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Established 1961 13 Lifestyle Features Wednesday, February 24, 2021 ne of the era’s defining dancefloor More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, acts hung up their helmets on Stronger”. There were some distinctive- OMonday, as electronic music stars ly left-field choices in the years that fol- Daft Punk announced their retirement in lowed, including producing the 2003 typically enigmatic fashion with a video film “Interstella 5555” by Japanese ani- showing one of them exploding in a me master Leiji Matsumoto, which fea- desert. The French duo released an tured music from “Discovery”. If their eight-minute clip titled “Epilogue”, using next album in 2005, a more sombre footage from their cult 2006 film “Human After All”, received mixed “Electroma” in which one of the robots reviews, these were quickly forgotten sets other to self-destruct mode. After amid the euphoria of their live shows the explosion, a cutaway reads “1993- over the next two years. 2021” with two robot hands making a cir- This included a headline appearance cle around a sunset. at US festival Coachella in 2006, per- Their publicist, Kathryn Frazier, con- formed inside a giant LED pyramid. firmed the news to AFP by email, without EDM fans still speak about it with an giving a reason for the split. From “Da almost religious reverence. In 2010, Funk” in 1995 to “Get Lucky” in 2013, In this file photo nominee For Best Album Of The Year “Random In this file photo Daft Punk performs at the Coachella Music they released a soundtrack to the Daft Punk became the torch-bearers for Access Memories” Daft Punk arrive on the red carpet for the 56th Fesival in Indio, California. — AFP photos Disney reboot of Tron, which picked up French house music across the globe, Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. a Grammy nomination. But no one pre- winning six Grammy awards and pio- dicted the massive success of “Random neering the monumental sound-and-light Access Memories”, for which they gave shows that came to characterize the wave of tributes to Daft Punk’s hit-making the year for “Get Lucky”, the millions- review in the British music press dis- up their usual makeshift home rig for a electronic dance movement (EDM) of influence. “They always cultivated a taste selling lead single featuring Pharrell missed the band as “daft punky thrash”- full commercial studio-and used entirely recent years. They did so while almost for the paradoxical,” electro pioneer Williams and Nile Rodgers. But the which struck a chord with them. live instruments. The resulting work never revealing their faces-the ubiqui- Jean-Michel Jarre told AFP, praising the much hoped-for return to touring never Reemerging as an electronic outfit, they dominated album-of-the-year lists and tous helmets became another much- duo’s “extremely elegant manner of say- took place. They showed up one more met with instant success. Early singles helped lift their total worldwide sales to copied trope of EDM stars, but also ing goodbye to their fans”. “Eternally time for the Grammies in 2017. Despite “Da Funk” and “Around the World” 12 million. afforded Thomas Bangalter, 46, and grateful,” tweeted Christine and the the Twittersphere erupting in excite- became club fixtures, and led to mas- In December, Strokes frontman Julian Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, 47, free- Queens singer Chris. Star music produc- ment last month amid rumors they sive sales for their debut album Casablancas told music website The dom from the fame that quickly encircled er Marc Ronson also hailed the “gor- would appear alongside The Weeknd “Homework” in 1997. It was in the video Needle Drop that he’d been “trying to do them. “We have daily lives that are a lot geous French robots”, writing on Twitter: for the Super Bowl half-time show, that for “Around the World” that they first something” with Daft Punk after collabo- more normal... than the lives of artists “Daft Punk left the game with a flawless did not materialize. donned the helmets that would become rating with them on their 2013 single who have the same level of fame as us, legacy.” Despite endless rumors of an their signature look. “Instant Crush”. But he was told they but who might be attached to being imminent new tour or album, Daft Punk ‘Daft punky thrash’ It mirrored the tight control they exer- were “not doing music right now”, with physically recognised,” Bangalter said in had been quiet for several years. Bangalter and Homem-Christo met at cised over every part of their career, one of the duo “focused on video stuff” a 2015 BBC documentary. Their last album, 2013’s “Random school in Paris before an inauspicious which included ownership of their mas- and the other “obsessing with ancient Access Memories”, was a phenomenal start in music with the rock band Darlin’, ter recordings. They followed up with aliens or something”. — AFP ‘A flawless legacy’ success, winning them four Grammies which also featured a future member of the even more successful “Discovery” in Monday’s announcement set off a the following year including record of the French indie band Phoenix. One 2001, which spawned the hits “One recording what they remembered and how they lived was the important thing to do.” His interviews with Bedouin citizens of Israel and in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, which Israel occupied for more than a decade after the 1967 Six- Day War, yielded around 350 hours of recordings. The content includes Bedouin poetry, legal issues, religion, history and environment. Bailey, who in 1994 won a human rights award from the Association for eading Bedouin scholar Clinton Israeli researcher Clinton Bailey shows his collection of audio tape recordings of inter- Civil Rights in Israel for his advocacy, Bailey has amassed hundreds of has also penned books, including a hours of recordings about the views with members of the Bedouin commu- L nity at his home in Jerusalem. tome of 113 Bedouin poems. To com- nomadic society’s poetry, history and plete its three-year digitization project, legal system, in a career that began area we are trying to fill in gaps and the library has hired members of while jogging through Israel’s Negev document all aspects of Israeli society,” Israel’s Bedouin community to help, desert. Bailey’s unique Arabic audio she said. among other things, transcribe the In this undated handout image, a curator at the National Museum of Norway uses an archive is now being transcribed and recordings using their knowledge of the infrared scanner in the quest to reveal author of hidden graffiti on Edvard Munch’s origi- digitized by Israel’s National Library, a ‘Going to disappear’ local dialect. nal painting of The Scream in Oslo. — AFP photos project aimed at enriching Bedouin Bailey was teaching political science Ukeles said the library would make scholarship in Israel, the Arab world and at New York’s Columbia University in the the archive accessible online, enabling well as events that happened in 1895, beyond. “I find that in understanding late 1960s when he decided to move to Bedouins in the Sinai to access the rare when Munch showed the painting in Bedouin culture... you understand Israel to teach English on a southern kib- cultural record by mobile phone. The Munch wrote Norway for the first time, all point in the human nature, how people adjust to liv- butz. An Arabic speaker, he was fre- library is also seeking collaboration with same direction.” ing under very difficult circumstances,” quently invited by Bedouins into their scholars in the Gulf, a prospect made ‘madman’ tag on Bailey told AFP. There are some 250,000 tents as he jogged in the surrounding easier by recent agreements with the Bedouins living in Israel, part of the area. Eventually, he bought a jeep to vis- United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to mainly Palestinian-Arab community that it Bedouin communities further afield. establish ties with Israel. “It’s a high ‘Scream’ painting, stayed in the Jewish state following its Now in his early 80s, he recalled thinking quality, rare oral history of a culture” that creation in 1948. that Bedouin society was at a transition was very important “in the rainbow of Impoverished and often living on the point. Watching them use radios and cultures here in Israel,” said Ukeles. museum rules margins, Bedouin culture is understud- plastic containers was a harbinger of ied in Israel, a problem Bailey’s record- encroaching modernity that would Rights advocate ings will help address, said Raquel inevitably infringe on their traditional Israel’s Bedouins once laid claim to mysterious inscription on Edvard Ukeles, head of collections at the library. ways, he said, adding he feared much of the Negev desert, but the minor- Munch’s famed painting “The The national library has consistently pri- Bedouin culture “was going to disap- ity community now survives on the mar- AScream” has baffled the art world oritized material on Islam, but focused pear”. gins of Israeli society and often in pover- for years, but Norwegian experts have less on the culture and history of indige- In order to preserve it, Bailey decided ty. Land ownership is one of main bones now concluded it was written by none nous Arab communities, she told AFP. to chronicle the Bedouins orally-based of contention between the Bedouins and other than the artist himself. Barely visi- “This collection enables us to preserve culture. The first step was to acquire a Israeli authorities. “We decided not to ble to the naked eye, the phrase “Can This undated handout image, shows an image and document Bedouin culture, in an tape recorder.

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