Justice for All

Even with all that religious intensity, raw energy and irresistible rhythm, performing electronic music live is always a challenge. Like their homeboys, Daft Punk, de Rosnay and Augé realize that visual appeal is key to any live performance. Inspired as much by Spinal Tap as by the Daft robots, the group performs with enormous towers of Marshall stacks, a seizure-inducing light show and that overwhelming lighted cross.

"We made the album for home listening purposes," de Rosnay declares. "You have to make everything simpler when you play live. It would be impossible and boring to redo what we did on the record, so we have to find a solution to make it work on stage."

For the duo's American television debut, the solution was particularly creative. Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live, de Rosnay and Augé only showed their faces briefly, pretending to fiddle with the tuner on an ancient boombox. The camera then panned to the stage, where Michael Jackson, Rod Stewart, Rick James, Prince and Stevie Wonder look-alikes lip-synched and hammed it up to "D.A.N.C.E." The brilliant and bizarre piece of theater managed to be completely entertaining while lampooning the inherently disingenuous nature of televised musical performances.

And this wasn't the first time that Justice had bitten the hand attempting to feed it. In mid-2007, the famous London dance club and record label Fabric commissioned the act to produce a mix for its famed Fabriclive series. The compilation was to include no more than 25 tracks and fit onto a single 75-minute CD. With Pedro Winter's blessing, de Rosnay and Augé set off in earnest to produce the definitive Justice mix.

"We didn't want to make a dance-music mix," de Rosnay remembers. "We wanted to make a compilation of what we listen to at home and what was inspiring to us." While the tracks included some club favorites like Daft Punk and Surkin, there were also plenty of curveballs, with tunes from the likes of Frankie Valli, Todd Rundgren and Frank Stallone, among others. Surprisingly enough, Fabric didn't reject the mix based on its content. The club did, however, ask the outfit to make the mix a bit longer. Justice had included the maximum 25 tracks, but the length of each track averaged less than two minutes, making the total duration of the compilation just over 44 minutes.

"They asked us to extend it, and we said no," de Rosnay states matter-of-factly. "This is our music. We won't extend it just to fill the maximum space of the CD. Take it or leave it." Fabric decided to leave it, and Justice walked away from the agreement to focus on writing and recording more of its own music. The act's standards are no less rigid in the studio. Whereas many electronic artists write songs as they record them, cutting and pasting sections into new arrangements, adding new layers and playing with new sounds and structures as they go, Justice takes a more organic route — despite its electro-punk aesthetic.

"We write all of our songs with real instruments," de Rosnay says of the duo's process. "All the tracks are written with a piano, guitar and bass, and then we put them through electronic stuff." Though the two are perfectly capable of playing their instruments, don't hold your breath for an acoustic Justice set. "The main reason we make electronic music is that it's the only way to make a record from beginning to end in my bedroom," he explains. "And that's what we want to do."

The potential of electronics and computers to liberate and democratize the music-making process, putting it in the hands of "anybodies" like Justice, is a large part of what motivates and excites the cheeky outfit. "The equipment we use is the most simple, and is used simply," claims de Rosnay, summing up the Justice approach. "Now, if you're twelve years old and have a pure mind and a computer, you can make a record, and I think it's cool."

Of course, Justice is not some tweenager, fiddling with a groovebox in his bedroom. Though they are relative newcomers, de Rosnay and Augé make dark club bangers that hold their own next to dance-floor classics by veteran musicians. But that's beside the point for these two young musicians, who simply see themselves as contributing to the world's inventory of music — and using the simplest, most accessible means to do so.

"In the end," says de Rosnay, "the more good music you have, the better."