Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.
In this Love Letter To A Record series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.
Strange Talk – Daft Punk’s, Discovery (2001)
Dearest Daft Punk, Discovery
Gosh how times have changed, trends have shifted and music has developed, but after all this time not a year passes by where I don’t revisit you at least once a year.
It feels like yesterday when the infectious vocoder vocal throughout this record became my life soundtrack. Seasons would change and my fondest memory is waking up as a teenager and tuning into the Saturday morning music video charts and for weeks and weeks the anime style video clip to
‘One More Time’ would kickstart my weekend’s youthful adventures – It was like nothing anyone else was doing. The art of looping you introduced to the world, the disco-infused style that opened up the mainstream airwaves, the creativity outside of just the music, the mysteriousness of who Daft Punk was, all had me hooked!
I remember falling in love with your sounds and researching high and low into the different synthesisers used to create such sonics, a time where plugins and music software were still so raw and nowhere near as developed or accessible – sound-crafting at its absolute finest.
Several years would pass. I was of legal age to attend nightclubs and the youthful memories you once bought me on Saturday mornings would constantly come flowing back time after time on many weekend nightclub dance floors, festivals and of course when I saw you live for the Alive tour – front row tickets to a two-hour onslaught medley of all the standouts on Discovery; I remember losing my mind to the lead arpeggiator of ‘Aerodynamic’ and again ‘One More Time’ would work as the quintessential party anthem for any occasion from an 18th Birthday to a closing song on a main stage at a festival.
Maybe it was an omen with the album title being ‘Discovery’ but you introduced me to french disco dance music. I would trawl through the internet looking for anything I could find – Justice, Kavinsky, Cassius, Tomas Bangalter’s solo projects, Fred Falke, Alan Braxe, the list goes on. You paved the way to a musical palette that is everything I love.
It’s been 20 years and we will miss you Daft Punk, but rest assure Discovery will live on forever
Love Always,
Strange Talk xx’
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