Daft Punk's influence's influence's influence (at least)--maybe the great-grandfather of French techno?

Edgar Varèse, the maybe-father of electronic music, was born in France in the nineteenth century.  His music, blurring as it does the boundary between electronic music and the normal sort, begins to describe what we might call the essential characteristic of electronic music:  noisiness.  His music, like Stockhausen's, is an exploration of sound and noise; unlike Stockhausen (who does claim to be influenced by Varèse), Varèse flirted with Dadaism and Surrealism before finally becoming grounded in his own musical language.  Before electronic music became a genre unto itself, Varèse acted upon electricity as a tool for making the jarring, unusual, and abstract music that he had previously only tried in such works as "Ionisation," a piece solely for percussion.

Varèse was still tied to the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, though.  Like them (in particular the group of six French composers who, like Satie, tried to establish a new musical language modeled on the rhythms of jazz), Varèse was obsessed with rhythm and timbre, as is evident in his "Poème electronique," a sort of amplification of Le Corbusier's glorified powerpoint presentation.  In evidence is the abstraction, the collage, and the isolated meaningfulness of sound, as well as his earlier quasi-Dadaist sentiment: