Symphony in sci-fi: Daft Punk's 'Tron' score

Played in the denouement to a gripping shootout between digital warriors on rocket-propelled hang gliders, the musical passage "Adagio for Tron" arrives about two-thirds through the $170 million sci-fi thriller "Tron: Legacy." It's an elegiac movement recorded by a symphony orchestra that features desolate violins swelling around a barely there synthesizer pulse.

But while "Adagio for Tron" - for that matter, most of the tracks on the soundtrack - shows a mastery of orchestral music and fluency for deploying every symphonic resource from timpani to Wagner tuben, the musicians responsible for the score are better known for a sound that can be characterized as anything but classical.

That would be Daft Punk. In a startling departure from the kind of techno-disco-heavy metal mash-ups and bombastic dance music that propelled them into international superstardom, the Grammy-winning French electronica duo back-burnered what they do best and went on hiatus from a lucrative touring schedule for nearly two years to compose and produce the "Tron: Legacy" soundtrack.

In its first week of release, the CD landed at No. 10 on the national album chart, scanning more than 70,000 units, according to Nielsen SoundScan; it has sold more than 118,000 units to date. Critically hailed as a game-changer for the group (even while a certain quadrant of the blognoscenti decries it as too commercial), the soundtrack is the first film score to chart that high in half a decade and Daft Punk's highest-charting album to date.

But hiring the group to score one of Disney's tent-pole films of 2010 was hardly a no-brainer for studio brass. Moreover, it took the members of Daft Punk - Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter - more than a year to commit to the project after being initially approached by "Legacy" director Joseph Kosinski. And when the duo finally set to work with an 85-piece orchestra, they shocked the filmmakers by shelving Daft's signature four-on-the-floor sound in favor of a more classical direction that little in the duo's musical oeuvre suggested they were qualified to produce.

"It was not obvious for anyone," Bangalter said during a rare interview with the notoriously press-averse group. He was seated at an outdoor picnic table at the Jim Henson Productions complex in Hollywood, where Daft Punk's production company, Daft Arts, keeps offices. "We knew that dance music was not the appropriate style of music to fit this movie - in scope and tone on many levels. We were not interested in doing it in terms of what we've done in the past," he said.

A rave act

Bangalter and de Homem-Christo started out in Paris as a punk-leaning indie rock group before trading their guitars for computer sequencers and making a name as an underground rave act. In the early '90s, Daft Punk performed a self-styled synthesis of acid house, funk and big beat electronica at illegal warehouse parties in France that "you had to crawl under barbed wire and run from police" to attend, as Bangalter recalled.

But they shocked rave purists by landing a major-label recording deal with Virgin/ EMI in 1996. Since then, with musical output comprising a scant three studio albums, the Grammy-winning live recording "Alive 2007" and a couple of remix CDs, Daft Punk has cemented its reputation as an enigmatic group of almost unerring street cred and uncompromising vision as well as a top touring act that has headlined major music festivals around the world.

Big-budget Hollywood films typically contract a soundtrack composer only when the film is in the can. In contrast to the prevailing method, though, "Legacy's" Kosinski tried to enlist the group in 2007, long before a script or even so much as a single visual-effects test had been created.

Given the musicians' electronic musical metier and the movie's computer-matrix-for-virtual-gladiator-games setting, it seemed like a marriage made in digital heaven.

But even after a meeting during which Kosinski and the musicians discussed their mutual admiration for recording artists such as Vangelis, Philip Glass and original "Tron" soundtrack composer Wendy Carlos, de Homem-Christo and Bangalter still had doubts about signing onto the project.

"Obviously, we love 'Tron,' " said de Homem-Christo, the quieter, more intense of the two. "We thought it would be hard for the director or anybody in the new 'Tron' to top not only the music but the visual aspect of the first one, which is still relevant and more avant-garde than most of the stuff out there now. Also, to commit to work with a big studio, maybe the biggest and most iconic? It was a big question."

After a year of reflection in which Kosinski continued to detail his vision for "Legacy" to them, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo agreed to take the plunge as a means of learning to "widen the palette" of Daft Punk's sound.

Getting down to business

After the two relocated to Los Angeles, scoring began in earnest in January 2009. Nevermind that "Legacy" still had no script, only concept drawings to illustrate set pieces and characters. De Homem-Christo and Bangalter decided that an orchestral score employing subtle electronic cues - rather than vice versa - would be most appropriate to "paint that epic quality" the film dictated. So the duo applied the same kind of musical cross-pollination responsible for its gold-certified 1997 debut album "Homework" and commercial breakthrough "Discovery" to recording violin arpeggios, surging horns and roiling timpani.

"In dance music, we've always tried to combine existing genres - heavy metal and disco or funk, something that contrasts associations," Bangalter said. "[For the film], we liked the idea of a dark influence reminiscent of some electronic scores of the '70s. But at the same time, we wanted the scope of classic Hollywood. To mash up those things that usually exist on opposite ends of the spectrum."

For his part, Kosinski says he understands why Daft Punk wanted to diverge from the repetitive, sample-and-synthesizer-based template that has served such epochal dance floor anthems as "One More Time." And he feels the new music fuses electronic and orchestral music in ways that serve the scope and sweep of "Legacy."

"It was always conceived as a blend," Kosinski said. "What evolved over that first year was the ratio. The original thinking was more electronic music with classical orchestral lines in it. As the process evolved, when they got down to writing the final cues, it became much more orchestral than any of us initially anticipated. I couldn't be happier with how it turned out."