Digital dance overlords Daft Punk have surprised everyone by creating an orchestral score for the year's biggest sci-fi spectacula. Rod Stanley spends a few days in LA to find out why they've swapped chips for cellos.
If you look closely at the back of a circuit board, that tightly packed grid of lines and soldering points looks a lot like a top-down view of a futuristic city. At least, it must have seemed that way to director Steven Lisberger in the late 1970s, around the time he moved his small animation studio to Los Angeles. Inspired by his experience of the first video game Pong, Lisberger had a vision of the future - a utopian virtual world that existed inside computer space, populated by avatars of programs and the people that created them, and enabled by a new form of animation that swapped paintbrushes for pixels. He called it Tron.
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A few days later, the completed soundtrack album is played through at their studio, and Daft Punk’s skill as composers is clear. Dance has flirted with classical in the past, and composers from Hans Zimmer to original Tron scorer Wendy Carlos have incorporated electronic music into film themes, but this score is a new form of cybernetically enhanced organism, seamlessly merging emotional strings and horns with pulsing bass and sci-fi synth. There's an electronic version of the main theme that fuses with the instruments so completely that it somehow seems to be originating from within that same high-domed Victorian chapel it's crazy and beautiful, a classical orchestra cutting shapes at a 90s warehouse rave. Thomas nods, saying they spent about six months just experimenting with the sound; recording was very pure, he adds, and they limited themselves to six or seven digital sounds, embedded like virtual instruments within the orchestra. He namechecks Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, John Carpenter, Vangelis and Maurice Jarre as soundtrack composers that have been inspirational to them. […]
