Daft Punk: what two robots did to disco

Before the machines there is an indie pop trio called Darlin’: Thomas Bangalter, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, and Laurent Brancowitz, later the guitarist of Phoenix. The English music press savaged them, the band stopped, and the two who stayed kept one of the insults for a name. The Bibliothèque nationale de France opens the duo’s record in 1993 and closes it on 22 February 2021: twenty-eight years, four studio albums, and two faces almost nobody ever saw.

Their first records came out on Soma, a Scottish label; “Da Funk” in 1995. Virgin signed them in the autumn of 1996 and Homework appeared on 20 January 1997. Then Discovery in 2001, Human After All in 2005, the Tron: Legacy soundtrack in 2010, and Random Access Memories in 2013, an album recorded with session musicians, which brought them four Grammy Awards in 2014, including album of the year. They had already won two in 2009.

On 22 February 2021 an eight-minute video titled “Epilogue” ends on two dates: 1993-2021. No statement, no explanation, no farewell tour. Two years later Thomas Bangalter finally spoke about it: the last thing he would want to be, he told the BBC in 2023, is a robot.

The gesture has three steps, and there is nothing secret about it. You take a few bars of an old disco or funk record. You loop them. And you run the whole thing through a filter: a knob that cuts the high frequencies, then gives them back, by hand, while the track moves on. The record goes away, comes back, breathes.

None of it was invented in Paris, and that is the point: house and techno are born in the underground clubs of Chicago and Detroit, disco in the New York of the 1970s, which is the division the Philharmonie de Paris kept to in 2019. The museum sees in the mix a transposition of collage, the collage of the visual arts, into popular music. What the duo brings is a way of quoting: you hear the original record, and you hear the hand twisting it.

The anonymity comes first; the helmets come after. The Philharmonie de Paris dates the anonymity to 1993, the year they formed, and the appearance of the two robot alter egos to 2001, with Discovery. Between the two, the museum describes a stance looking for its form, which then becomes a complete aesthetic, graphic, visual and theatrical. It also notes that they themselves compared these robots to the characters invented by David Bowie or The Residents: a stage costume, not a disappearance.

The helmets were manufactured, and it is known by whom. Introduced in The Face magazine in February 2001, they were built by Tony Gardner, a special effects specialist, from drawings by Alexandre Courtès and Martin Fougerol, two friends of the duo. One gold helmet, one silver, worn in public for twenty years.

The best story in the file is false, and they are the ones who told it. A studio accident, on 9 September 1999; a flash; gold and silver powder everywhere; they wake up as robots. They served it to Cartoon Network in 2004 and it went round the world. It is not a lie, it is a joke, and the only honest way to tell it is to say that it is their own version.

Second received idea: the helmets are supposed to have hidden a secret. The Philharmonie de Paris speaks of a form of anonymity, which later became an aesthetic. And the arrival of the robots in The Face, in February 2001, was staged with their press officer and the magazine: the journalist who interviewed them describes a campaign he felt part of.

Third, and the most awkward: the dates. They float, even between good sources: the press account ends Darlin’ in 1992 and puts the first Soma record in 1993, while the BnF opens the duo’s record in 1993 and closes it on 22 February 2021. Those are the two markers kept here, and the album years with them, because every record is deposited in the same library’s catalogue.

A label, first: Pedro Winter, the duo’s manager, founded Ed Banger Records in 2003 while Bangalter and Homem-Christo were shut in the studio; Justice signed almost at once, and its first album went round the world in 2007. A museum, next: in 2019 the Philharmonie de Paris titled its electronic music exhibition “Electro: from Kraftwerk to Daft Punk”, and the duo had become a marker. And a method that has not aged: take a record you love, twist it, and own up to having taken it.