cross examinations
Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Scott T. Sterling
Justice makes a monster disco album with microsamples, GarageBand and Cubase SX sound libraries and a song that almost makes them run for the hills.
When Remix interviewed you before [for the January 2007 “Go Forward, Move Ahead” issue], you said that the album would be “lots of disco, given the Justice touch.” Do you still feel like that is the case?
XdR: Totally. We stuck to our original idea to make a 2007 opera-disco album, even if we are conscious that some tracks don't sound like proper disco at first listen. The best example is the song “Waters of Nazareth,” which does not sound like disco when you listen to it for the first time. But if you forget that everything is distorted, the bass lines are just really basic disco patterns.
How would you respond to Justice being called “heavy-metal techno”?
XdR: We understand why people think this, and it's kind of a cool description, so we accept it. But the disco and pop parts of our music are as important as the metal part of Justice.
GA: I'm definitely not into that at all. We want to be called disco.
What are your feelings on the term “blog house”?
GA: We just discovered it on Wikipedia. We don't take it too seriously.
XdR: [Laughs.] We were flattered that “Waters of Nazareth” is considered the definitive “blog house” track. I still don't know if it's a proper style of music, but the name is quite smart and appropriate. It's also true that this music is living now mostly through blogs.
It's been said that dance music is a singles medium. Do you agree?
GA: Yes, and that's why we didn't do a dance record. We never aimed to do proper dance music. Some of our tracks are being played in clubs by DJs, and that's great. But we wanted do an album that you could listen to at home — not just a collection of bangers.
“Valentine” is very melancholy, a definite departure from the signature Justice sound.
GA: We wanted to pay tribute to French soundtracks and composers of the '70s and '80s, like François de Roubaix, Vladimir Cosma and Francis Lai.
XdR: It was one of the first tracks we did for the album. We've explored mellower sounds before, like at the end of “Let There Be Light,” or even in the break of our remix of “We Are Your Friends.” This is a pure and sincere romantic piece.
How did you record the vocals with Mehdi Pinson of the band Scenario Rock for “DVNO”? What was the signal chain?
XdR: Wow, this is way too technical for us. We just plugged a really simple mic into our Neve preamp and recorded them. I don't even know the model of the mic. We have had it for four years.
The echo-y effect on “DVNO” is interesting. How'd you get that effect?
XdR: This is just a Cubase default delay with exaggerated compression.
Do you prefer the more uplifting songs to the darker songs in general?
GA: To be honest, I love them all because both the romantic tracks and the more violent ones are just about instant emotion.
XdR: It just depends on the moment we're listening to it. When we finished the album, we obviously did prefer the last ones we did. But now I don't have a specific one I love more than the others. Maybe “Genesis.” That song is just made of hundreds of small samples, from Slipknot to Queen. We first recorded all the parts with MIDI synths and then replaced every note with really short samples.
Did you feel pressure making the album? Is that what the track “Stress” is about?
XdR: No. Pressure is just your body telling you to take a break from work. The song is called “Stress” because the first time we worked on it, it caused big headaches, so we had to stop. Just the base of the track, which is a repetitive loop of violins with a lot of high frequencies, was quite unbearable. But that was quite the aim of the track — to sound as claustrophobic as possible before we drop “Waters of Nazareth.”
GA: Everything is in the name.
XdR: When we came back to the track, we finished it quickly before it drove us both crazy.
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