Switched on Pop - Justice is never-ending

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay of the French electronic duo Justice speak with cohost Charlie Harding about their new album Hyperdrama. Song Discussed Justice - Phantom Pt II, D.A.N.C.E., Neveender, New Jack, Genesis, Horsepower, Civilization, One Night-All Night, Dear Alan, Incognito, Moonlight Rendez-vous, Audio Video Disco, Afterimage, The End, Generator, Pleasure The Who - My Generation The White Stripes - Black Math The Human League - Human John Carpenter - Night Serge Gainsourg & Jane Birkin - Je T’aime… moi non plus Michel Berger - Le Paradis Blanc Stardust - Music Sounds Better With You Chaka Khan - Fate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. The French electronic duo, Justice, have recently released their much-anticipated fourth studio album, Hyperdrama. I've been sitting on this album for a while. I was invited to a listen-back session with Justice, and I have been mulling over this electronic record, which fuses organic sounds, electronic sounds, things I can't even quite identify. And I know I had to speak with Justice because this musical work for me is beyond comprehension. Here's my conversation with Justice about their album, Hyperdrama.

Hello, I'm Xavier of Justice. Hello, I'm Gaspar of Justice. I'm so thrilled to have this conversation. I remember the moment that I got your first album, Cross, which I'm very confused is currently called Justice on Spotify. Is it? Yeah, it is. Oh, no. But I think it's because they can't find, like, the, because it's not called cross either.

It's just like the cross symbol. Yeah, it was unnamed. But it was not unnamed. It was named after a symbol. And that's why when we talk about it, we always refer to it as our debut album. Debut, oh. Because there's no a speakable name for it. It's just like a visual symbol.

Yeah, it's the symbol. Okay, wonderful. All right. So your debut album, I purchased in 2007. and I listened to it for an entire summer straight. You know, this was back when we had a CD player in a car and they just sat in the CD player for the entire year. Good times.

I want to go back to that moment because I feel like it's relevant to some of the sounds that we hear on hyperdrama. With your debut album, what musical statement were you wanting to make? It was pretty much the same statement as we've been making on all four albums, which is to make the music as dramatic as possible.

And also it was, was our first album and we had no experience in making music, in engineering, in anything. It's not a punk record because it doesn't sound anything like punk music, but the approach to it, it's like, okay, let's make an album. And without having any clue in this regard, it's one album in a lifetime for us. And it would be impossible to try to remake something like this because so much of it is due to lack of knowledge and freshness. Sometimes when we are learning our craft, the things that we don't do quite right become these happy accidents that become part of our identity.

Were there any of those things that you were searching for that you were trying to learn that became part of justice? Well, the thing is that this is all happy accidents. and for example, like when we started making music, of course we were aware that the music we were making didn't sound as good. I'm just talking sonics and not like sound as the real sound because at the end, to us, what sounds good is what sounds stylish and what brings like the most emotion out of something. So we are like, okay, do we try to make it sound good or do we try to make it sound as loud and, distorted as possible and as excessive as possible. And we also knew as music listeners

that most of the records we like, they don't sound good in terms of high five terms, but they sound great because they have style. Any rock and roll band that we like, I prefer 10 times the sound of the who, the sound of like any new rock band of today, that sounds huge, that has a lot of bass, a lot of bass, a lot of space, like 14 takes of guitars that are like perfectly produced.

And we also notice that the music that is recorded maybe in a rougher ways, it ages better. And it's very, very much the case in rock and roll, in rap, in electronic music too. Like the electronic music that we like from the beginning was always the stuff that were more like, like Gritty and for example, if you take like a video clash by Lil Luis, that is probably even more dirty than anything we have done on our first album. It still sounds amazing, it doesn't belong to really any specific period. Whereas like the dance music that's produced like that is clean and everything, it tends to age a bit less well.

So when given the choice, and we didn't really have a choice, because we didn't know how to do anything. We're like, okay, like, let's make it a statement and let's make sure that the listeners understand that they are listening something that is over dirty, over saturated, over loud and everything. This kind of innocence can only happen once, but we are still trying to keep that mindset

in the sense that to us there's also no hierarchy between Jean and there's no good taste or bad taste. Like when we first began, like we were in love with, I don't know, like the Buggles, with the white stripes, with Human League, with John Carpenter soundtrack. To us, it was just okay, like, we're just gonna inject everything we love in that record and make up for the Sonics like defects by making it. by making it weird in a way,

so that it can serve the purpose of the record. And it was not complete, like, conscious decision in the sense that to us it sounded right, but it was, we didn't enter the studio, okay, let's make something revolutionary. It was very natural for us to do something like the punks we were at the time. You've explored so many sonic spaces, since 2007. I've been in Mesh and all of your albums, but I feel like now with hyperdrama,

you strongly evoke a visual and sonic identity that hints towards the debut album. Is this a return to form of some sorts? And if so, how come? Now, we've heard that after the listening sessions, and because of the way it's produced, I can see the connection because basically in our debut album, we were writing songs with with Gaspar in a very classical way, you know, like with keyboard, bass guitars, you know, just by playing. And then when we had something that we liked, we would replace every note of the score

by a small sample, not all the time, but like most of the times. So we will make a bass line, for example. And then we would need like a F sharp. So we would like listen to records until we find a F sharp that we like the sound of, or maybe a F or G, and then like tune it, put it, paste it.

Okay, then we're looking for the next note. And we would like just, just, just keep on listening until we find something, then cut it, paste it. And we were doing the same with like drums, four chords. For chords, it was like a very process because we had like many notes and they had like to work together. Like it makes me think of like for example a song like a new jack. You have like some chords, some sort of like to do-do-do-do-do-do-do-d-d-d-d-. It's a bit like when you play guitar.

Like a strum. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And we found those sounds in the database of the computer. And then we were like tuning each note of that small strum sound to get our chords. So it was a very long process. And actually on hyperdrama, we didn't do the same thing. But because we wanted for everything to sound as one, we would record our parts, play them.

them, making a rough mix, then printing everything, then importing it again, then like processing it again with new elements and everything, then printing it and then re-importing it again. So at the end, it sounds like something that has been sampled like three, four, five times. The point of doing that was to have this sort of like glue and varnish on every generation of bounces that we are making so that when we re-import like those like stems in our song it becomes very hard to discernate what's being like humanly played what are scenes even what the instruments are doing because you can't separate anymore what's like the keyboard what's playing the bass it's all like a invert wine and pressed together so in that

regard I think the the fact that everything sounds like it has like 10 layers of varnish on it and the playfulness of the song structures, the energy. I can see the connection between this and our debut album. I hear in the opening couple of songs, almost like a red herring, of what I think the album is going to be, and then what it turns into.

Because when you open with Never Ender, with Kevin Parker from Tamampala, has this very smooth vocal. For me, it has almost like hints of D-A-N-C-E. When we go to Generator, the intensity of it, that sort of John Carpenter horror feeling reminds me somewhat of stress from the debut album. But then this technique that you talk about, about this sort of resampling yourself,

I start going on this sonic journey, it almost turns into like this hallucination, these early works that are maybe feel a little bit familiar, things that, oh, yeah, I know justice, I love justice. All of a sudden, I'm going into songs that have completely untraditional song forms. that feel as though I'm not listening to one album, but it feels like I'm listening to four albums that you have written and then remixed and done a DJ set reduced down to this is the live remix of this much larger work.

And I don't know what I am listening to. Am I listening to the original recording? Am I listening to these samples? It takes me on an entire sonic journey. And so I think it's just those first few tracks that remind me, oh, this feels like classic justice. and then I go somewhere totally different. Yeah, that's great to hear first.

And also, like, the way we structure our albums has always been more or less the same, is that we like starting with something that makes you feel home or in like a known landscapes. And when we started working on our second album, on audio-video disco, we thought like for some weeks and we debated and then we didn't do it, but we're like, okay, maybe we should start every album with the theme of Genesis and then go on to like another song. Because what made us think of that was that when you sit down in a cinema and you see like the 20th Century Fox theme,

you know you're in a cinema and you know you're in for like an hour and a half, two hours, three hours of a film. So it puts you in some sort of condition so that you know you're somewhere, you know more or less what you can expect, but of course you don't know everything and then it unfolds. And we didn't do it, but whether it was

a horsepower, civilization on the second album, or a safe and sound pleasure on a woman, never-endered generator after he made one night. It's just here like to,

so you feel a little bit at home at the beginning and it sets the kind of tone for what the may follow. And then from there we we expand on things and then take turns at some point. But yeah, yeah, like what you just said makes a perfect sense to us. I have to say that in addition to working as music journalists, I also teach at NYU in one of their music schools. And when my students lose attention, they start chatting or maybe the beginning of class I need to get their attention. I turn my volume all the way up on my computer and I play Genesis. And immediately they all stop. It gets their attention. They say, oh, okay,

we're in music school now. Pause it right after those opening notes. So it has served a great utility for me as setting a scene as well. That's cool. Yeah, that makes for a good entrance when you start a class and you start with this. Because for us, like a genesis was really like a gladiator, song, you know, it's something you put in the arena before coming in. Part of the inspiration for this album and the way that you constructed these samples feels very inspired by an era of sampling, which is no longer really feasible. Yeah, I mean, that's one thing we like about what most people call French Touch number one is that these guys, they really have a talent to spot like those like two seconds or

three seconds of a track that one's gonna they're gonna be looped it's it's it's making like a whole different song they're picking like the best part of that track to the point where like listening to the original tracks they feel like everything around is a is a is a waste you know because they could have like made just that one loop and that's actually the loop that you want to listen to forever and and that was part of the of the of the the thing we were thinking about when we started working on this album, we thought, let's try to streamline our music and to reduce it always to one or maybe two loops to make something that is very precise, sharp in terms of emotion. I'm taking this one example. It's not a very

good example. I mean, it's a good example on a pop level and not personally because we're not, We both are not a huge fan of this song, but music sounds better with you by a Stardust. It's a great tune, of course, it's not our favorite from like this period, but for what it is, it's amazing. It's like one second of Shaka Khan record that has been looped. Listening to that Shaka Khan song, it seems crazy that they didn't focus. on that one loop, but that they wrote a whole song around it. And the status song, because it's a sample, because it's one loop, because they have one modulation in the baseline that makes the whole song, it becomes a new futuristic for the time.

Impressive to see all these guys having this talent of like spotting that one thing and making a loop that the whole planet wanted to listen to forever. So without doing the same thing, the idea that came through was that we should try to, yeah, just to reduce and streamline our music. So instead of making like five different chord progressions in one song, we just like write, right until we have that one thing that we love and that we want to loop. And most of the songs, apart from I think two or three, they are loop-based. but then we also saw the bad side of it and we're thinking okay like all those tracks even the one we love we love the idea

we love the concept we love like the result but we never listen to them in their entirety and that's a good day like Star Dust again is a great example it's like it was like a huge hit I think I've never listened to more than two minutes of that track because after one minute you've heard everything you had to hear and we're like okay so now it's like we are making loop-based music.

How do we do it? So it's like unfolds over like three, four, five minutes and you never get bored. And actually this kind of like parallel tracks running, this kind of abrupt transition, like the structures, it came also from this idea of like making loop-based music that always feels surprising. Gospa, you both were designers before being musicians. Is there a sense that you're almost working from like a design brief when you're approaching an album? I mean, yeah, we don't have a physical mood board in the studio, but it's an endless, like, exchange, like, whether it's for a track idea or artwork cover or video idea, there's always something like triggering, like, those ways of expressing what we want to convey. And so, like, it can be anything, like, it can be, like, a painting, like an image.

Yeah, you know, like, and we were like both graphic designers and the thing that we kept from graphic design is that when you do graphic design, you don't make art for art's sake. Like graphic design is about to be able to translate an idea into an image. And for us, music is more or less the same thing, is that it's about transposing an idea, something we talk about, or a sensation into music that's the way we make. it. Although the big difference is that when we make music, we really make music for the sake of making music and it has no other purpose. Whereas on graphic design, there was like a very specific purpose. And the ideas we had was like to like this kind of thing of having like parallel universes sort of within the same track and going from one to the other

very abruptly and that came from like sampling and everything. What if we had like the original sample, you have the end result and you just go from one to the other like this just like if you are pressing a button.

Where's an example of that on the album? One night all night, like the disco part in the middle and like the other parts, they are exactly the same same music, it's the same arrangements, same chords, same vocal line, same everything. But there's just one part that is made with all electronic synths kind of rave sound. And there's the other part that's made with like human played drums, human played bass.

And going from like the first chorus, for example, to the midsection. Especially the first time you hear it because you have no idea it's going to come. it's like oh okay i'm like in this kind of like ravy situation and it stops all of a sudden and then you have this kind of like walking bass very like light organic drums and you have like it's the same song but dressed up completely differently and it's fun to have both versions of the same song within one song and generator is like these episodes of this in that another great example. Inco deit-o, yeah, definitely.

That song for me really captures this idea that you spoke of earlier, of resampling yourself over and over again because there's moments of clear live instrumentation. And then there's these moments where there's just microchops of tiny little seconds of things and I don't even know what I'm hearing. That's why I think I described this album as somewhat hallucinatory because I'm sort of being pulled in and out of a mental space. that is desositive. Yeah, yeah.

It feels like I know what I'm hearing, and then all of a sudden I don't. And then you take me to this huge epic rock outro and incognito. And so in just a few minutes, I've gone on this entire Sonic trip. No, but it definitely makes sense because it was a while ago,

but I remember doing some mushrooms once and walking back home. And for some reason, I could hear like every conversation in every house, in every cab passing by, and it has a bit the same feeling in the end. Like time and space don't really make sense and you can hear bits and bobs of stuff. And obviously we did it in a very sober and clear state of mind. But it has this, yeah, this kind of psychedelic sensitivity. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.

What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready.

Do not sugarcoat something for me. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. You have a wonderful palette cleanser right in the middle of the album called Moonlight Rendezvous. which feels to me like it's careless whisper as interpreted by Beethoven, but misremembered and digitally degraded over the decades.

Tell me about Moonlight Rendezvous. How did this sound end up on the album? To us, like the writing, the way we composed it was like, we grew up listening to a French singer-songwriter, such as like Serge Gainsbourg, Michel Berger. There was something very gloomy about it. it in a way and we felt that transposing it into a more futuristic landscape. Like we liked the challenge of making like a song that's a saxophone and piano a team and

then try to find ways of making it sound futuristic with such a few elements. And there's also a lot of like those kind of like Blade Runner type of sensations. When we talk about that track and it's half a joke because it's really like, it's really like like what we were talking about when we are making it. It's like a private eye, cheap whiskey, a shitty day and a rainy, yeah, a guy comes back home and the investigation is blocked, doesn't have any new clothes, and he's looking through the window,

and it's like raining, and all he can see is like, and droids and neons on the, through the window. Like how nerd can we, can we go in that, in your show? it you can go deep. Before every record we just pick a set of instruments and we we make the whole record with those instruments. Like for example audio video disco was made with a melaton and a guitar and for this one we we fell in love with that synth that's called the ppg wave ppg and so 2.3 or 2.2 i can remember which one is ours and we loved it because it's one of the first digital synthesizer and it's a 12-bit synthesizer so it has this kind of 12-bit aliasing.

Yeah, that digital distortion that like that grainy sound and I hear it on Moonlight Rendezvous, I hear that graininess, it's on a lot of places. It feels old and degraded. Yeah, it sounds like a dying replicant. Yeah, there's a very uncanny valley to it because there's a lot of sort of vocal like sounds, these fermenty, vowely things, but they're not quite human. Yeah. Yeah. And we love to loved it because also one of the like one of the things, it's not an idea, but one of the thing we wanted for this record is we wanted it to sound digital and futuristic. And we are not obsessed at all with analog gear or whatever. And most of the research we did for

this album were in the digital world. We did like a lot of resynthesis using a lot of digital tools. synthesizers, they don't really appeal to us for what they are. And in the studio, we have all the classic scenes, and they are just like taking the dust in a corner of the studio. Because when you take a CSAT and you play a chord on it or whatever, and it sounds already like something you heard like a million times. And the PPG, it was great because it was both, It has the thickness and it takes the space of what you would want from like a classic analog synthesizer,

while having all those kind of idiosyncrasies that belong to the digital world, even the way it's programmed and everything. And we fell in love with that, and there's that sound that is on Moonlight Rendezvous that was too beautiful not to be used. So there's this, there are these digital sounds being re-synthes, size, degraded, what does that texture? What does that timbre evoke for you? I wouldn't say they are degraded. I would say they are upgraded. Because we don't degrade things for the sake of, I mean, every time we would do that,

we didn't feel that we're degrading things. Actually, we felt that it was like giving them more space, more texture, more dimension, too. And a lot of, yeah, more harmonics and stuff. Yeah, so for us, it's more like an upgrade. I'm getting the sense, I don't mean to pigeonhole you and say, oh, you are a bunch of designers for learning who make music. But I do keep seeing this theme of there's an iterative process that you all use in your music creation, which I think especially in the world of more electronic and dance music is not necessarily the norm. Oftentimes you get in the computer and you just keep on clicking and you keep building in your track and you build it out in the DA and then you done. and you hit print. In your process, there is a lot of going in the computer, out of the computer,

thinking about something, making demos, dance tracks that are from a very deliberate process. Maybe it's explorative and fun. It reminds me much more of the world of fine arts than it does, maybe how I think of most dance music being made. Is that an accurate way of thinking about it? I mean, it happens like once in a while that we, like to us being able to work like the way you describe it, like just making things and then you finish, it happens when you have a stroke of genius, and it can happen once in a while, maybe every five years that we start a song,

and it just unfolds and we're like, oh wow, it's finished and we're happy with it, but it's very rare, unfortunately, and a lot of the times we just build up things slowly, and over the course of like three years and a half working on this record, knew that reaching the end of the of the process we would want to go back on things because we make these demos these songs and then we let them rest for like two three years and when we come back to them of course like because as it goes we

refine the method we are like we find new treatments new things and we want to apply them on the rest of the record so yes that there's definitely a lot of iterations And this is what we tell to everyone we're working with, whether it's on like the visual side or on anything. It's really, really rare to lend something good on first attempts. It can happen, of course, but it's like it's too rare to count on it really. Right. And so sometimes you have an idea. Maybe it's the wrong idea or maybe there's one part of that ID that needs to be developed.

And it can take like 10, 20,000. 200 or 200 attempts until you reach like the state where you feel okay that that was the right thing yeah and and also this is probably why we are not very good at making a proper dance music because we we we can't really be satisfied with a linear music so so there is there has to be an element of surprise or deception or some accidents and and most of the The dance music is very linear to us. And so I guess that's why it's a bit of a struggle to make something that is only dance floor efficient.

I grew up, my mom ran an art gallery. And so I got to know all kinds of different artists and art processes. And what I'm reminded of in this conversation, or some of my favorite artists are the ceramicists. Because if you want to make a teapot, you have to go through finding the right clay, molding it the right way. knowing the right heating and stages of heating, knowing the right glazes, but also accepting that in that entire process, there are things that are going to be out of your control. A slight variation in the kiln is going to create some sort of pop or bubble. And sometimes those mistakes are also beautiful. And so to get to that finished product, oftentimes you kind of have to, you know, try three or four times.

You're going to break a few pots. It doesn't matter. But you eventually get that well-glazed perfect pot that you're looking for. And I hear a little bit of sort of that method in the construction of your song. Yeah, and I once watched a documentary on a plane that were more or less saying that you need to make like a gesture like 10,000 times until you can like start being good at it. Like for example, if your job is like to cut like a piece of fish to make like a nigeries, only after 10,000 times having done the same thing, then you can start having the kind of like right. gesture and kind of know what you're doing and it's the same with everything unless you're a genius or unless you have like a lot of luck which which happen once again sometimes

maybe a place to go then would be to the end your final song on the album is the end it's with thundercat can you tell us a bit about where we have gone on this journey and where you want to be with us. Yeah, this song like, I mean, it was not pre-planned. And actually, these are the first words that came out of a Thundercat's mouth when he started like singing on the song. And that was interesting because we, we wrote a top line for this song that seemed like perfect for us. And he really approached the track in a way that I've actually never seen before, but that makes sense knowing him as a musician is that because like the the chord progression is a it's a very long corporation it's it's not like a one or two or four bar loops it's like very long and so he was

he listened to the song one time like the like the demo and then he was like okay he rolled his sleeves up and say let's start and he started kind of like a building like a very long top line, bit by bit, just thinking, okay, I make this and then we go from there, okay, so the previous line was that, so how do I go now from there? And doing a bit everything at the same time, which was surprising. And actually, like, the first line he enters was like, is this the end? So there must be something in the music that kind of triggered this kind of in his mind and we had like

Never Ender he started this song with the end and the whole landscape of that track sounds a bit like a closing track and we didn't think twice about it like okay like is this the end yeah it's going to be like the closer

of this of this album I remember when I first heard the album all the way through in a listening session with you both that when it got to the end, I wasn't ready for it to be over and I was ready for it to restart. And so the album can go from the end back to the beginning, never-ender, kind of in this endless DJ loop.

That's the ideal scenario and this is how we would love people to listen to this record. Unfortunately, we kind of think that only a small fraction of the listeners will actually listen to the records from top to bottom. But that's fine. For those who have the patience, it might be a good way. Although I'm not sure, because it's like the album is only like 49 minutes, I think, 50 minutes, but it's also quite. Personally, I find that it's a lot to take. Personally, yeah, I find that it's a lot to take and I'm not sure I would want to immediately listen back to the to the album again, but maybe. are just not an endurance enough.

Living in the world of hyper drama for too long can do a lot to one's nerves. Yeah, it can be a bit draining. Well, it definitely feels like a work that is, as much as there is a great dance music in here, this is one for me. I want to lie down, close my eyes, and experience the entire thing. Because I do feel like I am being guided on some kind of path that I haven't quite seen before, these unusual song structures, these sometimes uncomfortable sounds, these sounds these sounds that I don't know what I'm hearing

because of how they've been processed so many times. It almost feels like music that requires that kind of deep listening, and also for fun as well. Yeah, yeah, it has to stay playful. Yeah, that's a very good description. I'm by it.

I found this very delightful and insightful and that I am excited to go and listen even more deeply to the album again and again. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot. Thank you, thanks a lot. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, engineering by Brandon McFarlane, editing by Art Chung, illustrations by Arras Ghali, community management by Abubar, and our executive producer is Neshawkerwa.

Remember the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is a part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe to New York Magazine at NYMag.com. You can find all Switched on Pop at Switchedon Pop on all social media and at switchdot.com, where you can sign up for a weekly newsletter. We'll be back again on Tuesday, and until then, thanks for listening. Attention, Spotify. has arrived the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera, a fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive.

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