These are the droids you’re looking for: Daft Punk headline Vegoose; Caitlin Kliesmet and Margaret Kim rock the homemade headgear (bottom right)
audience can’t know for sure lends the experience its convention-tweaking aura—communicate with one another via mics and monitors built into the helmets, remixing on the fly from inside the pyramid. Wireless Ethernet links the Minimoogs and virtual synths at their metallic fingertips to offstage custom computers that have the processing power of nine tricked-out Mac G5s. While
the musical and visual elements are scripted and presequenced, both
Daft Punk and their lighting designer can improvise around set cues.
Every show has the same 80-minute run time with the same primary
“IT’S LIKE A MOVIE IN THAT YOU FOCUS builds and breaks, yet there’s still room to manipulate the beats based
ON AN E on crowd reaction, which generally includes stomping, writhing, pop-
.”X—PETRHIEONMCAESRBAATNHGEARLTTHERAN ping-and-locking, screaming, and—tonight, anyway—passing out.
AN EGO “Contrary to belief, they don’t just push play,” insists Paul Hahn, the
head of Daft Punk’s production company and Alive’s behind-the-scenes
mastermind. “By changing the mix, they can change people’s perception
of the visuals. It’s like a magic trick—giving away how it’s done would
take away from the experience. But the robot personas open up creative pos-
sibilities, whereas if we had put Guy-Man and Thomas up there as themselves,
it would be this megalomaniacal thing, this gigantic fascist’s pulpit.”
As the show progresses, the pyramid’s visuals escalate from minimal eight-bit-style lines to complex 3-D geometric patterns, culminating in a racing montage of human faces. By the finale, “One More Time,” the robot suits themselves are part of the light show, electroluminescent piping making the duo look like Tron characters come to life.
“It’s not just performing and creating music and images that makes the show,” says Bangalter. “It’s God, in the middle of 30,000 people.”
which Kanye West sampled for “Stronger,” have rocketed from 1,000 per week to between 5,000 and 7,000, while the new Daft Punk Alive 2007 CD and DVD attempt to pack the sensory overload to go. Somehow, the hottest electronic music act of 1999 has reconquered a mainstream American audience that traditionally prefers its rock stars to have instruments and, well, faces.
“We compare it to a Broadway musical,” Bangalter, 31, says backstage after the show. “There’s a lot of people involved, and every night is a different performance, even though it’s the same music and the same show. But it’s also like a movie in that you focus on an experience rather than the ego of the performer.” In their civvies, Daft Punk look like underfed art students, all skinny jeans and pristine vintage Nikes. Bangalter has close-cropped hair and wears a turtleneck sweater under a leather jacket. The long-haired Guy-Man, 32, whose English isn’t as fluent, nods in agreement, Silencieux Bob to Bangalter’s Jay.
Developed early last year for what they thought would be a one-off gig at Coachella, the Alive spectacle is as high-concept as it is high-tech, integrating ideas about evolutionary theory with the band’s own iconography—the pyramid first appeared in their 2005 video for “Technologic.” Bangalter and Guy-Man—and yes, it really is them up there, although the fact that the
MORE AT SPIN.COM To see the exclusive joint interview with Kanye West and Daft Punk, drop by spin.com/januarycover
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