DAFT PUNK'S LOST 1997 SHOW SURFACES AFTER 25 YEARS

## The Show That Time Almost Forgot Elements of the track 'Alive' can be heard as it was performed at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles, California on December 17, 1997. This wasn't just another gig. This was Daft Punk in their human form, before the helmets, before the mythology, when Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were still just two 22-year-old producers from Paris trying to make sense of what they'd created. The live show was filmed on December 17, 1997, at the 1,700-person-capacity venue in downtown Los Angeles. The tour spanned from February to December 1997, with Daft Punk using their home studio equipment for the live stage. This wasn't a slick production. This was bedroom producers scaling up their setup to fill a theater. ## The Technical Stack That Built French House As Thomas Bangalter explained, 'Everything was synched up—the drum machines, the bass lines. The sequencer was just sending out the tempos and controlling the beats and bars. On top of this structure we built all these layers of samples and various parts that we could bring in whenever we wanted to'. The band had used several machines running ARKAOS software into a custom visual setup. This wasn't just about the music. They were building a complete sensory experience using the same DIY ethos that created Homework. Homework was released on January 20, 1997 by Virgin Records, hitting the US on March 25, 1997. The Mayan show came at the end of that breakthrough year, when the album had already proven that bedroom production could compete with major label budgets. ## The Footage That Disappeared and Returned Little video footage from the tour has been released. For 25 years, this show existed mainly in the memories of the 1,700 people who were there. The only well-known footage was on D.A.F.T.: A Story About Dogs, Androids, Firemen and Tomatoes, which consisted of 8 different camera angles of Daft Punk performing at the Mayan Theatre. The one time only stream started at 2:22pm PST on February 22, 2022 — exactly one year on from Daft Punk announcing their split. The stream marked one year since the French duo announced their split and coincided with the 25th-anniversary edition rerelease of Homework. The full Twitch stream was captured in source quality untouched, now living permanently on Internet Archive. What was once lost media became a complete document of how a scene grows before the internet can properly witness it. The myth isn't just the show itself. It's how scenes build momentum in the spaces between documentation, how influence spreads through word of mouth and bootleg recordings, how two kids from Paris could use samplers and drum machines to rewrite the rules of what dance music could be.