Homework Remixes: when Daft Punk paid homage to their US dance roots
For a duo of exquisite taste, Daft Punk sure did commission some terrible remixes. I once described their remixed catalogue as being packed with more turds than a baker’s toilet and I stick with that. Daft Punk have released four (four!!) remix albums to date, not including RAM Drumless, which sits somewhere out there on its own, and three of them are genuinely terrible.
Daft Club gathers up remixes from Discovery-era Punk (plus Basement Jaxx’s execrable take on Phoenix) and, with a couple of notable exceptions, proves how terrible Discovery could have been in the hands of lesser producers. (The infamous Pitchfork review of the album, which gave it a 1.3, was possibly a little lenient in its criticism, if anything.)
Human After All: Remixes, perversely, showed what a bad idea Human After All was in Daft Punk’s hands — but that it could certainly get even worse, when paired with the wrong remixer. And Tron: Legacy Reconfigured is so bereft of life it led former Daft Punk manager Pedro Winter — aka the nicest person in dance music — to write a open letter of complaint to Disney. Put it this way: the Crystal Method will go to their grave know they remixed Daft Punk and you never did. And that is the true Legacy of Reconfigured.
I have long speculated about why remixes of Daft Punk are so terrible. (I think we can discard Legacy Reconfigured from the argument here: it is terrible because the remixers themselves are terrible, by and large.) The best I can come up with, then, is that Daft Punk were charitable enough to give remix opportunities to younger producers, who may have felt intimidated by the task in hand. But this only works part of the time.
For whatever reason, the glorious exception to this rule is Homework Remixes, which was released in 2022 as part of the 25th anniversary reissue of Homework. Over 15 songs — on the digital edition — it rounds up most of the remixes from the three Homework singles, Around The World, Burnin’ and Revolution 909, throwing in the extended version of Teachers and the Revolution Acapella from Revolution 909.
The last two tracks are inessential. And Homework Remixes isn’t entirely comprehensive either, missing Armand van Helden’s stunning Ten Minutes Of Funk Mix remix of Da Funk for, I suspect, copyright reasons. It’s a big miss, given that it is among the best Daft Punk remixes of all time and its serpentine funk features heavily in Alive 97. Motorbass’s rambling Miami mix of Around The World is also missing and, for posterity’s sake, it would have been nice for the album to include Ian Pooley’s unreleased Burnin’ remix, which he has been trying to get released for a while.
I’ve written about this before — notably in my Daft Punk book — but Daft Punk were always the most American of all the French Touch groups. St Germain, Motorbass, DJ Cam, Air, Dimitri from Paris et al all had something distinctly Gallic in their sounds, be it in a touch of jazz or the whiff of lounge. But Daft Punk didn’t, really. While Thomas and Guy-Man did come up with their own sound, they were hugely influenced by Chicago house and Detroit techno, not to mention US hip hop, R&B and funk. Thomas Bangalter, lest we forget, spent three weeks in New York in 1993 visiting night clubs, right at the start of Daft Punk.
“Daft Punk’s real core influences from house music came from America,” Roger Sanchez told me for the book, ”a lot of Chicago producers, they are really into the Chicago heads, [DJ] Sneak, they were into some really obscure guys that at the time were really creating a very dirty, proto-techno sound. And obviously, techno came from Detroit.”
Homework Remixes marks the moment that Daft Punk came closest to their roots in US dance music. Of the 13 remixes (minus the extended version of Teachers and the Revolution Acapella), nine came from the 90s US house music elite: Masters at Work (who provide four), Roger Sanchez (working with a fellow American, Junior Sanchez), Todd Terry (two) and DJ Sneak (two), who sprinkle Daft Punk’s work with US house dust and disco glamour.
The album is very much a family affair. Sneak and Masters at Work’s Louie Vega and Kenny Dope are both mentioned in Teachers, while Sneak would go on to work on Discovery; Roger Sanchez toured with the band on the Daftendirekt tour; and Todd Terry is named in the live version of Teachers that Daft Punk played on the same tour.
The other three remixers keep things equally close to home (work). Slam, who provide two remixes of Burnin’, signed a youthful Daft Punk to their Soma label in 1993; Ian Pooley got the duo in to remix his Chord Memory in 1996; I:Cube did likewise with Disco Cubizm; and Motorbass were Paris house royalty, consisting of Etienne de Crecy and Philippe Zdar, later of Cassius.
How relevant this is in the success of Homework Remixes I don’t know. (I suspect it is quite relevant, if not defining.) But for whatever reason, Homework Remixes is undoubtedly a fine record. You wouldn’t, perhaps, want to sit down to the whole thing, given how often the same three songs repeat. But, taken in doses, Homework Remixes stands up proudly for the art of remixing.
While I have always enjoyed Aphex Twin’s remixes, his approach of throwing out most of the original track and concentrating on some scrap of production (or not even that, eh Evan Dando?) is somehow cheating, like a remix should be a recognisable enhancement of the record at hand.
For the vast majority of its 13 reworks, Homework Remixes stays true to this ethos. The only exception is Motorbass’s Vice mix of Around The World, which, bar the odd scrap of vocodered vocal, sounds like an entirely new track. But, frankly, an entirely new track from the not exactly prolific Motorbass duo is a treat by any name.
The Homework Remixes aren’t necessarily better than the original tracks, of course. But the remixers succeed in welcoming Daft Punk into their own individual worlds. I:Cube makes Around The World chaotic and jazzy, like his own brilliant records for Versatile; DJ Sneak gives Burnin’ a tough, Chicago edge; Roger and Junior Sanchez add a tough New York hip hop house flavour to Revolution 909; Masters at Work bring their rolling percussion and soulful chords to Around The World; and Todd Terry gives Daft Punk some of his wild sampling energy on his two remixes of Around The World (both of which, bizarrely, sample Armand van Helden’s Mongloids in Space remix of Runaway by NuYorican Soul — aka Masters at Work.)
Essentially, the US remixes answer the (admittedly rather obscure) question of what would Daft Punk have sounded like, had Bangalter decided to stay in New York in 1993 rather than return to Paris. Not that different, perhaps, but steeped in an intriguing new shade, the Americanness of the tunes turned up by 20%. At the same time, they provide a welcome fresh perspective on songs that I have listened to far too many times for comfort.
More importantly, the two best remixes stand up to anything in the Daft Punk catalogue. Ian Pooley’s Cut Up mix of Burnin’ beats Sneak at his own game by launching several pointless Twitter attacks on fellow artists taking a razor to Burnin’s wonderfully twitching bass line, slicing it into tense coils of spasmodic funk, while adding drums that swing with super-hard funk. (Pro DJ tip; try mixing from Pooley’s Cut Up mix of Burnin’ into the original then back again: it works a treat.)
Masters at Work’s Mellow Mix of Around The World, meanwhile, does the wonderful remixer’s trick of taking a neglected part of the original tune — in this case, the bubbling synth riff — and bringing it into the heart of the song, its sunshine vibes resembling Around The World if it had been made on a Californian beach rather than in a Parisian bedroom.
All of which adds up to an essential release. Homework Remixes is not just the best Daft Punk remix album by far, the only one you can listen to without wanting to set light to your hearing, it’s also a record that offers a fascinating insight into Daft Punk as US-influenced house music group, pre-Discovery pop pioneers, Human After All noiseniks and Random Access Memories LA poolside party boys. Which is an illuminating and perhaps under-used lens to view this revered and much missed robotic duo.
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