as announced in the previous post, last weekend we had the last pink pony party ever going down in frankfurt and what else can i say, both justice and top billin were absolutely killing it and the whole party crowd went home with broken bones and deaf ears.
i made this interview with justice rather late at night in a very noisy backstage room, right before justice started playing their set. because of all the noise the recording was rather horrible, so some of the answers are missing a line or two but i am sure all the main points are in there and i hope i've got it all right. don't forget to buy the justice album, out now on ed banger records.
discodust: when your simian remix and later on 'waters of nazareth' came out, it was a very unique and fresh sound. can you describe what lead to your sound, any influences or intentions that were driving you during the production? did you just try to make a real club banger?
justice: oh no, we did not try to make a club banger because we were not really into club music. with 'we are your friends' we just wanted to make a pop song and when we made 'waters of nazareth' we just tried to do something pretty different from a radio track, something extreme, that was our intention.
discodust: nearly every music-related blog in the world has written about or at least mentioned 'justice' recently and you will soon have 100.000 friends on myspace, so the internet obviously plays a huge role regarding your success. do you like this development and how are you personally using the web?
justice: yeah, we like that. we still don't know how the internet and real life are related. we don't know if having 100.000 friends makes you sell more records. and you were talking about the blogs that were putting our tracks up without permission, i think it's not a bad thing, you know we don't feel like having our tracks stolen because overall i think it is more important to spread music than selling a record.
i think one of the downsides of the internet is that when people get too many tracks too early they are getting bored. when we put our album out we only had 3 songs that were already released and all the rest was new but because of the internet our album leaked before, so people had songs like 'd.a.n.c.e.', 'phantom' and 'stress' weeks or months before and came to us saying 'yeah okay, the album is cool but why don't you make more songs? i already know like 9 out of 12'. so if you make the choice to download the tracks before from the blogs, don't ask us to make more tracks. if you choose to know everything before, you can not complain by the time of the final release.
and on the internet, it is also impossible to know the real feeling of the people, as a lot were hating justice because it was not like underground any more and things like that. and i think that's the main limitation of the internet.
discodust: in another interview, you were talking about a real bad experience during dj'ing when you played rage against the machine and lionel richie afterwards and people kinda forced you to go off stage. (of course this was at some techno festival in germany.) fortunately, you haven't changed your dj-style at all and still play a very diverse selection of today's hard electro, rock and roll, 80s dance, 70s soul/funk and disco to 60s girl group pop. do you think the crowd has changed ever since, like people became more open-minded? or do you keep getting bad reactions?
justice: that party was like three years ago and i don't know if people are more open-minded or if people can just accept more things when they get used to it. but we have also learned to recognize the place where we can play that kind of stuff and where we can not. and i am sure if we would go back to that festival again this year, which was kind of a minimal techno festival, this year it would just be the same.
discodust: after talking about bad parties so much - you have been touring a lot and probably been like almost everywhere in the world by now, what was a great night that you will remember for life and why?
justice: we did our first live show ever at coachella a few months ago and that was a really good moment and we will also always remember our first dj show in munich with dj hell.
discodust: over here in germany, the harder and yet more playful and diverse electro/rave sound is still quite underground and people are starting to pick up on it very slow - what about paris, is it the dominating sound over there these days?
justice: no way, not at all. i think it is not the dominating sound anywhere. i think in germany it is the same as in france, the dominating club music is like tech-house or commercial house and american house. but the whole distortion sound is just one process to make music and is not really a proper style of music yet, so it might not last very long and is bound to stay underground.
discodust: even though your sound clearly has its roots in disco and french touch/french house, you are probably the most important band in the whole 'new rave'/'maximal' sound movement. i keep reading that this sound was just some hype and it is about to fade away soon. odd enough, the people who are saying this, are those who have been stuck on the same minimal or indie sound for ages. what do you think, is it going to stay or what's going to happen next?
justice: we don't know, we will just have to wait and see. maybe we will be like old-fashioned in about six months and nobody knows us any more. but it is funny that some people seem to be excited about the fact that some bands will fade like really fast because we are always excited when there is new music coming up and we never hope for anyone to fade away. but the cycles and life times of music nowadays are really short, so we are just enjoying it for now and let's see what happens.
discodust: how long did it take you to finish the album? and did you end up having any leftover tracks?
justice: it took us one year to make the album, we finished it in march 2007 and we only have one track that we finished and that didn't make it on to the album. a lot of bands have like dozens of tracks and then select the best ones but we are too slow to work like this, so we just took our 3 tracks that were already finished and then decided on making one track like this, one like that, one like this, one like that and that we just made it like that. we knew if we wouldn't have sorted it all out before it would have taken like 8 years to finish the album because whenever we're making music, we don't know where we're going to and we just lose ourselves.
discodust: just like your dj sets, your album is very diverse: you've got harder songs aiming straight for the dancefloor, other tracks sound like 80s soundtracks hommages and then there is 'd.a.n.c.e.' which is a really light-hearted disco track, a perfect single. this puts you way ahead of all the electro kids that are just messing around with distortion and it seems like you are destined to produce other acts' albums and tracks, is this something you are interested in, in the near future?
justice: yes, this is something we definitely want to do. we are just waiting for the right offer, some people already asked us to make it but it weren't really good conditions.
discodust: in the beginning, mainly the remixes made the justice-sound famous. it seems you took a break from remixing, are you getting back into remixing now that the album is done?
justice: yeah, we have stopped remixing for one year and a half. and we just got back to it last week, remixing justin timberlake's new single 'love stoned'. and we are already working on the next remix, we'll do it for free.
thanks to xavier and gaspard for doing this unannounced interview, you guys are great.
finally, you can download the justice dj-set here on discodust. unfortunately it is a bit distorted but it is the best recording of that night you will be able to get and justice played quite a few tracks that i have never heard before, so get this right now:
justice at 'pink pony is dead' dj set
justice at 'pink pony is dead' dj set (on free.fr)
note: use the comments to get the tracklist together. read more!
