Music Routes Blog

Your Discography Help Requested: Daft Punk

14 June 2009

We here at Music Routes HQ have had a difficult time connecting Daft Punk to other artists.

We're as surprised as you are.  We've had to settle for connecting LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" to Kanye West's "Stronger" which samples Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger".

You'd think it would be really easy to connect Daft Punk to other popular musicians—just connect them through their performance with Kanye West at the Grammy's!  But, to my knowledge, that performance has never been released legally on an audio recording.  And that's the standard we've been using for entering something into the database.

One might also be tempted to use West's aforementioned "Stronger" (which is the song he performed at the aforementioned Grammy's ceremony).  But that wasn't a true collaboration; West sampled Daft Punk.  And we don't generally count sampling as the sampled artist performing.

(We also generally don't count it when a track exhumes a dead person's recorded performance so that people who were not meant to be involved in that original performance can sing or play "with" the dead musician.  Natalie Cole's recording with her late father Nat Cole is the most notirous example of this, but there are a surprising number of these things.  Kenny G with Louis Armstrong.  Suriving and dead Beatles "performing" together.  Many uses of Jim Morrison reading poetry.  Even Les Paul at 90 "performing" with a long-dead Sam Cooke!)

OK, so Kanye West is out (at least until that Grammy's performance is released on a CD) as a collaborator with Daft Punk.  Who else is there?

There's Romanthony who collaborated with Daft Punk on their song "One More Time".  Romanthony, on his own recordings, has collaborated with Eve Angel and DJ S+M.  And from there?  Um, not sure.  Or maybe he's collaborate with someone else?

Another possibility is Todd Edwards who collaborated with Daft Punk on "Face To Face".  But from Todd Edwards, where do we go?

There are a few other projects that the guys in Daft Punk have worked on, but so far, they are all dead ends as far as connecting Daft Punk to the larger mass of musicians in the database.  Help?!