Give Life Back to Music is the first song on Daft Punk’s new album, Random Access Memories (RAM), and it seems that the robots found a heartbeat sometime in the last eight years because the album has more of a human touch to it than anything before and with that, Daft Punk are set to once again redefine popular music. Except after 20 years of computerized beats, and also heavily influencing nearly every piece of electronic dance music that came out during that time, Daft Punk have (finally) released a new album, but it’s much less about techno and more about disco. I bet you didn’t see that one coming.
You could say that RAM comes at a time when the genre that Daft Punk pretty much created is having a heyday, and I’ll bet my apple pie that after seeing what’s happened to it, it’s exactly why Daft Punk decided to scrap the sound that started it all and steer the future right back into the past. Electronic dance music is no longer reserved for an elitist group of underground ravers, but has been embraced by pretty much everyone. And there is just something that doesn’t feel right about almost naked jocks fist pumping from the front row of a rave. I now I find myself gravitating towards the back. Or staying home.
And it seems like Daft Punk collaborator DJ Falcon (real name Stephane Queme) is further testament to this. He told the Taipei Times that he thinks it’s a shame what happened to electronic music. “[The oversaturation] is due to the success of EDM in America,” he explained to me. “It’s a bad thing because now they’re doing it for success, fame, and money. It’s getting so obvious and they’ve turned electronic music into something vulgar.”
Photo courtesy of E for Electro
“But there will always be underground music in my opinion,” Falcon continued. “Everyone has his own definition of what underground music is anyway.”
DJ Falcon collaborated with Daft Punk on the 13th and final song on RAM, Contact. Actually, the song was first played in a DJ set in 2003 and is now perhaps that last link between Daft Punk and the rave scene that turned the century. But after that big moment, Falcon went on a bit of a hiatus from producing, returning only this year to collaborate again with Daft Punk, and also other French artists like Justice.
“I don’t feel like I was out of the electronic music sphere,” Falcon said of the break. “I never stopped deejaying since the early days.”
Falcon has been rolling with Daft Punk since the days of Homework, but told me that working on RAM was totally different. It was something special, he said. The amount of dedication and passion put forth by all the different collaborators was an intense experience for him. Well, it was an intense experience for the rest of the world, too.
When Daft Punk changed their Facebook photo in February of this year, the world went mad. Absolutely crazy! With no indicator that the French androids had been in the studio for the first time in eight years, that day their new album became the most anticipated album of perhaps this decade before it was even announced that there was officially going to be an album. And things just kept getting better when a clever marketing campaign kept leaking snippets of disco and diamond dusted songs that were so small and so good that fiends got their fix and for a minute, the Internet forgot about cats. Then Pharrell Williams and Get Lucky happened. Then Saint Laurent and bedazzled helmets happened. And then the full album happened.
But when RAM finally dropped in May, people largely stopped talking about it. Half of them probably hated it and would rather say nothing at all than anything bad about Daft Punk, and the other half tripped back to the 70s and refused to come back. But the reality is, it’s a perfectly flawed masterpiece. And it’s the future. Disco is sparkling at the top of nearly every chart this week, and Daft Punk is once again changing the face of electronic dance music.
“Nobody can predict the future of electronic music but I’m just happy they brought more soul into it,” said Falcon.
“And believe me,” he continued. “What is so special about Daft Punk is that in a lot of ways they remain the same, but are still always challenging themselves with new things.”
Words to live by, by DJ Falcon.
■ DJ Falcon plays tomorrow night at 8pm at Showhouse, 161 DaGuan Rd, Taichung (台中市南屯區大觀路161). Admission is NT$900. Tickets are available at the door. www.facebook.com/e4electro.tw
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