Veridis Quo, off Daft Punk’s second studio album Discovery, is to me the most sublime musical visualization of what an endless loop in a merry-go-round would feel like. Daft Punk, the celebrated French electronic music duo of Thomas Banghalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo was formed in 1993 that lasted until 2021, when they decided to split up, upsetting millions of fans “around the world” (cue Around the World by Daft Punk).
The title of the track itself is a gorgeously folded mystery to begin with, wrapped in bright electric lights. Veridis Quo is a wordplay on the Latin Phrase Quo Vadis, meaning “Whither goest thou?”, as asked by Saint Peter to the risen Jesus on his way to re-crucifixion in Rome. Veridis Quo is also a pun on the phrase “Very Disco”, an attribute not too unfitting to describe an album almost tailor-suited for the dance floor. The title can also be jumbled up to be re-read as Discovery, the album title itself.
But what does it feel like to listen to a 5:45 minute-long instrumental free of the nuisance of words, splendidly transcending all muscles of conceptual limitations, circuiting the orbit of existence once and back in the split of a second’s blink? That’s exactly what it feels like.
Not to deny any glory to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Morrissey, or any of the many mic-wielding poets who penned the murderously intricate and cosmic human feelings to a beat, but sometimes the simplest orchestration of non-human sounds can shift spatial densities of emotions and penetrate the depths of human existence just as lithely the human voice does. Veridis Quo is a subtle display of how sounds can be manipulated to create a textured and detailed scape of musical architecture, channeling a charged stream of young love in the veins of the listener.
Daft Punk, with its history of experimenting with genres and styles like electro, punk, jazz, rock, prog-rock, etc. attains their electric peak in Veridis Quo, where we witness and feel their musical brilliance stripped to its bare and beautiful essentials, all so slenderly slight that they lead a quiet pulse full of existence into the passive mind of the listener, setting their nerves ablaze with bright neon, electric love.
The faux-orchestral, or digitally instrumented song starts with a simple and minimal synthesizer layer that stretches as the perennial fabric of the track. At 0:37, a 4-beat starts. It diminishes quietly at 2:57 and just as quietly builds back up at 3:18, ending indefinitely at 5:45, where one invariably decides to play it on loop, and goes about one’s day. The places this track has taken me to cannot be quantified without hyperboles that can put Keats to test. I strongly urge anyone interested to try Daft Punk to avoid wireless earphones and let that current of sounds travel its natural material course through copper wires, insulated by coloured plastic or jacketed fabric, to gain its free velocity in time, to reach your ears, where not one cell of sound is lost in vacuum.
Veridis Quo is one of those tracks that can both act as a soundtrack to one’s mundane life, by blanketing one’s drab consciousness with a constant layer of audial activity; and also as an extraordinarily rare pleasure in life that pushes the boundaries of sound and space, and tempts one to appreciate the vividness of the wayward, farcical lives we lead. It jolts one’s muscles and synapses to new life, to cycle around at night, to run through a crowd, to let one’s hair flow by the speed of a passing vehicle, and the candy-electric sound that irrepressibly puts one in an amusement park full of familiar rides, vivid lights, cheap soap bubbles, real laughter, and hidden embraces, where faces beam full with excitement and quiet hope. And like that, this track creates a sonic texture of urban velocity where brief bursts of beatitude blend into one’s blood, unannounced and unplanned for, full of merry-go-rounds and awaited elevators, missed trains and shared earphones.
In short, this track reintroduces innocence and youth and appreciation into one’s daily existence. It is instrumentally quite simple and completely non-lyrical, but it transports a world of emotions, possessed by an inanimate weight of extension, shifting planes of lyrical density through gravity to help one pretend better with life, to assist one to fool eternity for a second and lose oneself in a trance-charged carousel, their senses clear yet tinted with a thin layer of delirium and their cells blended full with time, dying in love.
Listen to Veridis Quo by Daft Punk on YouTube and Spotify
Edited by S Santhosh Mohan
Article 19 