Daft Punk’s “Discovery”
A Trip Inside The Pyramid
The creation of electronic music’s defining album
Swapping pink thread detailing for a puddle of shimmery silver, Daft Punk’s logo is emblazoned, once again, on the duo’s second studio album. The tonal change is both ornamental and substantive for the French duo, as Discovery steers fans away from the patchy roughness of Homework to a smoothly produced, pop-prone track-list that, at times, can be as easy on the ears as it is on one’s dancing feet.
A sophomore effort—whether by a band, film director, or an author—can often be more of the same, a “safe” endeavor that harnesses and capitalizes on the techniques or elements that got the artist noticed in the first place. Daft Punk’s Discovery was nothing of the sort.
Instead, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo changed up their successful formula with their second album (released in March 2001 by Virgin Records), and embraced a broader range of pop, funk, and progressive rock, eschewing dance music’s conventional benchmarks in an effort to reinvent themselves. This was just the first of many reinventions throughout their career thus far.
The heavy emphasis on filtered disco samples, phase-shifted textures, and 909 drum beats mostly based around loops and grooves that had become hallmarks of modern house—a sound Daft Punk helped to define—took a backseat to traditionally styled songs with distinctive rock overtones and body-popping electro beats reminiscent of the late 70s and early 80s. If Homework had been an effort to show rock fans that electronic music was cool, Discovery, conversely, told the electronic kids that rock and roll is here to stay.
Rather than produce a tribute album devoted to the music of their childhood, Daft Punk instead wanted to focus on their relationship—honest, playful, and fun—with the music of the period, including disco, electro, rock, heavy metal, and classical tunes. Electronic dance music had shown that it was possible to destroy the rules when making music but, in doing so, the genre had established new rules of its own. Daft Punk set out to shatter those in order to create songs in the spirit of house music rather than the style. Bangalter has said that one of the cool things about the house music spirit—and the same can be said for that of hip-hop—is that it inspires musicians to use instruments for things they weren’t designed for, and to veer away from the instruction manual.
On Discovery, there are guitars that sound like synthesizers and synthesizers that sound like guitars. The recording studio—again, Bangalter’s bedroom (although the duo also did some recording in New Jersey and other places)—was stocked with lots of gear, including guitars, bass guitars, keyboards, effects pedals, and drum machines to produce complex, meticulous tracks; reportedly, every track on Discovery used a different phase shifter and vocoder effect. Daft Punk played and sampled their own instruments (de Homem-Christo was usually on guitar, with Bangalter on keyboard and bass, although they both play all three instruments) and went out of their way to use instruments in ways they weren’t intended to be used. The benefit of working in a home studio was that the musicians could take all the time they needed to experiment without watching the clock. Many times, stretches of music were sampled and re-sampled; de Homem-Christo has estimated that half of the sampled material on Discovery was originally played live. (Some of the duo’s reported samples are not samples at all, but newly recorded elements that sounded like “fake samples,” such as the instrumental “Nightvision,” which is a dead-ringer for 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love.”)
Discovery was ultimately a multimillion-selling album and, in 2012, Rolling Stone named it the eighth greatest EDM album of all time. It kicks off with the perky party tune “One More Time,” featuring DJ, producer, and singer Romanthony’s heavily processed vocals (he also penned the lyrics, co-produced, and sang on the album’s final track “Too Long”). Until the release of “Get Lucky” in April 2013, “One More Time” was Daft Punk’s highest-charting song, peaking at number two on the UK Singles Chart in 2000; it was also one of the duo’s few charting songs in the United States, climbing to number sixty-one on the Billboard Hot 100 (additionally, Mixmag readers voted it as the greatest dance record of all time in February 2013).
The instrumental track “Aerodynamic” starts off with a funky groove that segues into a metallic solo on electric guitar—an unlikely facet for a dance record—and then fuses them together in a space-age combo. “Digital Love” also features a guitar-sounding solo and offers an electronic pop song vibe; it features one of only four samples on Discovery (“I Love You More” by George Duke), and has a Supertramp-esque bridge (Daft Punk used the original Wurlitzer piano the group used). With lyrics about unspoken love written by DJ Sneak and performed by Daft Punk, the song features a prominent keyboard solo, aided by music sequencers in its second half.
“Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” which won the Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording in 2009, features Daft Punk’s signature robotic vocal performance. “Superheroes” opens with a drumroll and features classical arpeggios in the vein of Queen’s music for the film Flash Gordon (it also samples Barry Manilow’s “Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed”) and a pounding four-on-the-floor drive. “Face to Face,” featuring vocals by producer Todd Edwards (who also wrote the lyrics and co-produced the song), reached #1 on the Billboard dance chart in 2004. All of the tracks for Discovery provide the soundtrack for the film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem.
Although Daft Punk wore masks or covered their faces in publicity shots during the Homework era, it wasn’t until Discovery that they unveiled the first installment of their trademark robot personas, which came with a backstory of their own. As the story goes, at 9:09 A.M. on September 9, 1999 (as Daft Punk was working on the Discovery album) there was “a little accident,” as Bangalter has called it, with the machinery in the studio. Having to seek medical attention as well as some reconstructive surgery, Daft Punk reemerged looking like robots. (Although they have forgotten aspects of their life before the accident, luckily most of the recording and final production of the album was already complete.) With a “new chip” in their brains, coupled with their beating human hearts, Daft Punk would now focus attention—for the promotion of Discovery and beyond—on the music rather than the men, which is where they’ve always firmly believed it belongs.
Cover photo by belTRON / Flickr.
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Excerpted from DAFT PUNK: A Trip Inside the Pyramid by Dina Santorelli. Copyright © 2014 by Stonesong and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.
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