While electronic music’s most famous Parisian duo Daft Punk continue to work on their new collaborative album, their first since the 2010 soundtrack for Tron: Legacy, the pair have actually released new music.
As Pitchfork reports, at the request of Yves Saint Laurent’s new creative director, Hedi Slimane, the Daft Punk pair – Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, old friends of the designer – were charged with putting together a soundtrack to debut Slimane’s Spring/Summer 2013 collection at Paris Fashion Week.
Rather than settling for any of their past catalogue to score the fashion show, the pair instead crafted a new 15 minute piece of music that heavily samples blues artist Junior Kimbrough, editing and looping a number of Kimbrough songs, including “I Gotta Try You Girl.”
You can hear the new 15 minute work, simply titled “Junior Kimbrough Edited by Daft Punk” in the stream below, and if you really want to recreate the Parisian fashionista experience, you can listen while gorging at the Yves Saint Laurent slideshow, courtesy of NYMag.
Meanwhile, reports of Daft Punk’s highly-anticipated studio album have been pretty interesting, with some famous collaborators getting involved in some curious recordings for the electronic music-makers.
Earlier in the year, they had hit up producer/guitarist/disco go Nile Rodgers of Chic fame for his services on the forthcoming LP.
“We were just jamming at my house,” said Rodgers about the recordings. “We were having so much fun just in an informal setting that we decided to make it formal. And it’s very formal. It’s gonna be amazing.”
“Every track they played I just ran across the room and got my guitar and started playing and we were all dancing around my dining room having the time of our lives,” the funk legend enthused.
Then in May, it was revealed that Daft Punk had recruited Italian producer Georgio Moroder, best known for kick-starting disco into a new age with his collaborations with Donna Summer, to record a spoken-word monologue-come-rap for their new record.
The synth pioneer was asked to “go into a vocal booth and speak about his life.” The resulting ‘rap’ was recorded onto “multiple microphones of various vintages from the ’60s to today.” When Moroder, no stranger to the studio himself, asked about the need for so much equipment – an engineer replied “that the mic they would use would depend on what decade of his life he was speaking about.”
As with all things to do with the rob0t-helmed duo, there’s an obvious air of mystery to their activity, with no further details from the famously secretive Daft Punk camp about a release date, title, track-listing – anything – on the new record.
The Georgio Moroder/Nile Rodgers connection would suggest however that the new record is heading in a disco-centric direction. We live in hope – if only to see those robots in Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever catsuits.
In the meantime, enjoy their contribution to the catwalk with their 15-min mix of blues artist Junior Kimbrough below:
