I've never personally understood the desire to catch a tribute act at, say, your local dive. Sure, seeing blink-180True or Green Date is probably easier on the wallet and ensures less time is wasted trying to get out of a goddamn arena, but why relegate yourself to a tribute when the real thing is still readily available?
For those living in a less show-friendly city, however, the choices aren't so clear. Enter Taft Plunk, the brilliantly named two-person project that's the closest thing to Daft Punk the city of Kiev has seen.
"It would be really great if Daft Punk would come to Kiev one day," DJ/produer Vlad Fisun told Mixmag for an excellent feature published Monday. "They've never played here before. In fact, they haven't been to many Eastern European cities at all. Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to see them these days—so we created our own Daft Punk performance here in Kiev."
The journeys of Taft Plunk began back in May when Vlad Fisun, who splits Taft Plunk duties with his frequent collaborator Vladimir Sivash, hired a guy who made Daft Punk replicas to help with a Burning Man Precompression event. "Then at the event we got two guys to pretend to be our security, we shut all the lights off before we went on stage and then played a Daft Punk-inspired set," Vlad recalled. "Everyone was pretty surprised like...where did these Daft Punk guys come from?"
From there, the two decided to rock some Daft Punk-esque gear in Kiev while photographer Olga Babych captured the experience. The resulting shoot was inspiring enough, per Vlad, for them to build an entire new project around it instead of just tossing the photos on social media. To pay proper homage, the duo released a new mix specifically focused on Daft Punk's French house connections:
Meanwhile, the real Daft Punk—whose most recent studio album was the 2013 blockbuster Random Access Memories—were recently named in a suit against the Weeknd over their "Starboy" collab.
