Why daft punk choose wee waa

The impact on the planned celebration was immediate. A journalist from the local newspaper The Narrabri Courier told Wired that the Wee Waa Motel experienced 37 out of 60 cancellations in the day following the leak. What had been sold as a world premiere now seemed humdrum, an experience that anyone with an internet connection, BitTorrent or iTunes could have.

So what value, if any, does an album release event have after once an internet leak has removed the mystery? I went to Wee Waa to find out.

During the seven-hour drive to Wee Waa, the temptation to listen to the album is powerful. After all, it's right there. I resist, though, out of respect for the album and the experience ahead. I figure that saving that crucial first listen for the first night will be worth it. The choice to host the album launch here had everything to do with sheer disorientation — hence the global headlines. Sony first floated the idea with the Narrabri Shire Council in February, two months before the news was made public in mid-April.

The Wee Waa Show committee discussed at length how the showgrounds would cope with the influx of tourists; local accommodation was fully booked soon after the news broke.

This three-day event is an important cultural staple of the region, even when Daft Punk isn't around. The only problem with the fairytale story was that the Bank, the John Ibrahim -linked nightclub that was frequented by rapper stars like Chris Brown and Trey Songz , closed a week ago. Melbourne Sound Mafia was lapping up the glory online and praising ''da ectic workz'' of his management and agent in securing the much sought-after support slot. But when caught out by the Diary he admitted he was closer to a ''fictional entity''.

Perhaps he should just get in line with the rest of the world who are clamouring for the tickets to the listening party. Sony has confirmed that Daft Punk will not actually be in Wee Waa, or Australia at all, but their album won't be played publicly anywhere else in the world before then. Daft Punk set for Wee Waa. The technical crew and backing musicians on the album are drawn from old favourites as well as contemporary recordings.

The concept is to have a radical for modern dance-focused recordings example of using real sounds, bodies and instruments alongside technology to capture ''the magic''. In this idea of transmission, we said that there was something interesting about recreating the circumstances, going back to these magical places, these iconic recording studios and working with these engineers. Daft Punk won't be there in person and they had never heard of the NSW country town until recently.

But the suggestion from the local record company that they launch their album during the Wee Waa Show fitted the conceptual brief the Frenchmen had drafted. The French duo's Thomas Bangalter says: ''It felt for us that this record has a certain aspect of random quality, and the idea of breaking the barriers between cities and the countryside, or between the musical genres or any sort of classification. So we thought this [the Wee Waa launch party] was a poetic idea.

The only thing that could be better is if they beam down, via hologram maybe, into Wee Waa and greet us as visitors from the planet Daft Punk. On one hand it's cool, it's fun, it's healthy, it's sexy, it's stylish. On the other hand it's terrifying, it's alienating, it's addictive and it's scary. That has been the subject of much science-fiction literature. The main problem Daft Punk have with technology in and outside the studio today is the idea that it would make room for humans to focus on more important things, when, in fact, it makes everyone lazier.

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