Cole Cuchna

And as the crowd roars, they turn around for the first time all night, revealing the backs of their jackets, each bearing the Daft Punk logo glowing in bright red lights.

It's a literal signature.

One final masterstroke placed on what will forever stand as one of the most extraordinary live performances ever created.

The piece we're hearing now is by the 20th century composer Charles Ives, who is known for his intricate sound collages that wove together fragments of existing music into his original atonal compositions.

In this piece, Ives frequently quotes Beethoven's famous Fifth Symphony.

You know, this one.

Now see if you can spot this motif in Ives' piano sonata.

It's a direct quote placed in a completely different context, leading to an entirely different musical outcome.

Even though Beethoven's melody appears throughout the entire piece, you'd never say Ives was ripping off or stealing from Beethoven because the motif is so clearly transformed.

Ives recontextualizes Beethoven's motif, dressing it up in modern clothes, creating a fascinating musical conversation between the past and present.

Now fast forward 100 years and this instinct to recontextualize and transform fragments of existing music has evolved into one of the most important musical innovations of the 20th century, sampling.

Sure, the technology's changed, musicians now manipulate recorded audio instead of rewriting notes, but the underlying principle is the same shared by Charles Ives and countless musicians before him.

Indeed, sampling today has become its own fully realized art form, complete with its own distinct styles and subgenres, each with its own techniques and its own masters, its own Beethovens and Ives.

And as we've witnessed all season, Daft Punk are among the most skilled, innovative, and tasteful producers to ever touch a sampler.

But even within their vast and impressive sample repertoire, one song stands above the rest.

A song that's not only among the most technically impressive achievements in their own catalog, but one of the most ambitious and virtuosic feats in the entire history of sampling.

Created in collaboration with another sampling legend Todd Edwards, it's a track built from over 40 sample fragments drawn from roughly 25 different sources, pushing the long-standing art of musical quotation to its absolute limits.

The song is called Face to Face, and I can't wait to break down every single piece of it with you today.

From the Ringer Podcast Network, this is Dissect, long-form musical analysis broken into short digestible episodes.

Today we continue our deep dive into Daft Punk's entire catalog with our final episode on 2001's Discovery.