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Published on 7/23/08
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Parisian duo Justice (Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay) epitomizes both the possibilities open to an emerging wave of dance acts, and the not-so-fast fashion of electronic music. Although Justice, which plays Smartbar on Thursday 2, seemingly came out of nowhere in 2005, its rep—via a monster hit remix—has been building for years. The time lag explains the fact that Justice’s remixes bear little resemblance to a recent EP of originals, Waters of Nazareth, but that hasn’t caused the buzz to dissipate. We got Justice’s Augé on the phone and it only got more mysterious.
Considering Justice’s blue-chip cool stock, it has a dorky indie past as the rhythm section for the rock band (also)starring. “It was pretty college rock,” Augé says. “It sounded a bit like Weezer or something. We were not composing the tracks, we were just the backing band.”
While working day jobs doing graphic design, the guys (who had only issued a few tracks on indie musclorecords) remixed a tune called “Never Be Alone,” by British electro-rock act Simian, for a contest—which they lost. Friend Pedro Winter, manager for Daft Punk, liked the Justice mix and put it out on his label Ed Banger in 2003. Germany’s International Deejay Gigolos liked it so much, DJ Hell put it out again the following year as “We Are Your Friends,” and credited it to Justice vs. Simian. A club anthem was born.
So in a sense, Justice is an accident. “I think it’s really by chance,” Augé says. “Neither of us was into electronic music at the beginning; we just had the opportunity to do this remix of ‘Never Be Alone,’ and then it was played a lot, so we had to follow it up.”
By the time the duo finally visited the States—for a DJ set at this year’s Miami music conference—the hype was at a boil. The punky clubbers fist-pumped during the tune’s refrain “We are your friends, you will never be alone again. Come On!” (It’s a chorus that young bloggers have called “perhaps the catchiest in the history of sound.”) The track’s long life on the dance floor and a crate’s worth of subsequently commissioned remixes (N.E.R.D., Fatboy Slim, Britney Spears, Daft Punk, Mystery Jets and Soulwax) further established its twisted, dark but slamming aesthetic. It hasn’t hurt that Justice’s French label Ed Banger has a slew of possible breakout acts (all of which you’ll hear in Justice’s DJ set, Augé tells us) and that its promotional efforts (dressing its entourage as M&M’s for a party at Parisian boutique Colette) show some refreshing humor and imagination.
But back to the contradictions: Considering their club-banger résumés, the Justice fellows’ tastes are pretty arty. We’ve read of a fondness for Nile Rodgers and Chic, but Augé says he’s devoted to the strange soundtrack music of Vladimir Cosma and the synth excursions of François De Roubaix (“it’s really melancholic and weird”), while de Rosnay is a fan of the ’80s electropop singer Daniel Balavoine.
Like Balavoine, the fellows are recording at home. Constructing their debut album has been far from a party, because of their labor-intensive process. “It’s more like really short samples—we take one note of a sound and we compose a riff with it,” Augé explains. “The bass line is composed from a few different bass sounds; it makes things really more dynamic. It’s more like doing a jigsaw.”
Augé says that both fans of the abstract, aggressive Nazareth (circuit-fried disco fed through a stomp box) and the pop-rock songs that Justice remixes will be well served on the record. Although Augé is a drummer and de Rosnay a bassist, Justice hasn’t figured out a live setup that wouldn’t be two guys fiddling with laptops. For now, spirited DJ sets should more than suffice, as Augé reassures us, “We come to party, not to cry or listen to bad French composers.”
Justice deejays at Smartbar Thursday 2.
