’s satirical rock opera Phantom of the Paradise, Tod Browning’s horrific Freaks, THX 1138’s dystopian futurism, David Lynch’s perverse Americana, Woody Allen’s absurd sci-fi Sleeper, and white-knuckle road movies like Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop. Electroma’s explosive existential climax, meanwhile, pays tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Sixties freak-out Zabriskie Point, while the epic cinematography (by Bangalter himself) evokes high-art imagery spanning Magritte’s quiet surrealist scenes to Courbet’s nude “The Source.” This all adds up to Electroma’s hallucinatory, pop-cultured exploration of the American mindset via landscape, paralleling Daft Punk’s own long, strange trip to now. Bangalter himself found he was a stranger in a strange land when he migrated from Paris to Los Angeles in 2005 with his wife, French actress Élodie Bouchez, when she took a part on the network TV series Alias. In a sprawling conversation with STOP SMILING, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo explain how this move resulted in Daft Punk largely moving their base of operations to LA, setting the stage for both the group’s unlikely Coachella comeback and Electroma’s maverick production.
Stop Smiling: I had a very interesting reaction to Electroma. The first time I saw it, I hated it; the second, third and fourth time I saw it, I loved it.
Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo: Cool, I’m happy you didn’t like it the first time. You’re not the only one.
Thomas Bangalter: That you watched our film more than twice is interesting considering what we were trying to do. When we were conceiving Electroma, we knew it was not specifically an entertaining experience on the first viewing. We were thinking more of the long-term effect that the images would have.
GH: Electroma was an attempt to break the formula that is everywhere now in cinema. Watching movies today is a very passive experience: A lot happens on the screen, but as soon as you walk out, you don’t remember anything. Most of the big blockbusters are like that — the more I watch them, the faster I forget them. Electroma is maybe too artsy for some, but when you get into it, you have more of an active response.
SS: You’ve referenced classic “midnight movies” as an influence on Electroma. In a way, the midnight movie back in the day was a communal, proto-rave ritual.
TB: We’re very happy that, in Paris, Electroma has shown for the past two years as a midnight movie. Every Saturday night, 50 to 150 people come and watch it. The interactive process is very interesting.
GH: When we were kids, we’d go see Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight: People would act really crazy and dress as the characters in the movie. If Electroma can be a little bit of that, great — that’s the way it should be.
TB: The development of a subculture of uncontrolled gatherings is interesting to us. Even though it’s unrealistic to do nowadays, Electroma was created very much as a theatrical experience. In a very naïve, simple sense, we photographed the images to be projected on a big screen in a dark room, not thinking about any other context.
SS: One reason I keep coming back to Electroma is how aggressively experimental it is — it unabashedly challenges the audience. Its uncompromised artistic indulgence reminds me of classic experimental independent film — iconoclastic works from filmmakers like Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol. It’s provocative, as opposed to something designed for mass appeal.
TB: In a lot of cult films, the film stands for the memory of the visual experience of a film. That’s one of the central themes: How can you define a story or experience where the memory becomes more interesting than the experience itself? Why do some images stay with you, and some lose their primal impact, now that we’re surrounded by a saturation of images all the time? We’re really drawn to strong concepts that trigger viewers onto not a mind trip, but an intellectual process. Whether sensual or physical, it’s ultimately emotional, linked to how your brain interprets images. The difference with music is that because it’s often in a shorter form, you can listen to music while doing something else; it becomes the soundtrack of our lives and memories. You can listen to a song a thousand times, whereas it’s unlikely that you’ll watch a movie a thousand times.