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Roll Call: Daft Punk & The Rapture @ Arrow Hall, Toronto (pg. 7)
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| StereoPrincess |
| quote: | Originally posted by shanny
This video has been my promotional material for convincing non-believers to buy tickets to this show for months.
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it worked so well that i had my ticket way too early. |
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| Grinder |
| Woooooooo Yaaaaaaaaaaaa! |
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| goodnet |
I'll be there ;)
Anybody doing a pre-meet? |
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| Cosmic Fur |
| quote: | Originally posted by goodnet
Anybody doing a pre-meet? |
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| FunkyCrew |
| quote: | Originally posted by Cosmic Fur
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msg Mikey on msn, take him for drinks or something ;) he's all yours on Sunday! |
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| DigiNut |
| Had my ticket months ago. |
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| shanny |
| quote: | Originally posted by StereoPrincess
it worked so well that i had my ticket way too early. |
You know what they say, early to bed, early to rise.
It is easy to extrapolate that applied to this situation it would go, early to ticket, early to suddenly-becoming-famous-and-awesome.
Looks like we're going to be celebrities before the weekends out. |
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| Orko |
| quote: | RISE OF THE MACHINES
WITH A NEW MOVIE AND A SPECTACULAR MULTIMEDIA-HEAVY TOUR, DAFT PUNK ARE THE HARDEST-WORKING ROBOTS IN SHOW BUSINESS
By Dave Morris
Even their most ardent fans would concede that Daft Punk are as frustrating as they are talented. As much as we love them, they never give us exactly what we want.
Tantalized by their squelching acid funk debut Homework in the halcyon days of “electronica” back in '97, what should have been our first glimpse of the Parisian dance-music duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo was instead a walking, talking dog in Spike Jonze's “Da Funk” video. How... French. When their second album, Discovery, came out in '01, we flinched again; instead of more of the same banging deep house and electro, they gave us robot masks, Supertramp keyboard licks and “Beat It” guitar solos intricately woven into a hyper-ornamented disco tapestry – and if that wasn't confounding enough, they made an anime film, Interstella 5555, to accompany it. By the time Human After All made it to the internet in '05, their now-sizable cult audience were so shocked by its simplicity that it was widely assumed that the leaked album was a fake. (It wasn't.) Last year, they co-wrote, produced and directed Electroma, a full-length movie, hired actors to wear their masks rather than appear in the film itself and didn't contribute a note of original music to the soundtrack. The higher our expectations, the more those who didn't get it immediately felt let down.
And in time, we worshipped them even more for it. Their albums have sold hundreds of thousands worldwide; their current amphitheatre tour – their first in a decade – is largely sold out; and for all the incredible bands at Coachella '06, poorly recorded MP3s and YouTube videos of their visually stunning performance were easily the most talked about and widely circulated bootlegs of the entire festival.
When I found out I was going to interview Guy from Daft Punk, my dilemma wasn't what should I ask them; it was whether anything he could say would actually illuminate the mystery that's as much a part of their appeal as their art itself. He did, though he did it without giving me everything I was hoping for. In hindsight, I probably should have expected that.
Arguably the most remarkable thing about Daft Punk isn't their music, it's the fact that their entire aesthetic – from their music to their videos and films to their robot suits – is astoundingly consistent. That consistency apparently comes from working almost exclusively with a close-knit team. My first glimpse into how small Daft World is comes when I ask de Homem-Christo how they decide which designers to work with.
“Thomas and me, we try to do the most possible that we can ourselves,” he explains. “Then when there's a point when we don't have time or the capacity, we work with other people. For example, we've been working with Tony Gardiner from the dog video with Spike Jonze. [Gardiner] has a special effects company called Alterian that made the dog in ‘Da Funk.'” According to de Homem-Christo, Gardiner also worked on the robot masks along with designers Alex and Martin and directed the video for Human After All's “Prime Time of Your Life.”
The desire to do everything themselves, or at least keep it in the family, partly explains their glacial productivity – producing just three albums is hardly normal for a group that have never gone on hiatus. It's tempting to attribute their snail's pace to Gallic laissez-faire, but as our conversation progresses, it becomes clear that meticulousness, not laziness, is what slows them down. De Homem-Christo explains that they don't work on multiple projects at once; they don't have any un-released material kicking around the vaults; and they have no idea what they'll be doing next until they begin working on it.
In fact, they plough most of Daft Punk's profits back into their own projects. De Homem-Christo also reveals that self-funding is part of what has allowed them to develop a full-length feature such as Electroma, as well as their current live show with a full light rig and a travelling pyramid from which they control their gear remotely. (“Ten years ago when we were touring,” he says, “sometimes we had to find a table to put all our gear on.”)
“I know many artists and most of the artists in the music industry or the movie industry have to rely on the major companies behind them, and sometimes the creativity is diluted. Most of the money we gain we put it back into making movies. It's a lot of money making movies, shooting videos, doing everything we do. But at the end of the day, we don't have any regrets because we do it by ourselves.”
Asked whether he still goes to clubs and listens to newer dance music, de Homem-Christo again refers back to the Daft Punk inner circle.
“There's a lot of great music happening everywhere but we've been working with a team of people around us for 10 years and two of them are Pedro Winter with Ed Banger Records and Gildas Loaëc of Kitsuné. [I'm not just praising them] because they're people that we know; it's really good music they're putting out.” He cites SebastiAn and Kavinsky (both of whom are opening the Punks' shows) as favourites, as well as Ed Banger's marquee act Justice, England's Klaxons and Brazil's CSS. “It's not only good music but has a strong image with an impact and style. What was maybe lacking for me as a fan of music was more the style and now there's a lot of it going on.”
Auteurs are inward-looking by nature; there's a certain selfishness required to spend all your time on your own idiosyncratic vision. Daft Punk's gestures might seem to reflect an indifference to their fans; prompted for his impression of them, de Homem-Christo proffers sheepish awe.
“We are really always surprised and flattered when some fans are coming to us. I know there are some fans coming to our shows who've made their own DIY helmets, and sometimes they're really well done. I'm really paying homage to that – when we designed them, [it took] a lot of companies that specialize in effects. It must be really hard to do by yourself.”
De Homem-Christo doesn't generally romanticize what they do, but given that their aesthetic is an elaborate science-fiction fantasy that transcended dance music's often workmanlike image, he admits that underneath their robotic costumes, their desires are all too human.
“Since the beginning of what we are doing, we always tried to make our dreams become reality, and it's true that this show and this pyramid and the robots and everything, the music and the lights around it and all these colours and stuff it's kind of a dream that we tried to make a reality. We succeeded I think to do what we wanted with that. Yeah, it's a child's dream.”
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http://www.eyeweekly.com/eye/issue/...sic/feature.php |
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| Nostrum |
| quote: | Originally posted by Nostrum
+1
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HEY, PLUS 1 |
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| DJ Mach X |
Anyone heading back to Toronto after for the part at the social with Busy P, Falcon and Gildas? The Ad/D party? Dunno how late the concert is going to be, plus travel back to the T.dot...
Anything going on in the Sauga area? or is it just back to the hotels for some good ol fashioned hotel raves? |
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