BY JONATHAN DURBIN
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN MONICK
Daft Punk's Electroma ends in robot suicide. The gorgeously shot hour-long film is about two androids that drive across California in a black Ferrari coupe. Their license plate reads "Human," and it's clear that's what they want to be: Stopping at a blisteringly sterile medical facility in the desert, they're attended to by white silhouette "technicians" who pour latex over their helmets and fashion them into human faces -- grotesque, expressionless caricatures of the men beneath Daft Punk's disguises, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. But the man-masks are neither convincing nor weatherproof, and as they wander through a sunbaked robot suburbia, their faces melt. Distraught and inconsolable, the chrome-domed android takes off his leather jacket, flips a switch on his back, and explodes in the desert. His companion, whose helmet resembles something a Harley biker might wear in space, lights himself on fire. Cut.
There is no dialogue.
The soundtrack features music, but none of it is by Daft Punk. Even weirder, Daft Punk do not actually appear in the film. Instead, actors play the robots. "It is inspired by surrealism in general, painters like Magritte," says Bangalter, the taller, more talkative member of the group, who wears the silver mask. "It's about creating sensation without triggering the verbal area of the brain." He pauses to think. "It is music for the eyes."
Electroma is quiet, calm and deeply unsettling. It couldn't be further from the French DJ duo's other project out this fall, ALIVE 2007, which is, simply put, a bolt of lightning captured on DAT. Roughly the same length as the film, ALIVE is their first collection since 2004's critically panned Human After All. It exceeds all expectations. Recorded in Paris last summer, the album documents the searing energy of Daft Punk's first live hometown show in a decade. The two meld their biggest hits into a frenzy of house and electro that's the most exuberant and sexual release of the millennium, binding classics like "Around the World," "Harder Better Faster Stronger" and "Da Funk" together in a sound collage that's so cathartic it transcends genres. This isn't dance music, punk or hip-hop. It's all of them. Daft Punk are rock stars.
After a nine-year hiatus from DJing live, they amped up production values and took their disco circus on the road, where, dressed in their helmets and Hedi Slimane-designed leathers, they basted audiences in sound and light. Daft Punk are the underground's most colorful and visible ambassadors, the first electronic music act to matter since the dot-com implosion in 2000. New York City favorites the Rapture, who were opening up on the American leg of the tour, had trouble competing. "Our soundman put it really nicely," says Gabe Andruzzi, the Rapture's keyboardist. "He said it was like the Jetsons versus the Flintstones," Andruzzi laughs. "It was like opening up for a movie. No, a laser-light show."
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