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Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’ Closer ‘Contact’ Allegedly Emerges in Early Form

Daft Punk

Last month, Daft Punk revealed they had sworn off samples for their upcoming album Random Access Memories (out May 21). But there was an exception. They told Rolling Stone the closing track, “Contact,” would begin with a slice of, in the French electronic duo’s words, “an Australian rock record.” Well, as FACT points out, a recording has surfaced online of a Daft Punk-related track including just that. Ladies and gentlemen, we may have just made contact with “Contact.”

Check out Techno Logic: Daft Punk’s 19 Savviest Samples

In 2002, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter DJed at Amsterdam’s Paradiso with fellow French electronic musicians Cassius and DJ Falcon. Around the two-hour, 21-minute mark in a stream of the full set below, or in the accompanying YouTube rip, you can hear a jubilant, pounding electro-house track built out of a sample from Australian rock band the Sherbs’ “We Ride Tonight.” A spoken-word vocal snippet repeats: “Are we in this thing alone? Or are we in it together?” (A reference to Bangalter and Falcon’s short-lived project as Together.)

Daft Punk have been treating the release process around Random Access Memories with utmost mysteriousness, but FACT reports that the 2002 track is “pretty damn similar” to the album version of “Contact.” And Daft Punk told a French magazine, as best as our Google Translate can make out, that “Contasct” was recorded with Falcon, and that it features the recorded voice of astronaut Eugene Cernan, the last man to have gone to the moon. That’s not his voice in the track below, though. In any case, we’re all in this together:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zcwga6UoSsg%3Ffeature%3Dplayer_embedded