Justice

Electronica That Rocks, à la Française

By WILL HERMES, New York Times
Published: July 1, 2007

ONE of the most blogged-about sets at this year's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Southern California took place on a stage dominated by towering Marshall amplifier stacks and a huge illuminated cross. When the dark-clad musicians let loose with a familiar hammering riff, the fans erupted in roars, punching their fists in the air and barking out lyrics.

Young audiences "just want more fun in electronic music," says Gaspard Augé, right, of the duo Justice, with Xavier de Rosnay. No, the group wasn't a heavy-metal revival act — not exactly. Justice is a French D.J. duo at the forefront of a new school of electronic music far removed from the genteel soundtracks one commonly hears in W Hotel lobbies and design-conscious restaurants. The music is harder and hookier, as apt to inspire slam-dancing as hip shaking. It's more like rock, which effectively dislodged dance music early this decade as the hipster soundtrack of choice.

"Our crowd is more a rock crowd," said Gaspard Augé of Justice, who is still surprised that fans sometimes stage-dive at its gigs. Young audiences, he suggested, "just want more fun in electronic music, more hedonism."

So in a year that has seen indie rockers like Bright Eyes and the Shins releasing conservatively tuneful CDs that parents might borrow from their kids, rowdy electronic music seems to be seeding a new underground. "People are dancing again," said Tom Dunkley of GBH, the New York company behind Cheeky Bastards, a weekly club event that has embraced the new sound. When Justice and several like-minded D.J.'s performed at a Cheeky Bastards event in Manhattan in March, Mr. Dunkley said, the demand for tickets was "crazy, completely unusual."

Justice's debut full-length CD, whose provocative "title" is a simple cross icon, arrives July 10 via the Vice Records label. The duo had a video added on MTV (extremely rare these days for an electronic act) and has just finished a remix of "LoveStoned" for Justin Timberlake. And it has emerged amid the ever-growing influence of Daft Punk, the Parisian D.J. duo that pioneered the harder, faster approach that characterizes Justice's music with its thrillingly crude electro-house debut, "Homework," in 1996. The rapper Kanye West sampled a track from that album for his hit "Stronger"; this summer Daft Punk will embark on its first major tour in a decade, a multimedia extravaganza that will come to Keyspan Park at Coney Island on Aug. 9.

Some American acts, like LCD Soundsystem and Ghostland Observatory, have been channeling this new sound, as have cutting-edge artists elsewhere. (In recent recordings and live shows, Bjork has been adding noise to her usual dance beats.) But for the past couple of years France has served as its most exciting incubator, on indie labels like Kitsuné, Institubes and especially Ed Banger, which signed Justice and whose name suggests its M.O. (Try pronouncing "headbanger" with a Parisian accent.) And despite some tut-tutting by fans of minimalist techno and other esoteric electronic styles, the new headbanging aesthetic has found an audience.

The members of Justice — Mr. Augé, 27, and Xavier de Rosnay, 24 — met in Paris. Mr. Augé was a Metallica fan who once played in an experimental post-rock group. Mr. de Rosnay was a fan of hip-hop and pop. Justice was effectively born in 2003 when the pair, on a lark, refashioned a song for a remix contest promoted by a college radio station in Paris.

"You could download the separate tracks: guitar, drums and other things," Mr. de Rosnay said via phone from Paris, explaining their remix process. "But we were working without music software: just a sampler, a sequencer and a synthesizer. So we downloaded just the voice on the chorus, because there was not space enough for more than eight seconds of sound on our sampler."

The remix, a radical reshaping of "Never Be Alone" by the British rock group Simian, lost the contest (no one seems to recall who won) but netted the duo a deal with the nascent Ed Banger label in 2003. Eventually retitled "We Are Your Friends" to echo its shouted refrain, the track became a club and Internet phenomenon. To top it off a striking video clip for the song, which looked like the aftermath of a college keg party as dreamed by Michel Gondry, won the award for best video at last year's MTV Europe Music Awards, trumping even the Evel Knievel-themed flamboyance of "Touch the Sky" by Kanye West (who, characteristically, threw a tantrum over the outcome).

"We Are Your Friends" isn't on Justice's new album, but there are plenty of other signs of the members' fusion-minded taste, from a pixilated take on Parliament-Funkadelic ("New Jack") to the kiddie-disco singalong single "D.A.N.C.E.," which seems to have struck a chord: A leaked version was so widely remixed by Internet sample-jackers that Vice posted alternate versions on its blog.

The album also includes the vocal-less single "Waters of Nazareth" from the group's self-titled EP, which made numerous best-of lists last year. The new version begins with a serrated sputtering of electronic noise; when a 4/4 kick-drum beat comes in, the noise becomes a simple, brutish melody. It mutates as the beats fragment, like chips of wood from the blade of a buzz saw, and is replaced by a churchy organ riff on the bridge; then the two melody lines combine, skidding back into pure modulating noise again at the end.

As with the best garage rock or heavy metal — as well as '80s electro, the synthesizer-heavy urban dance style Justice frequently echoes — there is beauty in the relentless primitivism.

As for the cross-icon title, Mr. Augé said it was inspired, in part, because "it was a potent pop symbol in the '90s, with people like Madonna and George Michael using it." Of course it's also a common heavy-metal motif, a connection also suggested by Justice's crudely gothic black-and-silver cover art (not to mention those awe-inspiring Marshall stacks, which, it should be noted, are merely stage props).

Both members of Justice have worked as graphic designers, and visual presentation is an important part of Ed Banger's aesthetic. So is a sense of playfulness, whether it's the shameless potty mouth of Uffie, a female American rapper of sorts best known for the campy gangsta track "Pop the Glock," or the way DJ Mehdi mixes old-school hip-hop and electro with bits of hair-metal guitar. (Both acts appear on the recent compilation "Ed Rec Vol. 2," released in America via Vice.)

"I've never worked with a group that's so fully formed," said Adam Shore, the general manager of Vice Records, referring to the Ed Banger crew. "They've got the music, the art, the aesthetic, the amazing videos, and they're kind of a traveling party."

Ed Banger's multimedia sensibility, not to mention its sound, has a clear antecedent. The label is run by Pedro Winter, who, in addition to making music as Busy P, has for many years managed Daft Punk, the duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Like Justice, Daft Punk played Coachella, in 2006; its set was a spectacle of lights and video with the duo, in the guise of robots, triggering electronics atop a sort of neon pyramid.

Daft Punk is not directly involved in Ed Banger, but you can hear its influence on the label. And Mr. Bangalter's superlative remix of DJ Mehdi's "Signature" turns a teasing snippet into what might be the most ecstatic dance track you'll hear this year. The duo's influence persists elsewhere too.

"Daft Punk were my heroes when they released the `Homework' album," said Thomas Turner of the young Austin synth-rock band Ghostland Observatory. "That really influenced my view on music."

Mr. Bangalter, who spoke from Los Angeles last month during a break from tour rehearsals, is amused that, at 32, he is considered an elder statesman to a new generation of electronic musicians. And unlike the scene veterans who reject the rockist attitude of Justice and its peers, Mr. Bangalter appreciates the music on its own terms.

"Most of these people were like 6 or 7 years old" during electronica's first wave, he said. "It's not really their history. So they are starting from scratch maybe. From more of a blank slate."

Or as Justice's Mr. Augé put it, "We just don't care about respecting the rules."