![]() ![]() ![]() In the early ‘90s, Daft Punk performed a self-styled synthesis of acid house, funk and big beat electronica at illegal warehouse parties in France that ‘you had to crawl under barbed wire and run from police’ to attend, as Bangalter recalled.īut they shocked rave purists by landing a major-label recording deal with Virgin/EMI in 1996. We were not interested in doing it in terms of what we’ve done in the past,’ he said.īangalter and De Homem-Christo started out in Paris as a punk-leaning indie rock group before trading their guitars for computer sequencers and making a name as an underground rave act. ‘We knew that dance music was not the appropriate style of music to fit this movie - in scope and tone on many levels. He was seated at an outdoor picnic table at the Jim Henson Productions complex in Hollywood, where Daft Punk’s production company, Daft Arts, keeps offices. ‘It was not obvious for anyone,’ Bangalter said during a rare interview with the notoriously press-averse group. They shocked the filmmakers by shelving Daft’s signature four-on-the-floor sound in favor of a more classical direction that little in the duo’s musical oeuvre suggested they were qualified to produce. And when the duo finally set to work with an 85-piece orchestra, Moreover, it took the members of Daft Punk, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, over a year to commit to the project after being initially approached by ‘Tron: Legacy’ director Joseph Kosinski. Critically hailed as a game-changer for the group (even while a certain quadrant of the blognoscenti decries its commerciality), the soundtrack is the first film score to chart that high in half a decade and Daft Punk’s highest-charting album to date.īut hiring the group to score one of Disney’s tent-pole films of 2010 was hardly a no-brainer for studio brass. 10 on the national album chart, scanning over 70,000 units according to Nielsen SoundScan it has sold more than 118,000 units to date. In its first week of release, the CD landed at No. In a startling departure from the kind of techno-disco-heavy metal mash-ups and bombastic dance music that propelled them into international superstardom, the Grammy-winning French electronica duo back-burnered what they do best and went on hiatus from a lucrative touring schedule for nearly two years to compose and produce the ‘Tron: Legacy’ soundtrack. ![]() ![]() Ultimately, the success of a soundtrack is hard to judge in isolation but, even with the weight of expectation, this one doesn’t disappoint.Scoring aces such as Hans Zimmer (‘The Dark Knight,’ ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’) and John Williams (the ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Harry Potter’ franchises) have become global brands for creating similar emotionally pregnant soundscapes for film - the kind of music that isn’t shy about pushing viewers’ buttons or providing an emotional context for what’s on-screen.īut while ‘Adagio for Tron’ - for that matter, most of the tracks on the soundtrack - shows a mastery of orchestral music and fluency for deploying every symphonic resource from timpani to Wagner tuben, the musicians responsible for the score are better known for a sound that can be characterized as anything but classical. However, a strange sense of melancholy and creeping doom pervades and that’s what really makes it work as a cohesive whole, even if at first listen those few blasts of classic Daft Punk are what catch the ear. The recurring theme first featured in ‘Overture’ owes more than a little to Aaron Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’, written in 1942, and the more overtly dancefloor friendly tracks (‘Derezzed’ is ubiquitous in the publicity but is in fact very short) are few and far between. The much-vaunted interplay of 90-piece orchestra and Daft Punk’s familiar electronic approach has perhaps been overstated, but the end product is still an evocative and stirring mix of enormous strings, huge booming drones and finally some familiar and full throttle Daft Punk. As a whole, the score has more in common with Hans Zimmer’s recent work for Christopher Nolan’s Inception than it does with Daft Punk’s oeuvre to date, or even Thomas Bangalter’s fantastically mindbending yet still unmistakeably Daft Punk-esque soundtrack for Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible. Putting aside the massive media assault that is now building around the Disney sequel, the hiring of the Parisian electronic dons for the project seemed too good to be true – who better to orchestrate the reanimation of such a seminal piece of retro-futurism? The finished product is not, however what many are perhaps expecting it to be. There’s as much hype and hyperbole around Daft Punk’s TRON: Legacy score as there is around the film itself. ![]()
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