Live Coachella 2006 Updates

Keep refreshing this page as we will be posting reviews
and comments live from the Coachella Valley Music and
Arts Festival in Indio California featuring Depeche Mode,
Daft Punk, Franz Ferdinand, Tool, Massive Attack, Madonna and many more.

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Day 2 Begins
Submitted by Raymond Flotat
On 2006-04-30 15:39:00

We're live on day 2. Due to Madonna rehearsing on the Sahara Tent, the crowd was roped off at the Gobi tent until everything was cleared out. This obstruction caused for a short delay in the opening set at that same tent.

The Best Dance Party Ever?
Submitted by Raymond Flotat
On 2006-04-30 04:31:05

Masterful. Simply masterful. With an opening ripped from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Daft Punk delivered arguably a mindblowing set of electronic music. The band's two principal members 1 and 2 emerged from behind a curtain standing on a platform sliced out of a cross section of a gigantic pyramid. Two emerged wearing only their standard robot costumes and masks. The duo was practically motionless through the duration of the set, occasionally one of them would nod his head in affirmation, but beyond that it was hard to tell what instrument exactly they were in fact using to make their music.

Varying between hard house, a clangy genre that could be associated to IDM and the glitchy kitsch electro-pop they made their name on, DP switched between styles, tempos and melodies so nimbly, one could contend they brought Art Tatum back from the dead and taught him what electronic music was all about.

A scant number of "songs" found their way into the set, yet each one carried the crowd with jaw-dropping power. At the mid point Daft Punk did what could be called a 20 minute extended jam on their early 90s classic "Around the World." As the set progessed they would do similar assessment/reconstruction to "One More," "Human After All" and "Da Funk," the latter of which focused on a thunderous beat perfectly laced with the foreground melody. And it has to be mentioned that the group's set design (the pyramid they were housed in and the hexagonal grid that vertically covered the rest of the stage) was immaculate. Each piece of framework was independantly capable of showing color or video, and each and every beat in each and every song had a beatifully different color scheme that followed the music being played. This end of day set was so good, it defies convention and nomenclature. So good, it rivals Kraftwerk's performance here in 2004.