( Entertainers of the Year )

By Andrew Vontz

Nine hours into October’s Vegoose festival, the immortal five-note melody from Close Encounters of the Third Kind drifts out over the grassy field at Las Vegas’ Sam Boyd Stadium, and the crowd of 30,000 is packed so tightly it can barely move. The night’s headliners, Daft Punk (Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, henceforth referred to by his nickname, Guy-Man), are led by roadies to a control booth in the middle of a 22-foot-wide, 18-foot-tall, three-ton steel pyramid hidden behind a curtain at center stage. They’re decked out in their customary automaton-biker gear: face-obscuring helmets and leather jackets. As the curtain draws back, only their helmets and torsos are visible inside the pyramid, and blips of light pulse across blackness on the LED video screens covering its base. A massive lattice of glowing tubes serves as a second tier of lighting, and a large black curtain covered in diodes provides the stage’s backdrop. “Robot Rock,” off the duo’s 2005 album, Human After All, replaces Close Encounters, and when the first drumbeat kicks in and Daft Punk pump their glove-covered fists, the crowd form pyramids with their fingers, bouncing in unison with such ecstatic violence that the scene looks like a soccer riot. In the year 3000.

All this might sound like a particularly vivid ’90s-rave flashback. But many of the lucky 67,800 who witnessed the eight-date North American leg of the Daft Punk Alive 2007 tour—alternatively a provocative examination of the tenuous relationship between technology and humanity and the most mind-bending rock extravaganza since Pink Floyd’s pig took flight—are evangelical and slavish in their devotion. Two fans from Milwaukee, Caitlin Kliesmet and Margaret Kim, wear homemade, elaborately rendered robot helmets. Julia Brindle, 25, who caught August’s New York date on a whim and was so impressed she flew to Vegas for this final show of the tour, says: “I’m not a big electronic-music fan, but this is a transcendent religious experience.” And she is hardly the only relative electronica neophyte to finally see the (strobe) light—since the North American tour began in July, digital sales of the duo’s 2001 single “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,”