Advertise here with Carbon Ads

This site is made possible by member support. โค๏ธ

Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.

๐Ÿ”  ๐Ÿ’€  ๐Ÿ“ธ  ๐Ÿ˜ญ  ๐Ÿ•ณ๏ธ  ๐Ÿค   ๐ŸŽฌ  ๐Ÿฅ”

kottke.org posts about Daft Punk

The 100 Greatest BBC Musical Performances

I linked to this in the recent David Bowie post, but it’s worth pulling out separately: the 100 greatest BBC musical performances. This is an incredible trove of late 20th and early 21st century musical greatness. Some selections just off the top of my head:

Blondie โ€“ Atomic/Heart of Glass (The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1979):

Talking Heads โ€“ Psycho Killer (OGWT, 1978):

Daft Punk โ€“ Essential Mix (Radio 1, 1997):

Hole โ€“ Doll Parts/He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)/Violet (Later, 1995):

Joy Division โ€“ Transmission (Something Else, 1979):

Radiohead - Paranoid Android (Later Archive 1997):

The Jimi Hendrix Experience โ€“ Sunshine of Your Love (Happening for Lulu, 1969):

Patti Smith Group โ€“ Because the Night (OGWT, 1978):

Arlo Parks and Phoebe Bridgers โ€“ Fake Plastic Trees (Radio 1 Piano session, 2020):

Bob Dylan โ€“ live at BBC studios (BBC One, 1965), apparently Dylan’s last acoustic concert:

Dizzy Gillespie โ€“ Chega de Saudade (Jazz 625, 1965). Don’t miss the musician intro at the ~13:15 mark:

Nirvana โ€“ Smells Like Teen Spirit (TOTP, 1991):

And Rihanna (Umbrella, 2008) and Prince (1993) and Lorde (Royals, 2013) and and and… If you’re anything like me, this list will keep you busy for a few hours.

Reply ยท 0

Some “New” Music from Daft Punk, Perhaps Their Last Ever

Earlier this week, the retired electronic duo Daft Punk released the 10th anniversary edition of Random Access Memories, their last studio album. The anniversary album includes 35 minutes of previously unreleased music.

Among the tracks is a demo of Infinity Repeating, featuring Julian Casablancas and The Voidz, which a recent interview w/ Casablancas on Daft Punk’s YouTube channel called “the last Daft Punk song, ever”. The music video for Infinity Repeating, embedded above, features a cool evolution-of-humanity animation (with robots!) and is highly re-watchable.


Daft Punk Live Set from 1997

This is video of a live show by Daft Punk recorded at LA’s Mayan Theater on December 17, 1997; they’re playing mostly tracks off of Homework, which was released earlier that year. Note that this was before they started wearing the robot outfits for all of their appearances, so it’s just two normal humans DJing. Here’s the setlist. Ohhh to have been there for this.

See also Daft Punk Live DJ Sets from the 90s. (via flowstate)


Bart Simpson feat. Daft Punk & Giorgio Moroder

Part of what makes this so good & funny is the obvious level of care put into making it, right down to the smallest details. The audio distortion? Perfect lip syncing? The Doppler effect?! It’s just a meme, you didn’t have to go so hard! (via the xoxo slack)


Daft Punk Have Broken Up

Musical duo Daft Punk have called it quits after 28 years. They said goodbye with the video embedded above. This is so far from the worst thing that has happened in the past year but I am unexpectedly emotional about this. I still remember quite vividly hearing their music for the first time and I was hoping for more to come. So much of what they’ve created continues to resonate with me and, gosh, I can’t believe it’s over. Thank you, gentlemen.


Newly Released Footage of a 2007 Daft Punk Concert

As a post-Tr*mp gift to the world, YouTube user Johnny Airbag uploaded a “previously uncirculated” full-length video of a Daft Punk concert in Chicago in 2007. This was from the first night of Lollapalooza and was one of the stops on the duo’s Alive tour, which later resulted in their Alive 2007 album (recorded live in Paris a few weeks before the Chicago show). You can find bootleg recordings of several of their 2007 shows on Soundcloud.


Daft Trump - Harder, Woman, Faster, Camera

Donald Trump’s idiotic brag about how well he did on a cognitive test (“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”) set to Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.

You just have to laugh because if you actually stop to think about how much harm this man has done and will continue to do in his remaining time in office, the incandescent rage might make you pass out.


Flat Earthers Listening to Daft Punk

This made me laugh really hard today:

Gotta be frustrating. โ™ช Around the world, around the world, around the world, around the world, around the world, around the world… โ™ช (thx, naomi)


Daft Punk Live DJ Sets from the 90s

From the Flow State newsletter โ€” “every weekday, we send out two hours of music that’s perfect for working” โ€” comes a collection of live DJ sets that Daft Punk did in the 90s.

Aside from being masterclasses in DJing, these sets feature a bunch of classic house tracks from pioneers like DJ Deeon, DJ Sneak, Todd Edwards, and Giorgio Moroder. What’s amazing is that these performances happened over 20 years ago, but sound like they could be from last week.

Here’s the playlist for their Headbangers Ball set in 1998 and their Cameo Theatre set in Miami in 1999. I also found additional sets from 1995 and 1997:

And then there’s this: a two-hour mix of songs by artists that influenced Daft Punk’s seminal Homework album.

That should keep you rolling right into the late afternoon.


Marching band plays Daft Punk at Bastille Day parade

At the Bastille Day parade in Paris, with Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron looking on, a marching band played a medley of hits from Daft Punk. Macron gets it pretty quickly while Trump looks confidently clueless as usual.


Daft Punk samples and their sources

Daft Punk creates their songs by extensively sampling records, mostly from the 70s and 80s. In some cases, bits of song are used relatively unchanged while others are chopped up and repeated to the point of being unrecognizable. Here are a few of the group’s samples compared with their original sources.

See also the duo’s Alive 2007 live album, which I have been listening to extensively lately.

Update: The video I’d originally linked to got taken down but I replaced it with another one. Here’s another one as well.


Beastie Boys / Daft Punk mashup

This is pretty simple: 8 songs from the Beastie Boys remixed using beats and samples from Daft Punk. If you need further prompting, it’s probably not for you.


Daft Punk soundboard

Daft Punk Soundboard

A keyboard-controlled soundboard for Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. See also the Beyonce Soundboardt. (via waxy)


Daft Punk’s chocolate in Jay Z’s peanut butter

A track called Computerized featuring Jay Z rapping over Daft Punk beats has surfaced. Take a listen:

I agree with Drew Millard’s take that this is an old unreleased track from the Tron Legacy / The Blueprint 3 days.

First, this isn’t an original Daft Punk instrumental; that keyboard line is a loop from the song “Son of Flynn” off of Daft Punk’s score for Tron: Legacy. From there, literally anyone-like, even me in GarageBand-could loop that, throw some drums in there, get a vocoder plugin and sing “computeriiiiiized” into it.

From there, let’s analyze Jay Z’s lyrics, which include the line, “I got an iTouch but I can’t feel,” and also a reference to Hov Jobs’ BlackBerry. Judging from the dated technology iHova is talking about on here, this is probably old as fuck.


Get Lucky reimagined for every decade since the 1920s

This is great…Daft Punk’s Get Lucky as it would have sounded in every decade from the 1920s to the 2020s.

This is what singles should be from now on…you get the original song, a 30s jazz version of the song, a 1800s classical version, an 80s new wave version, and so on.


Ken Crosgrove Dancing + Daft Punk

[SORTA MAD MEN SPOILERS! but not really] I don’t know if Ken Crosgrove dancing on the latest episode of Mad Men is the best thing that’s ever been on the show, but it’s definitely in the top 10. And it might be even better with a little Daft Punk.

And it might be best with the Crazy in Love cover from Gatsby…just load up that this YT video while watching the animated GIF and you’re all set. (This is how Millennials watch TV, BTW…it’s all animated GIFs with YouTube video soundtracks. Civilization is gonna be juuuuuuust fine.)


Does good music need to be good?

I enjoyed and agree with much of Sasha Frere-Jones’ take on Daft Punk’s recent album, Random Access Memories.

Daft Punk’s fourth studio album, “Random Access Memories,” is an attempt to make the kind of disco record that they sampled so heavily for “Discovery.” As such, it serves as a tribute to those who came before them and as a direct rebuke to much of what they’ve spawned. Only intermittently electronic in nature, and depending largely on live musicians, it is extremely ambitious, and as variable in quality as any popular album you will hear this year. Noodly jazz fusion instrumentals? Absolutely. Soggy poetry and kid choirs? Yes, please. Cliches that a B-list teen-pop writer would discard? Bring it on. The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of “Random Access Memories” repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I’ve ever heard. Daft Punk engages the sound and the surface of music so lovingly that all seventy-five loony minutes of “Random Access Memories” feel fantastic, even when you are hearing music you might never seek out. This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?


Daft Punk, Goat Lucky

Daft Punk + goats who yell like people = not the funniest thing you’ve seen in your life but it hits a certain spot, that’s for sure.

(via @thebakerruns)


Daft Punk’s Get Lucky “leaked”

This is supposedly a leaked version of the song Get Lucky from Daft Punk’s forthcoming album, but from what I can tell, this is just an extended version of the song cobbled together from this minute-long commercial that ran during SNL this weekend. Not that that’s a bad thing…I’ve had it on repeat for the last 30 minutes.

The duo have, however, given their first interview about the album to Rolling Stone. (via kyleread)

Update: Hmm, getting some reports that this is the actual radio edit of Get Lucky…and it does have some Pharrell lyrics that weren’t in the promos and commercials. And if not, we’re getting closer!

(via @djrange)

Update: Ha! Probably still fake. But it’s the best fake so I’ll take it for now. Would probably take DP, Pharrell, and Rodgers themselves to top this one. (via @Robbie)

Update: Guess that last one actually was the genuine article, which is now available on iTunes, on Spotify, on Rdio, and at Amazon.


Daft Punk to launch new album at local farm show

I have checked the publication date on this story ten times and it’s not April 1st, so I guess Daft Punk really is launching their new album at a farm show in the small town of Wee Waa, Australia.


New. Daft! PUNK!!! ALBUMMMMMMM!!!!!

Daft Punk is coming out with a new album called Random Access Memories. It’s out on May 21 but you can preorder on iTunes. Here’s a brief ad for the album:


The music that inspired Daft Punk

For Homework, their 1997 debut album, Daft Punk drew on a large number of musical influences. Here’s two wonderful hours of the music that influenced them.


Daft Swanson

9 minutes and thirty nine seconds of Ron Swanson dancing to Daft Punk. Years from now this video could be the basis of a religion.


Frida Kahlo rocking Daft Punk

Fabian Ciraolo does illustrations that mash up old and new pop culture. My favorite is Frida Kahlo rocking a Daft Punk t-shirt:

Frida Kahlo Daft Punk

Here are a few others I particularly like:

Dali Vampire Weekend

Dorothy Bling

He-Man Plaid


The music of Daft Punk revisited on vintage video game systems

Daft Punk already sort of sounds like they make their music using vintage video game systems but Da Chip is what that would actually sound like. Better than I expected. (via @shauninman)


Tron Legacy soundtrack remixed

If you liked Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy soundtrack, you might like Tron Legacy R3CONF1GUR3D with remixes by Crystal Method, Paul Oakenfold, and M83. It’s just out today and I haven’t listen to it yet, so caveat emptor.


Tron Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk

I have enjoyed nothing (nothing!) more over the past week or so than Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy soundtrack. Amazon’s got the mp3 album today for only $3.99.


Daft Punk Tron Mashup

This is a mashup of Daft Punk with scenes from Tron and Tron Legacy by Electric Method. Let’s see… Daft Punk? Check. Tron? Check. I’m CERTAIN it is relevant to the interests of a lot of you.

(Via The Daily What)


Daft Punk’s greatest hits

Amazon’s mp3 deal of the day: Daft Punk’s greatest hits album for $1.99, today only.


The lyrics for Around the World by

The lyrics for Around the World by Daft Punk.

Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world

Etc., etc., and so on. (via chris)