Justice: "All we know is what we do."

It doesn’t feel like Justice have been away for four years. And perhaps that’s because they haven’t, in a manner of speaking. After the release of their earth-shaking 2007 debut, †, Frenchmen Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé toured almost continually for eighteen months, compiling a live DVD and indulging in a slew of side projects throughout 2009, before finally sitting down early last year to tackle some fresh recordings.

Still, taking the best part of half a decade to cook up your second album is an eternity by modern standards. The fact something that would be so detrimental to most artists is hardly a blip on the Justice radar says plenty about de Rosnay and Augé’s impact on both electronic music and wider pop culture. And in a sense, ‘modern’ is the word that best describes Justice. They construct their music rather than write it, and new material seems little more than grist for their jaw-dropping live performances.

So, how does an album as '70s prog and (seemingly) instrumentally driven as last month’s Audio, Video, Disco convert to the live arena? It turns out de Rosnay and Augé don’t quite know yet -- they're debuting their new live show in Australia this summer. That didn’t stop us from getting on the phone to de Rosnay and trying to find out, as well as picking his brains about life in the studio, Justice’s impending trip, and the idea that thirty years ago he and Augé wouldn’t have been musicians.

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You’re not in Paris, Xavier?

I’m in London right now. We live in London now.

How long has that been the case?

Two years.

You just released your second long player – Audio, Video, Disco – about a month ago. It’s four years between albums. You’ve been busy, but that’s still an unusually long gestation in the digital age.

We released our first album in 2007 and then we toured flat out for one and a half years [afterwards]. When we finished touring it was 2009 already, and then we worked on different things, together and separately. Together we put out a live DVD and documentary, A Cross The Universe, and we worked on separate stuff. Like, a soundtrack for Gaspard, I produced for a band called Jamaica, and other sorts of things. For one year we did that and then we started to make our [new] album. We started that in January 2010 and worked on it for a bit more than one year, and then, yeah, here we are! [laughs]

That was four years, but we just didn’t sit around – we were working on different things, and finally four years has passed, but it didn’t feel that long – it feels like six months.


Justice - 'Audio, Video, Disco'

Was there pressure to follow-up † in a tighter time period?

No, not at all. It was just that we were working on all those things. We started when we had time to start working on it. That’s about it. It’s just that we didn’t have time to work on it before.

I’ve read a comment by Gaspard that you only had thirteen tracks at the end from which to construct the album. That would make somebody think it was an arduous process.

No, it was really easy to make. We take a long time just because we are slow at making things – it was pretty smooth and fluid. But the thing is that when you’re making music, there are two methods: either you make, say, forty tracks and keep the ten best, or if you need just ten tracks you make ten tracks. This is what we do. When we make an album with eleven tracks on it, we make eleven tracks. We did the same thing for the first album. We don’t make spare songs. For this album we decided we’d make twelve songs, so we made twelve songs. It’s as simple as that.

You’re known for your live shows. Working on a record – working in a studio – does it come naturally to you guys?

Yeah, it does. These are two different things, but we adjust to going from one to the other. It’s not like you live two different lives when you’re on tour and when you’re in the studio, and our brains are still able to develop from one to the other quite smoothly. It’s fine. At the end these are just two quite easy jobs, and it doesn’t require too many skills to go from one to the other.

I understand that you used a lot of different instruments on this album, and a number of instruments that you had little knowledge of how to play. Why approach it in that way rather than hiring session players?

I think that’s a misconception. I don’t know why people keep saying that. This album was made with four keyboards and one guitar, and that’s it. So it’s quite a minimal setup. The thing is that we both know how to play keyboards and guitar, but we’re not instrumentalists. We’re not amazing players, but we know just enough to write and record the songs, and that’s enough for us. That’s why we didn’t need to take on session musicians.

Also, I think for certain types of music it works to bring in sessions musicians, but for our music I think it’s better when we do everything ourselves, even if it takes a bit longer. For us it’s not a big deal and what we play is pretty simple. But yes, it was a very minimal setup.

Does the studio environment you establish have an impact on the songs you then create?

Of course. And I think it’s the same for everybody like that. The sound is a big part of that, but also the psychological conditioning is very important. You can make almost the same music with a laptop that you can with a full blown studio. You can reach almost the same result, but you don’t think about music the same when you are working with laptop compared to a full board of equipment. The conditioning is really different, and when we set up the studio we think of that as one of our main goals.

We just want to make the right environment for us because – as I was saying – we know we’re going to spend a long time in the studio and it’s important to be surrounded by an environment that will lead us through the process and make us think in a special way. Make us do things in a special way, in order for us to get the results that we want to get.

You made a comment recently that you don’t know much about the real process of writing and recording, and that it makes you approach things in ways that aren’t always logical. Does that make it harder to know when you’ve finished?

No, not at all. We want to stay like this – I think it’s good that we don’t know too much about it. It doesn’t make it harder; it makes it a bit longer sometimes. But at the same time it’s really hard to compare, because we would never know what it would be like to be a professional instrumentalist or whatever. Would it be different? Yeah, it probably would, but we would never know because we don’t do it that way. All we know is what we do.

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