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What does daft punk leave behind.

Andrew Flanagan

On Monday, the ur-French-dance-music duo Daft Punk announced – via the slick and typically cryptic video above, featuring a dramatic self-destruct sequence – that it was hanging up the helmets and leather jackets for good.

The pair, born Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, began making music in the early '90s, raving through that effervescent decade and leaving it, with the release of Homework in 1997, in a blissed-neon glow. Over the next 10 years – most notably with Discovery in 2001, a legacy-cementing tour in 2007 and the mystique-enhancing break they left in-between (not to mention all that came after) – Bangalter and Homem-Christo became the steel-and-silicon giants they'd wished themselves into being, while unwittingly setting the stage for a different type of machine altogether.

Daft Punk's music is and always will be formidable, but the roots and future of its legacy aren't yet crystal clear. NPR Music asked a few experts to consider what the two did for them personally, and what that might mean for the history books.

It all started in the Midwest

It's easy to equate Daft Punk with disco loops – like all good crate-diggers, as they aged they leaned heavily into exploring the lineage of where their samples had come from. But when I think of Daft Punk I always think of Chicago house in the '90s, the pair's adulation of which was no secret. "Teachers," track nine on their 1997 debut Homework , is a spoken incantation of influences that name-checks Midwest greats like Paul Johnson , DJ Sneak , DJ Rush , Romanthony and DJ Deeon – Black and brown artists who didn't have Daft Punk-sized budgets, DJs that may have gotten their flowers in the underground, but are definitely at risk of being forgotten in successive waves of digitalism and cultural Coachella-fication. Just as Berlin had a special bond with Detroit techno, Paris and Daft Punk developed a unique relationship with Chicago, applying chic filters, rock distortion and high-gloss mastering to the city's unctuously loopy disco house, squealing acid and raw stripped-back jack trax. This became the "French touch" sound, with Daft Punk at the center: Guy-Manuel with his Crydamoure label and Thomas Bangalter via Roulé records and Stardust, his collaboration with fellow DJ Alan Braxe (which yielded 1998's inescapable dancefloor sing-along, "Music Sounds Better With You").

At some point, Daft Punk became more than the sum of their parts – actually, they became robots, with a giant f***-off stage show, highly stylized movie-length videos and Grammy trophies. They weren't for me anymore – they were for everybody. It wasn't about twirling on the dance floor at Chicago's Route 66 roller-rink, a sea of phat pants and Polo caps erupting into a cheer as the first squelchy, cartoon notes of "Da Funk" hit the mix. Daft Punk was now at the grocery store, the gym, the festival, on TV. I didn't love them any less – their Alive 2007 show at Coney Island's Keyspan Park was one of the best live electronic music shows I've ever seen – but I listened to them less purposefully, absorbing them in the atmosphere the way one does pop music.

Younger artists excited me, as they amplified fragments of Daft Punk's vision into whole other styles. Longtime Daft Punk manager Pedro Winter explored a hundred juicy tangents of the duo's sound with his Ed Banger label: Justice, picking up where "Robot Rock" left off, took rock distortion in electronic to the nth degree; Sebastian and Feadz leaned into dramatic effects and sample cuts; Kavinsky's '80s keyboard obsession (and Drive soundtrack) almost single-handedly started synth wave. Fellow Parisian label Institubes explored a Punk-esque mix of avant-garde ideas and ghetto house, while Berliner Boys Noize is still artfully applying the duo's mixing and compression techniques as he surfs big waves of cheeky-yet-raw European house.

Yet most of the Daft Punk clips surfacing right now are their least stylized; they're more about [ Ed: As in, this entire article, I suppose... ] how the group (and especially their live performances) made people feel. One of the most popular is a YouTube clip of a very young Daft Punk playing live at Wisconsin rave Even Further in 1996 – a reminder that no matter how many "Get Lucky"'s they might have made in the future, somewhere in there they're still two kids tweaking drum machines relentlessly in the middle of the night. It doesn't matter if Daft Punk disbands or not because that essence never dies. Daft Punk forever. – Vivian Host is a journalist, DJ/producer and host of the Rave to the Grave podcast. She loves berry pie, Sharpies and giant speaker stacks.

The notion that Daft Punk were once underground dance music "populists" hasn't aged well — the underground isn't associated with many Grammys for best album, and most anti-elitist notions have taken a decidedly right-wing turn in our collective consciousness. But at the time of the duo's legendary 2007 Alive tour, their aspirations to build a bigger dance tent, while deprogramming mainstream dancing biases — the residue of both the "disco sucks" era and the boom-bap '90s defeat of house and techno as commercial genres — felt mass revolutionary in the best ways. The tour also came on the heels of an era when culturally conservative reactions to the racially and sexually mixed club scene saw raves illegalized by the feds, and popular dance spots shut down in city after gentrifying American city. Before the myth that "Daft Punk's pyramid changed everything" would end up propping up Coachella, EDM, the live dance market as a whole and much of non-hip-hop-related pop, dance music needed larger-than-life champions, and at that moment, les robots Francais consciously embraced the role.

That embrace manifested itself in one unlikely, but perfect, creative choice: the stage walk-on music for the American Alive shows: Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out For a Hero," from the 1984 Kevin Bacon film Footloose . "Hero" is Bonnie Tyler and Meat Loaf producer Jim Steinman's follow-up to "Total Eclipse of the Heart," a personification of over-indulged, synth-driven orchestral '80s cheese, yet also the kind of overt, emotional pop that made sense for a French act which had embraced disco's big, hook-filled gestures.

Aesthetically, it stood out like a sore thumb, welcoming a crowd made up of not only the die-hards but those who just wanted to find the best party. As an anthemic earworm from a soundtrack that spawned numerous hits, "Hero" was pop-spotting 101, an invitation to even the most culturally unhip helping Daft Punk pack minor league baseball stadiums and festival headline spots. More pointed was the song's source, a B movie about a Chicago high school kid that loves to dance, whose move to a conservative small town which has banned dancing sees him rebel and start a youthful uprising. Footloose was based on the laws of the very real Elmore, Okla., but Daft Punk was into liberation on a greater scale. "Holding Out For a Hero" wouldn't have worked as well as it did, had what followed not boldly lived up to the fight. – Piotr Orlov lives in Brooklyn, and writes regularly at Dada Strain .

"Digital Love"

My golden Daft Punk memory is not witnessing their 1996 U.S. debut at a muddy Wisconsin rave, or meeting the duo at their home-from-home in the Hollywood Hills in 2013. It's dancing to "Digital Love" with my two-year-old son in 2001, the year Discovery came out. The childhood link – if not my own, then my kid's – cuts to the core of Daft Punk. As hinted by the title itself, Discovery felt like a flashback to pop's primal scene: those first encounters, ears cupped to a transistor radio or eyes glued to the TV screen, with otherworldly transmissions from Planet Pop. A magical recovery of that pre-teen openness to everything, before you've learned the rules of cool and uncool.

On Discovery , Daft Punk took their existing filter-disco sound, as explained on tracks like "Musique," and blended in a palette of textures and tones sourced in 1970s radio rock at its most overground, overproduced and over-lit. This was the yacht-rock move, almost a decade ahead of chillwave or groups like Haim. But in Daft Punk's case, the balance of irony and awe leans far more to the latter. There's a transcendent artificiality to "Digital Love" especially, a splendor of sound at once camp and sublime. The hazy glaze of the filter effect on the twirling main riff is like plastic if it could rust. At the breakdown, Supertramp's keyboard sound is duplicated with eerie exactness (or not so eerie exactness, given that Daft Punk used the exact same Wurlitzer piano as the English soft rock group). Then there's the ridiculous majesty of that Van Halen-style guitar solo, frothing and bubbling over like a geyser of hot-pink liquid latex. Yet, within all the delicious knowing allusions, the heart of "Digital Love" aches with unrequited longing: it's a rewrite of "Jump" tilted to the tentative, whose last words implore "why don't you play the game?"

"Digital Love" is such an epic distillation of What Daft Punk Is All About that it's still slightly bemusing to remember it was the third single off Discovery and only a modest hit. Admittedly, on the album "Digital Love" jostles with rival delights: lead single "One More Time," with its astonishingly protracted minute-and-half breakdown during which the beat absconds leaving just Romanthony's Auto-Tune-crackling ecstasy; the baroque excess of "Aerodynamic"; frantic electro-funk bangers "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and "Crescendolls"; the shimmering 10cc homage "Nightvision" and bittersweet ballad "Something About Us"; "Veridis Quo", which sounds like the credits theme for a French movie about a lonely girl who's just moved to Paris.

Fans photographed on the eve of Daft Punk's album launch, held in the tiny Australian town of Wee Waa, on May 17, 2013. Shanna Whan/AFP/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Fans photographed on the eve of Daft Punk's album launch, held in the tiny Australian town of Wee Waa, on May 17, 2013.

Still, "Digital Love" is The One as far as I'm concerned: a wondrous fusion of disco, AOR, glam metal and New Wave (the choppy guitar-riff breakdown practically forces you to dance in jumpy formation like you're in a Toni Basil video). The actual promo for "Digital Love", like its precursor singles, was hewn from Daft Punk's anime movie Interstella 5555 , a project that captured an abiding truth about pop as well as forecasting its emerging destiny in the 21st century: pop's pulpy essence has far more to do with cartoons, comics and video games than literature or the other high arts.

Of course, in a move that seems in hindsight both logical and fatal, Daft Punk fell out of "digital love." They abandoned sampling and embarked upon the back-to-analogue quest of Random Access Memories : an attempt to turn back time and resurrect the pop monoculture of the late '70s and early '80s, ruled by performers and producers like Chic, Giorgio Moroder and Michael Jackson. RAM was a conceptual and commercial triumph, but ultimately a dead end – where on Earth could the duo go next? How could they hope to top "Get Lucky" being on the radio each and every hour for an entire year, the six Grammys and the awards ceremony jam session with Stevie Wonder and Nile Rodgers? As a commentary on our atemporal and digitally-overdriven epoch, RAM provided a heaping portion of food-for-thought. But since it came out, I've never once felt the urge to play the record. Whereas "Digital Love" and Discovery are perennial, always there when I need an intravenous jolt of insta-joy. Happy daze. – Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture and operates a number of blogs centered around Blissblog .

Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem and Leiji Matsumoto

To me, Daft Punk lives most vividly in the early aughts — more specifically, in the liminal space between Cartoon Network's Toonami and Adult Swim and in the late hours when they would air reruns of older programs. It was there that I first saw Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem in parts, which I'd later find out would form the whole of a playful animated film the duo created, in collaboration with manga artist Leiji Matsumoto and director Kazuhisa Takenouchi. Set to their second record, Discovery , the movie features a band of interstellar performers, designed in the familiar style of Matsumoto's work and other popular 1970s sci-fi anime, with their long limbs, sideburns and big, dramatic eyes.

As kids, Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo had watched Captain Harlock , one of Matsumoto's beloved works. The titular character's image – his mysterious one-eyed gaze, the skull detailing on his outfit and his wine glass – stayed with them. Captain Harlock was a hero that found his place in the stars. In many ways, Daft Punk did, too. There's a chivalrous air that persists in Interstella , as there was in Captain Harlock , that locks you into the lightness and romance of their retrofuturism. It's fitting, then, that Discovery is the album where Daft Punk finds inspiration in the past's popular sounds.

"It was as if spacemen or androids had arrived from outer space," Matsumoto said, recalling his first encounter with Daft Punk. It may have looked like that — with the duo decked out in suits and their robot heads — but the encounter was closer to young boys meeting their childhood idol. Meanwhile, Matsumoto loved French films growing up. Perhaps this is what leveled the field in the making of Interstella , which has no dialogue and very little in the way of sound effects. Image and sound are set up in a perpetual trust fall, but rather than recreating risk, they seek to recreate childlike joy. – Alex Ramos is an artist, writer and NPR Music's editorial intern.

Scotland slows down to "Da Funk"

In 1995, I was resident DJ at Pure in Edinburgh – probably one of the wildest clubs to ever exist. Perceived by many as a techno club, myself and Andy, my co-DJ, were always trying to shatter people's preconceived notions as to what could and should play inside the club.

One barrier that was particularly hard to tear down was the one constructed around tempo: Any time I dropped the tempo below 120 beats per minute, I was guaranteed to be on the receiving end of a lot of moans and groans. Then "Da Funk" came out. It was as if tempo absolutism instantly melted away. "Da Funk" had all the energy and power the dancefloor demanded, but it was that groove , combined with the incessant earworm of a riff that gave it instant anthem status.

I think the fact that "Da Funk" initially came out on Soma, a Scottish label, meant that this was one of the first parts of the world where they were ecstatically embraced. Ultimately I feel "Da Funk" helped point a way forward for me to contemplate the possibility of running a club night beyond the confines of genre or tempo rigidity. – JD Twitch .

So long, and thanks for all the bros

You can distill the arc of 21st-century dance music, from niche concern to billion-dollar industry, into one 75-minute DJ set, which doubles as my favorite Daft Punk record. Alive 2007 , and the 18-month world tour in which it was recorded, is the ultimate "you had to be there, man" concert experience of this century so far; I wasn't. (I have like three regrets in life, and that's No. 2.) Only, in a way, you didn't have to be there: 10 seconds in, as "Robot Rock" stutters to a start and the crowd explodes, you close your eyes and you basically are. Back then, I'd watch YouTube footage from the tour and feel as if I was on drugs, and on the occasion I was on drugs, I felt as though I was in heaven (God, as it turned out, was not just a DJ, but two of them).

The Alive tour and its recording opened the floodgates for dance music as mass culture, which is cool in theory and fairly disastrous in practice — a Pandora's box for all sorts of soulless industry cash-grabs and stupid pyrotechnics. What makes Daft Punk's legacy so relevant, I think, is that it wasn't the inherently positive force it had seemed to be circa Alive 2007 , when bands sold their guitars and bought turntables and the DJ became the new rock star. There's an argument that it was exactly the formulaic computer music Daft Punk inadvertently inspired which prompted their analogue turn on Random Access Memories , released at the peak of EDM oversaturation: "Whoops, sorry we laid the foundation for an empire of s***. Here's our million-dollar oldies record. Peace out!" Looking back, maybe Alive 2007 did more harm than good. When I press play, I couldn't care less. – Meaghan Garvey is a writer and artist from Chicago.

Robots before, and after, all

Tron: Legacy was always a sci-fi blockbuster best understood as a silent film. Apart from Jeff Bridges' opening monologue as Kevin Flynn, taking us back to the arcade game's first spark of creation, little needs to be said in the sequel, set decades after the original. From a motorcycle chase on Earth to lightcycle races, gravity-defying battles and flying ships within Tron , there's a visual vocabulary to this digital fantasia: dark shadows are lit in neon stripes, as bodies boldly stride, fight and glare with a pre-talkie flair. Even Bridges, master of dude-ly understatement, announces his quiet presence with demonstrative volume.

In the Tron universe, The Grid was developed offline, away from and before the Internet's pervasive influence on the outside world; likewise, Daft Punk scored a digital frontier of its own making. The duo spent two years composing, arranging and orchestrating with Joseph Trapanese, blurring the line between synths and strings, but also deepening their symphonic relationship. The quickening strings of "Outlands" mimic a taut synthesizer sequence. "The Game Has Changed" charges the arena with a mix of organic and digital drums that push up against glitching bombast. "Derezzed," the soundtrack's only single, whizzes with an unlocked character's energy — we see Daft Punk on screen, as they play themselves up as party DJs for underworld extravagance. Even in tender moments of reflection, there's harmonic nuance: unease for an unknown world, but also a euphoric embrace for its possibility. How many nights have I drifted asleep to Tron: Legacy only to be awoken by the overture's stirring motif, rebuilt as a club banger for the closing credits? Bio-digital jazz, man. – Lars Gotrich is a producer and resident Viking at NPR Music.

On becoming a helmet

Music has no shortage of enigmas and recluses, operating quietly and in contrast to artists who live perpetually online or otherwise actively seek the spotlight. Coming from dance music's sweaty underground and no doubt informed by the so-called "faceless" techno tradition of acts like Underground Resistance, Daft Punk always fit best in the former category. Giving scarcely few interviews as their career took them from electronic music favorites to chrome-domed idols, and almost never showing their faces, their notoriety grew with their near-anonymous public image as, well, robots.

While many artists employ pseudonyms to showcase their work, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo took the concept to another level after the modest-yet-significant success of 1997's Homework , an eclectic album that clearly conveyed admiration for their diverse influences. By Discovery , a full-throated house music homage, they donned helmets as conjoined cybernetic identities, adding depth to the mystique. Aided by a vague sci-fi backstory, the immersion afforded to the duo by their custom, instantly signature masks obliterated the fact that we knew their real names and their roots in the Parisian DJ scene. This facade allured and repelled to different degrees, drawing curious listeners in while maintaining a certain distance from the artists themselves.

Daft Punk, performing on Oct. 27, 2007 in Las Vegas. Karl Walter/Getty Images hide caption

Daft Punk, performing on Oct. 27, 2007 in Las Vegas.

These android personas allowed for a kind of world building, both in virtual and physical spaces, where Daft Punk could create without the messiness of human expectations or interaction. Like with the recently departed emcee MF DOOM, who famously sent imposters to play some of his live shows, one could never be entirely certain that the pair on stage or on screen was, in fact, the real deal or a couple of stand-ins. Even when lending their technical skills to the formidable likes of Kanye West and The Weeknd, artists who presently spend no shortage of time in public-facing capacities, Daft Punk held onto their automatonic asceticism. When they scored one of the biggest hits of the 2000s with "Get Lucky," they stayed in muted character as highly visible collaborators Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers pantomimed the boogie in its music video.

Seeing Daft Punk as robots, committing to the fantasy on both ends of the experiential transaction, enhanced the listening experience. Though the aesthetic insularity of the underrated gem Human After All perhaps best captures that ethos, the far more popular Random Access Memories came across like an aggressively learning A.I., the connections with legends Giorgio Moroder and Paul Williams feeling like technological advancement rather than a divergence from the mission's directives. Even as they borrowed, often wholesale, from the disco and funk crates across the discography, their use of vocoder and other vocal tools kept fans vested in the moment and the myth. – Gary Suarez is a freelance music critic and journalist born, raised, and based in New York City.

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Daft Punk's live recordings and video from 'Alive 2007' tour

If you weren't lucky enough to catch Daft Punk on the inexplicably rockin' live arena tour this past summer, check out the next best thing: an official live recording of the group's June 2007 show in Paris.

With three stellar albums under its shiny metallic belts, Homework (1997), Discovery (2001), and Human After All (2005), the helmet-wearing heroes known as Daft Punk continue to win new fans across the globe with the group's bangin' blend of acid-house, funk, electro, hip-hop, and love of a good sample as heard in hits including "Da Funk," "Around The World," and "Harder Better Faster Stronger," among others. Speaking of which, I couldn't believe it took someone like Kanye to discover the talent behind the duo which in turn went on and sampled "Harder Better Faster Stronger" for his hit single "Stronger." Since then, Daft Punk received more publicity in '07 than any other year with sold out shows to prove it.

If you weren't lucky enough to catch Daft Punk on its inexplicably rockin' live arena tour this past summer, check out the next best thing: an official live recording of the duo's June 2007 show in Paris (as if you needed more proof of Daft Punk's subhuman awesomeness).

Listen to the new album "Alive 2007" here !

Watch the video shot by fans during the "Alive 2007" tour in Brooklyn on August 9 here !

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Best New Music

By Ryan Dombal

November 20, 2007

The blitzing “Pimp My Pyramid” scheme. The pulsing honeycomb. The tiny metal heads bobbing up and down. The Lite-Brite leather jacket reveal. The dude in front of me who wouldn’t let a pair of crutches stop him from dancing as if the apocalypse were mere minutes away. The sensual explosion that was Daft Punk ’s Alive 2007 show is difficult to overstate—or reproduce. Even with the biggest, flattest, sharpest HD setup, there's no way to sufficiently recreate the most exuberant LED-laden music blowout ever staged. So Daft Punk didn’t even try: There will be no Alive 2007 DVD.

Commenting on the decision, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter recently told Pitchfork, “The thousands of clips on the internet are better to us than any DVD that could have been released.” And, in many ways, the Alive tour is a perfect match for YouTube—the ancient Egypt by-way-of “The Jetsons” spectacle barrelling its way through shitty compression quality with blinding force. But still, even the most hectic web clip can’t equal the French duo’s visceral sound-and-vision assault, so the focus of Alive 2007 falls on the reason why Daft Punk were allowed to lug 11 tons of equipment around the world for the last 19 months in the first place: their music. Playing like a flawlessly sequenced and paced greatest hits album, this full-set Paris recording from June finds Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo connecting the booms among their three albums while officially cementing one of the year’s most rewarding and welcomed comebacks.

Lest we forget, before the out-of-nowhere debut of the now-iconic 3D triangle in April 2006, it seemed like Daft Punk lost the plot. The monster riffage and mind-numbing gloom of 2005’s Human After All had our favorite party-starters turning downright nihilistic. And early screenings of their art-house opus, Electroma , evoked (unfortunately accurate) comparisons to Vincent Gallo’s on-the-road/oral sex epic Brown Bunny (except with endless scenes of hunk-o-metal ennui filling in for the graphic oral sex). After the shattering pop breakthrough of 2001’s Discovery , Daft Punk were going through an especially angsty adolescence—their spit-shined heads way up their own asses. But then, amped-up with enough electricity to illuminate a black hole, French house’s masked men upstaged Madonna , previous electronic pioneers Depeche Mode , and (ironically) Kanye West at 2006’s Coachella. And now, they’re everywhere (except Gap ads, thankfully)—getting sampled on No. 1 hip-hop songs, filling magazine spreads, spawning worthy would-be successors and, of course, owning the internet (on Flickr, Daft Punk photos currently outnumber Justin Timberlake snaps 2:1). With a bounty of latent good will on their side thanks to the incredible re-playability of their first two albums, Daft Punk finally gave fans a million flashing reasons to fall in love with them all over again.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Alive 2007 is how well it recontextualizes career nadir Human After All , turning previously leaden songs into ebullient rock’n’roll manifestos; injected with Homework ’s air-tight Moroder -style anthems or Discovery ’s flamboyant funk, Human After All tracks are constantly improved and born anew. The live set doesn’t simply run through the hits, mindlessly segueing from one smash to another. Instead, well-worn favorites are glued together, cut-up and mashed into pieces. The titular refrains of “Television Rules the Nation” and “Around the World” combine to form the globe’s most dance-friendly TV station theme song before the Black Sabbath crunch of “Television” is sent down upon the impossibly buoyant “Crescendolls,” resulting in the disc’s most unlikely-yet-spectacular roller coaster peak. Meanwhile, the creepy hiss of “Steam Machine” is atomized and given space-age dynamics, turning it from a oddball bore into a fist-pumping celebration of the industrial age. Wisely, the duo also know when to let the bass be, allowing large portions of unfuckwithable classics like “Da Funk” and “Burnin’” to work their magic with little robo-meddling. Even without video, Alive 2007 is an exercise in exacting excess, from the blaring “Robot Rock” intro to a wide-eyed power-booster of a encore that layers “One More Time" atop “ Music Sounds Better With You ”—a combination so “holy shit” ecstatic it would seem downright cocky if it wasn’t so blissful.

Talking about the relationship between artist and audience, Bangalter told Paper , “Robots don’t make people feel like there’s an idol on stage. It’s more like a rave party where the DJ isn’t important. We are two robots in this pyramid with this light show, but everything is [meant] for you to have fun and enjoy yourself.” He’s absolutely right about the “have fun and enjoy yourself” bit, but the Alive tour separated itself from the millions of DJ parties before it by drawing attention to a fixed point while incorporating everything from Kiss -esque pomp to Space Invaders retro-future shock. The results were massive—the myriad “best show ever” kudos deserved. And, just as they hold back their identities at every chance, it makes sense for Daft Punk to hold back the Alive visuals; when more and more mystery is constantly being sucked out of popular music thanks to the insatiable hunger for fresh product and up-to-the-nanosecond information, the duo aren’t about to release an imagination-stifling DVD filled with behind-the-scenes tour bus inanity. It’s a noble choice, especially when the consolation prize happens to be the Ultimate Daft Punk Mixtape.

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2007 live album by Daft Punk / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Alive 2007 is the second live album by the French electronic music duo Daft Punk , released on 19 November 2007 by Virgin Records . It features Daft Punk's performance at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy arena in Paris on 14 June 2007 during their Alive tour. [1] [2] The set features an assortment of Daft Punk's music, incorporated with synthesisers, mixers and live effects. [3]

• " Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Alive 2007) " Released: 15 October 2007

The retail release of Alive 2007 in North America was delayed to 4 December 2007 due to production problems. [4] It was released as a download on 20 November 2007, and was released in the United Kingdom on 25 February 2008. [5] A performance of " Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger " was released as a single. The album won a Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album in 2009. [6]

• Live albums

Alive 2007 (album)

• View history

Alive 2007 is a live album released by Daft Punk in 2007. It features live songs from their performance at Bercy in Paris , France, on their Alive 2007 tour.

The album won the Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album in 2009. A live version of " Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger ", containing elements of "Television Rules the Nation / Crescendolls" and "Around the World / Harder Better Faster Stronger", also won a Grammy that year for Best Electronic/Dance Recording.

The physical release in North America was delayed to December 4 due to production issues, but the album became available as a digital download on November 20, 2007. A special edition of the album was released that includes the encore from the Alive 2007 tour on a second disc, which is included on the digital copy as well. It also includes a 50-page book containing photographs from the tour taken by DJ Falcon.

• 1 Structure
• 2 Reception
• 3 Track listing
• 4 References

Structure [ ]

The Alive 2007 set used Ableton Live software on "custom made super-computers" for the show. Daft Punk accessed the hardware remotely with Behringer BCR2000 MIDI controllers and JazzMutant Lemur touchscreen pads within the central pyramid. Minimoog Voyager RME units were also implemented for the live performances. The four Voyager units and two Behringer mixers allowed Daft Punk to "mix, shuffle, trigger loops, filter, distort samples, EQ in and out, transpose or destroy and deconstruct synth lines". The majority of the equipment was stored away during the live sets within offstage towers.

The recording of Alive 2007 was derived from Daft Punk's live performance at their Bercy show on June 14, 2007. Reviews of the set noted how Daft Punk manipulated and reworked their established material. One report spotted vocal elements from the song " Too Long " mixed with newly-generated accompaniment. The overlapped mixtures of " Television Rules the Nation " with " Crescendolls ", " Around the World " with " Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger " and " Superheroes " with " Human After All " were reported to be well received by the audience. The set itself was considered a collection of Daft Punk's most popular recordings. The performances heavily featured tracks from Daft Punk's album Human After All , prompting critics to reconsider what they felt about the album.

The visuals of the 2006 and Alive 2007 tour were set up by XL Video. The company provided eight-core Mac Pro units running Catalyst v4 and Final Cut Pro. Daft Punk approached the company with their visual concept for the shows. "They came to us with a pretty fixed idea of what they wanted", said the head of XL Video, Richard Burford. "They wanted to mix live video with effects. Using the eight-core Mac Pros, we were able to take in eight digital sources and treat them as video streams. Then they could use Catalyst to coordinate the video with lighting effects and add their own effects in on the fly. The final digital video streams ran to LED screens."

The performances for the Alive 2007 tour were an expansion of Daft Punk's 2006 live sets. Noted additions include elements of the tracks " Burnin' " and " Phoenix " as well as an encore. Bangalter explained that the 2006 sets were initially designed for performances within larger festivals, but later refined to accommodate Daft Punk-specific shows. "The goal was to try and bring a complete global experience to the audience". The introduction for the live show featured the five-note sequence used in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".

The album includes elements of the Busta Rhymes song " Touch It ", the original version of which was produced by Swizz Beatz featuring a sample of " Technologic ". Also featured are elements of Gabrielle's " Forget About the World ", the original version of which was remixed by Daft Punk for her single. The encore of the Alive 2007 set features Bangalter's side projects: Stardust 's " Music Sounds Better with You " and Together 's self-titled track " Together ". Many songs from Human After All: Remixes are utilized, like Robot Rock (Maximum Overdrive Mix) and The Prime Time of Your Life (Para One Remix) .

Reception [ ]

Alive 2007 was generally met with praise upon release. Pitchfork Media regarded the recording as "the Ultimate Daft Punk Mixtape", specifically noting how songs from the album Human After All had been "constantly improved and born anew" for the live set. The sentiment was also shared by Allmusic, stating that "It has the feel of a greatest-hits-live concert, but energized by Daft Punk's talents at weaving songs in and out of each other". The publication ultimately considered Alive 1997 the stronger of their two live albums, however. A review by The Star noted that the release and Daft Punk's concurrent tours cumulatively restored the duo's reputation following the mixed reception of their two earlier studio albums.

Sputnikmusic stated that the Alive 2007 performance was closer to a theatrical production than a traditional concert, and that the album "could just as easily be a studio concoction". Entertainment Weekly, however, felt that the live crowd enhanced the positive mood of the performance. Rolling Stone stated that Alive 2007 "loses some of the essential experience" of attending the live Daft Punk events. The Phoenix also felt that the album package would have benefited from more video content, expressing that a key factor of the live show was its implementation of visual elements. In his first positive review for a Daft Punk album, Robert Christgau believed that a full video representation was avoided because "too much scale, flesh and bodily effluvia would be lost". Thomas Bangalter expressed his reasons for not releasing a DVD by stating "the thousands of clips on the internet are better to us than any DVD that could have been released".

On December 3, 2008, Alive 2007 and its single "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" received Grammy Award nominations for Best Electronic/Dance Album and Best Dance Recording, respectively. Both the album and the single were announced as winners during the 51st Grammy Awards pre-telecast ceremony.

Track listing

References [ ].

• ↑ Daft Punk YouTube Channel . YouTube.com. Retrieved 6 September 2007 .
• 1 Veridis Quo
• 2 Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem

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Will Daft Punk ever tour again? Here's everything we know about their possible return

The return of Daft Punk is one of the most hotly anticipated events in electronic music

• Mixmag crew
• 12 May 2020

Will Daft Punk ever tour again? It's the question the world has been asking since the Alive shows in 2006 and 2007. Their live performances are the stuff of legend and the robots' return to festival stages and concert halls is one of the most hotly anticipated events in all of electronic music.

Daft Punk last performed "live" with The Weeknd at the 2017 GRAMMYs . They appeared on stage with the vocalist for a rendition of 'I Feel It Coming' , one of the two tracks that the duo produced for The Weeknd's album 'Starboy'. Electronic music has a long history at the GRAMMYs but it wasn't enough to satisfy fans of Daft Punk.

Read this next: The best Daft Punk live footage

The brief sighting of the robots was less of a spectacle than their 2014 performance at the GRAMMYs , where they won Album Of The Year for 'Random Access Memories' and Record Of The Year for 'Get Lucky'. To celebrate, they performed 'Get Lucky' with a band that included Pharrell, Stevie Wonder and Nile Rodgers (the rehearsal footage can be seen here ). The band also played Chic's 'Le Freak', Wonder's 'Another Star' and parts of 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger', 'Around The World' and 'Lose Yourself To Dance'.

Daft Punk's last live performance to a paying public was when they appeared at the climax of Pheonix's 2010 headline show at Madison Square Garden in New York. The robots joined the French band to play 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger', 'Around The World', 'Together' and 'Human After All' as well as Pheonix's '1901', with both acts contributing to the performances of the songs and mash-ups of tracks in true Daft Punk live style.

Read this next: The best Daft Punk tracks ranked

It was a poignant moment between the two bands – Daft Punk fans will of course know that Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo were in the band Darlin' with Pheonix's Laurent Brancowitz. A review of the trio's music in Melody Maker in 1993 famously referred to their "daft punky thrash" and the Daft Punk moniker was born.

Daft Punk's last headline show took place on December 22 2007 at the Showground Main Arena in Sydney. It was the last stop on the Alive 2007 tour which took in arenas and festivals across the world, starting on June 10 2007 at RockNess festival in Inverness in Scotland.

The duo also toured Alive in 2006, starting with Coachella festival in California on April 29 and ending with Bang! festival in Miami on November 11. This was something of a 'warm-up' for the 2007 shows, with 16 gigs taking place in '06 and 30 taking place in '07.

Read this next: Taft Plunk is the duo impersonating Daft Punk

Daft Punk had released 'Human After All' in 2005 and the setlist for the Alive shows featured music from the record, as well as from their first two albums, 'Homework' and 'Discovery', with different tracks blended together and mashed-up for maximum impact.

The Alive tours have gone down in electronic music history as some of the most seminal performances of any dance music act ever. The iconic pyramid stage production and visuals set the blueprint for every spectacular electronic music live show that would follow and the shows resulted in the 'Alive 2007' live album and DVD.

The shows are the reason why the return of Daft Punk to the live arena is so eagerly awaited and the Alive legend only grow stronger as the years go on.

This period also included Daft Punk's first televised live performance, which took place at the GRAMMYs in 2008 . The robots brought their pyramid onstage to perform 'Stronger' with Kanye West, which famously samples 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger'.

Daft Punk's previous and first world tour took place in 1997, with the robots playing over 60 dates at venues and festivals between June and December. The tour included their live show as well as some DJ sets. They duo took their studio on the road with them to perform, with Thomas Bangalter saying "Everything was synched up, the drum machines, the bass lines. The sequencer was just sending out the tempos and controlling the beats and bars. On top of this structure we built all these layers of samples and various parts that we could bring in whenever we wanted to."

Read this next: There's a new Daft Punk book

The Daftendirekt tour went on to be immortalised in the 'Alive 1997' live album, which was recorded at Birmingham's legendary Que club. It captures the energy of Daft Punk at the time when they released 'Homework' and were fast becoming a bona fide dance music phenomenon.

Many fans thought Daft Punk would play live around the release of fourth studio album 'Random Access Memories' in 2013, but not even the official launch party at an agricultural fair in the rural Australian town of Wee Waa could lure them out.

Rumours circulated in 2017 that Daft Punk would revive the Alive tour and continue the tradition of playing shows every 10 years, with Lollapalooza and Glastonbury cited as festivals that may have booked them.

There were also heavy rumours that the duo would replace Beyoncé when she pulled out of Coachella the same year .

The robots have been active in recent years, releasing a lot of merchandise and organising a pop-up shop in LA . The closest we've got to a live sighting of them since the GRAMMYs has been a 'Technologic' art installation in Paris in 2019 .

At this point, given the nature of their recent music, a live tour would require a large number of personnel and special guests – their medley at the 2014 GRAMMYs featured themselves as well as a band containing seven members, which included Pharrell, Nile Rodgers and Stevie Wonder.

Read this next: How 'Homework' changed dance music forever

And now Daft Punk are enshrined as one of popular music's most famous acts, venues would need to be big enough to accommodate the ensuing crowds. Thanks to the mythology that's been built up around the duo, they're now far more famous than they were in 2007 and 1997.

Would their return be as big budget as performances of the songs from 'Random Access Memories' require? Or would they revert to the club hits of their previous three albums? Would the pyramid be restored or would they return as part of a large band? We're hoping they haven't said goodbye to performing live, let alone the electrifying blends heard on the Alive tours, just yet.

If all else fails, there's always the tribute band .

Read this next: Get the best of Mixmag direct to your Facebook DMs

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Daft Punk played its first U.S. show at a campground in Wisconsin. You can watch it on YouTube.

French electronic duo Daft Punk called it quits Monday after 28 years, leaving behind an incredible legacy: an album of the year Grammy winner in “Random Access Memories”; influential hits like “One More Time” and “Get Lucky”; and blockbuster collaborations with Kanye West (“Stronger”) and The Weeknd (“Starboy,” “I Feel It Coming”).

And with the duo's “Alive” tour that kicked off at Coachella in 2006, Daft Punk turned live EDM into a senses-obliterating spectacle that transformed the genre into a festival-dominating juggernaut.

But about a decade before Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter donned robot suits and jammed from an LED pyramid, they were at the scrappy (and muddy) Even Furthur Festival in Wisconsin. 

Presented by Milwaukee-based rave promoter Drop Bass Network, it took place at the Eagle Cave Resort and Campground near Blue River in Grant County, over Memorial Day weekend in 1996. It’s immortalized as Daft Punk’s first U.S. show.

As an oral history of the set  published by Spin magazine explains, co-promoter Woody McBride became familiar with Daft Punk when the duo opened for him at the Rex Club in Paris in 1995.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

The duo's debut album “Homework” wouldn’t come out until 1997, but its lead single “Da Funk” was already making waves among electronic music fans in the Midwest when it ended up on a mixtape, “New School Fusion Vol. 2,” that was making the rounds in 1995.

The Even Furthur set was different from the game-changing “Alive” setup. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo didn’t don the robot suits. They didn’t even play on an elevated stage, performing instead on the same level as fans inside a tent, with a modest laser light show and solid sound system, according to Spin.

But it left an indelible mark on the people who were there — including Daft Punk.

“We were 20-year-old kids, and I thought it was really one of the best festivals we’d done,” De Homem-Christo said in a 2007 interview. “It wasn’t huge, but it was in the woods, in nature, really outside the city. Techno music was known in Chicago and Detroit, but it wasn’t as big as it is now. It felt like a special moment; we have great memories of it. Even now, people go on YouTube to get videos from that night — it was true energy.”

You can check out a YouTube video of the set yourself below, and there’s also a high-fidelity audio mix on SoundCloud.

Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or  [email protected] . Follow him on Twitter at @pietlevy or Facebook at facebook.com/PietLevyMJS .

Piet also talks concerts, local music and more on "TAP'd In" with Jordan Lee. Hear it at 8 a.m. Thursdays on WYMS-FM (88.9), or wherever you get your podcasts.

Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 live show has been recreated in VR: Watch

The show has been uploaded to YouTube by Flip Reality

A Daft Punk live show has been recreated in VR.

Uploaded to YouTube yesterday (22nd), shortly after French duo Daft Punk, made up of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, announced they would be splitting after 28 years , Daft Punk's Alive live show from 2007 is now available to experience in Virtual Reality.

The live show, which took place at RockNess Festival 2007, has been recreated by YouTube user Flip Reality, and features some of the duo's biggest hits, including 'Technologic', 'Harder Better Faster Stronger', 'Around The World' and 'One More Time'.

"A few years back I recreated this stage while learning the Unity SDK for Vinyl Reality," Flip Reality said. "I decided to then also use the stage to do a full show where I had to DJ Daft Punk's full set behind the stage as well as control the cameras."

You can check out the show below, and y ou can download this stage to DJ with here https://vinylreality.mod.io/ .

Daft Punk formed in Paris in 1993. Their debut album, 'Homework', was released in 1997, featuring hit singles including 'Around the World' and 'Da Funk'. Their follow up, ‘Discovery’, is  seen by many  as one of the most important dance music releases of this — or any — era, a record that anticipated the digital music age, the pivotal importance of video content and the growth of the online fan club.

Their most recent album, 'Random Access Memories', was the  best-selling dance music album on vinyl of the decade . An unseen Daft Punk show from the duo's Alive 2007 tour also  recently appeared online .

Revisit our 2018 Solid Gold feature, where DJ Mag's Ben Cardew explores how Daft Punk's 'Discovery' reshaped dance music for the digital age .

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