Thomas Bangalter spent June making sound you could stand inside. In a few weeks, the man who was half of Daft Punk released a ballet score, soundtracked a cave built over Paris’s oldest bridge and set up a warehouse rave in the middle of the world’s biggest art fair.
The rave is Warehouse Artefacts, on Saturday (June 20) at Messe Basel. Bangalter conceived it with the artist Julian Charrière and the Berlin DJ Rampa, and it sits in a 3,000-square-meter hall. Charrière, as quoted by The Art Newspaper, says it “blurs the boundaries between installation, theatre, party and even social experiment.”
An Installation by Day, a Club by Night
From 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Art Basel ticket holders can walk through it as an installation, with flickering lights, fog and a sound design built from house-music parts. One example is “the bass drum of a Roland TR-808 stretched beyond its original duration hundreds of times, transforming this signal into almost a material presence,” Charrière says.
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At the center of the room is a sealed glass monolith. Inside, an analogue tape machine plays Eleanor Roosevelt reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “To look back at politically difficult times and witness the hopeful efforts to better the world is something I feel is intrinsic and important, in a present that often feels divisive and uncertain,” Charrière says.
At 6 p.m. the hall turns into a rave led by Rampa and a special guest. All 3,400 tickets are sold, and the night continues at Nordstern Basel. The project is presented by the club in cooperation with Art Basel and the Fondation Beyeler. Art Basel’s own “Inner Worlds” film follows the three in their Berlin studios as they built it.
The Cave on the Bridge
A few days earlier, Bangalter’s other June project opened in Paris. After storm damage delayed it, JR’s La Caverne du Pont Neuf unveiled on Monday (June 15) and stays open around the clock through June 28. It wraps the 17th-century bridge in 80 inflated canvas arches printed with limestone, stretching 120 meters, as a tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1985 The Pont Neuf Wrapped.
Bangalter made the soundscape, and he refused to make music for it. “I don’t like the idea of putting music in a public space, imposing music as an obligation on the public,” he told ARTnews. His first pitch was to wrap the bridge in a single nine-hertz sine wave. The final version hides the speakers and folds the inflation motors into the sound. “I put my sound around it so you don’t know where it comes from,” he says.
Sound as Sculpture
The same thinking runs through Mirage, the score for a ballet with choreographer Damien Jalet and the artist Kohei Nawa that Bangalter released in early June. He says he composed it with graphic tools, a method he links to Iannis Xenakis. “Some of the sounds are almost like Jackson Pollock clouds or dots or points that go through harmonic filters and microtonal processing,” he told ARTnews.
He now describes Daft Punk the same way. The helmets, he says, were “in some sense performance art—an act of blurring the lines with the robot entities between fiction and reality.” He and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, he adds, were “obsessed with Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, and the Factory.”
Why It Matters
Art fairs have courted club culture for years, but rarely at this scale or with this much art behind it. The Fondation Beyeler and Nordstern Basel have already partnered on the sun.set series, and Warehouse Artefacts puts the idea of electronic music as a museum-grade medium on the fair’s own floor. Bangalter is also an awkward fit for the market around him. “One thing I don’t like about the art world is the speculative aspect of the trade,” he told ARTnews.
The fair, which opened to strong sales on Tuesday, runs through Sunday (June 21); the next one is already planned for Paris in October. La Caverne closes June 28. As Bangalter says of his hidden speakers, you notice the piece “more when it’s off than when it’s on.”
- Event
- Warehouse Artefacts, Messe Basel, Hall 1.1 South
- When
- Saturday, June 20: installation 11 a.m.–5 p.m., rave from 6 p.m.
- With
- Julian Charrière and Rampa, presented by Nordstern Basel with Art Basel and the Fondation Beyeler
- Also
- JR’s La Caverne du Pont Neuf, Paris, through June 28
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.
