“Touch, Sweet Touch” — Daft Punk’s Machine Time
In musical notation, there is the concept of “Half-Time.” It is essentially taking the meter of the song and making it slower by half, so if you have a song at 100 beats per minute, its half time groove would sound like 50. It is currently a technique very common in hip hop production, because it allows for a seemingly slow tempo with a lot of percussive detail inside it (think of the relationship between the sparse, crackling snares versus the busy hi-hats firing off). Along with its antagonist, double-time, it is one of music’s quirks at time manipulation, making us perceive fast and slow at the same time. When double time kicks in, it makes the music trip over itself, and when it goes into half-time, it melts into molasses.
I think half-time becomes something more than a mere notation and performance quirk in Daft Punk. It becomes an emotion, a specific moment in an adventure, it turns into “Machine-Time.”
As I write, I am still processing the announcement of Daft Punk’s split. Not only because I have been a big fan for years, and not only because I was in a bit of a DP Phase for the past few months (re-listening to Random Access Memories frequently), but because of their farewell video (repurposing a scene of their movie Electroma and titled Epilogue) and their final images, both their hands joined in a triangle pointing to a clouded sunset. It is a beautiful heartwrecking and heartwarming image, perfectly encapsulating their quirky, VHS tinged personality and their tendency towards emotionally lingering aesthetics that tug at your heartstrings while still moving your feet.
They were never really known for their lyrics, because they often didn’t need to go beyond the tried and true tradition of “repeating a cool sentence a lot of times” to hypnotic, trance-like effect. Songs like “Around The World” and “Robot Rock” are centered around intense repetition of pretty much a single phrase, while “Get Lucky” and “One More Time” have a more “conventional” pop structure while still putting the emphasis on a killer hook strutting around the whole tune. There are however, songs like “Technologic” and “Harder Better Faster Stronger,” which instead of drilling repetitive words into your skull, intend to play around with how things are repeated. “Technologic” is a series of orders given to us by a high pitched robot, the infamous “Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, mail — upgrade it” refrains. The song actually has a bunch of words, over 76 ones. But the word “it” is repeated more than 300 times. We never find out what “it is”, and eventually all the words mesh into a mush of sounds, but it is to a far more dizzying effect, meshing with the intense menacing beat. Harder Better Faster Stronger has a more contained pool of words to make use of (“work it harder/make it better/do it faster/makes us stronger/more than ever/hour after/our work is/never over”). The song starts with the sparcest of sentence fragments over a funky, vaguely glitched out groove and little by little through every new section the phrases start to create more coherence. It is almost like a house take on a Devo-style concept. I absolutely love how the song plays with the pauses once the sentence is completed, as if it’s trying to not give the game away too soon. Then it launches into that infectious melody once the instruments drop out.
And then, at 2:40, it launches into a half-time groove. The sample of Edwin Birdsong’s Cola Bottle Baby gets more mangled than at any point previously, to make the song drift away in its tracks. It glistens under a factorial sun of dividend potentials.
In Discovery, Daft Punk saw the peak of their early success, with the monster hit One More Time. The thing that always gets me about the song for how long this dance tune has virtually no drums. The extended bridge pretty much only has the vocals and keys, briefly featuring a tambourine with no accompanying drums, ending with the song’s sample getting louder for that final drop in the outro hook. It is once again half-time, but even more dire since there is no percussion to drum along. Like seeing pictures of dance parties, it is dancing as a non-physical concept, as an implication. I can’t help but think of the amazingly nostalgic pictures at clubs like Paradise Garage or Studio 54, imagining that those people are still dancing into eternity.
And yet, as the opener of the album, it asks for one more time, one last dance. It is final and world shattering in a kind of melancholic way. It is like one last dance on the heat death of a solar system. In his phenomenal series of posts in an (at the time) ongoing polemic with Mark “K-Punk” Fisher over Sonic Youth, blogger Zone Styx Travelcard quotes William Woldsworth’s “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement” to refer to electronic dance music’s relationship to nostalgia (specifically the Second Summer Of Love). The quote goes “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!”. I think Daft Punk fits a version of this quote that is narrated in Chico Buarque’s present-past presented in João e Maria (“And now I was a hero/And my horse could only speak in English”).The joy of the future celebration is folded into the present with the music that has him “feeling so free,” while already presenting its demise in the fact that it is after all “one more time” for tonight.
Those sentiments carry over into the narrative of Digital Love. Notice how “Last night I had this dream about you”, but “in this dream I’m dancing right beside you” in the present. The dream is not only the oneiric space where your mind runs off while you sleep, it is also another word for wishmaking. In that sense, again, the song exists in the past, the present and in the future. That folding is not even a one off thing, as “Don’t stop, come a little closer” gives way to “We were dancing all night long”, or “You’re feeling right, you wrap your arms around too” ends with the narrator waking up (“Before I knew it, this dream was all gone”). And in the hook he literally says “I hope this dream comes true,” bringing us back to that notion of a dream as a wish. It is one of the all time great love songs, for it takes advantage of infatuation’s chronomantic powers (with an absolutely phenomenal music video related to the Interstella 5555 movie, with a cosmonaut dreaming of dancing with the bassist of the fictional alien band, floating over a shimmering field of flowers).
One of the other great songs about longing in the album is Something About Us, but this time is not one of cupidic tricks and wordplay, time is a hurdle. After all, “It might not be the right time/I might not be the right one”. Here the narrator faces up with one of time’s tragic limitations: it can never be recovered. The final refrain of “I need you more than anything in my life/I want you more than anything in my life/I’ll miss you more than anyone in my life/I love you more than anyone in my life” is as blunt and as powerful as a metal bat to the heart. And the fact that one of the album’s slower tunes, with its somber groove (which was not actually sampled from anything else, showcasing DP’s own instrumental mastery) comes right after the proto-future-funk (how is that for chronomancy) of High Life is once again, the duo pulling the brakes momentarily.
The future-nostalgic balladry of Something About Us would be something Daft Punk would throw its hat again in Random Access Memories, an album defined by its post-modern old school worldbuilding. I’ve always marveled at the decision to throw Julian Casablanca, one of indie’s most instantly recognizable voices, through so many heavy layers of vocoders and autotune, and even more so at how clever that decision was in the context of the song. Julian’s power comes in how down to earth his vocals are, being somewhat sleepy and straightforward as a compliment to The Strokes busy riffs. But in this context, Julian becomes a choir of soaring crooners, a mechanic greek choir announcing the tragic end to a relationship. This time the lyrics cut far deeper, pointing at petty, envious and regretful emotions (I got this picture of us kids in my head/And all I hear is the last thing that you said/”I listened to your problems, now listen to mine”/I didn’t want to anymore). It recognizes the dysfunction that leads to the end of the relationship comes in large part from the narrator, but it’s pleas for his lover dont feel fake or forced.
In Random Access Memories though, the crowning lyrical achievement to me comes in the 8 minute epic Touch featuring Paul Williams, an absolute masterstroke in the progressive funk music the album’s other behemoth Giorgio By Moroder takes on (not uncoincidentally, the other song featuring an older singer, precisely from the era that Daft Punk returned all over their career and decided to fully indulge in RAM). It starts with sparse, warped electronics that sound like a cross between Boards of Canada and Stockhausen, with heavily distorted vocals pointing to the title of the track that is the focal point of the track. “Touch/I remember touch”. After nearly 2 minutes, Paul’s clean and weary vocals kick in, accompanied only by a Rhodes. Paul’s two verses (the second one with hi-hats kicking in, indicating a far faster tempo than the previous sections would indicate) before the instrumental break that takes as much from ragtime as it does from disco are some of my favorite lyrics in any Daft Punk song, with its vivid, on one hand lovesick and on the other terrifying imagery. “Touch, I remember touch/Pictures came with touch/A painter in my mind/Tell me what you see”. I absolutely adore the way it connects tactile sensation with images, feels very at home in DP’s nostalgic time magic, almost like the memories in one’s mind feel more real than the world around them.
And then the half-time section kicks in once again. Machine-Time. This time, even the song is telling us to slow down a bit (“Hold on, if love is the answer, you’re home”). It is alright to rest. As far as grappling with one’s memories go, they would be the one place where the narrator would feel at home.
“Touch, Sweet Touch/You’ve given me too much to feel/Touch, sweet touch/You’ve almost convinced me i’m real/I need something more…”.
As one of the ending sentiments of the song, I think it perfectly fits Daft Punk’s departure. Not a finishing period on a sentence, but more an ellipsis. Or maybe a musical ritornello. For in a way, we have reached the other side of “One More Time”’s celebrating tonight one more time: needing something more. It is an ending that is certain of its own demise, but much like the robot that keeps on walking towards the sunset in their farewell video after his friend has exploded, will keep on searching.
Their infectious energy will be surely missed, but all throughout their career, they have been training us to treat the end as not necessarily final. I urge us all to think more in machine-time. Take all possible times as far as you can at the same time, draw haphazard connections, and don’t forget to dance along the lines created.
I want to finish this text with one of Kodwo Eshun’s many phenomenal quotes on music’s power over time. This one is in the context of acid and jungle music, but i think it fits very well.
“The producer follows the trail blazed by the error, breeds it into a new sonic lifeform. Acid amplifies these constraints as much as possible. jungle accepts the rigidly quantizing function of the Cubase virtual studio. It doesn’t revolt against the digital grid; it optimizes it into new possibilities. Your record collection now becomes an ongoing memorybank in which every historical sound exists as a potential break in the present tense. Chronology collapses into mixology, the time of the mix where the location of a bass note in space time gives way to spacetime dislocation. ’73 is replaced by plus 5 on the turntable pitch adjuster”
As well as with one from Soren Kierkegaard, on a similar topic (this time in relationship to the music of Mozart), folded in with the nature of sensuous (“Touch, sweet touch?”). I take it to connect to Daft Punk’s sensuality, but also because at the end of the day, they are dance music, body music, touch music.
“The most abstract idea conceivable is the sensuous! in its elemental originality. But through which medium can it be presented? Only through music. It cannot be presented in sculpture because it has a qualification of a kind of inwardness; it cannot be painted, for it cannot be caught in definite contours. In its lyricism, it is a force, a wind, impatience, passion, etc., yet in such a way that it exists not in one instant but in a succession of instants, for if it existed in one instant, it could be depicted or painted. That it exists in a succession of instants expresses its epic character, but still it is not epic in the stricter sense, for it has not reached the point of words; it continually moves within immediacy. Consequently, it cannot be presented in poetry, either. The only medium that can present it is music. Music has an element of time in itself but nevertheless does not take place in time except metaphorically. It cannot express the historical within time.”
