Monolith Festival

Justice For All

Xavier de Rosnay's honesty is refreshing — even if the words he's just uttered won't exactly go down as the most artistically inclined assertion ever made. "We make electronic music," the musician confesses, "because it's accessible and easy."Rosnay is one half of international dance-floor phenom Justice, whose suave yet glitchy take on electro and house music ruled the clubs in 2007.

The gritty, rock-oriented grooves of singles like "D.A.N.C.E." and "Stress" proved irresistible to dancers and DJs alike. The outfit's influence, however, has spread far beyond the dance floor; its music has been prominently featured in film and on television, too. Chances are great that even if you've never heard of Justice, you've heard Justice. The music press, which often gives the cold shoulder to club music, even embraced the act's primal, pulsating party music. In the Village Voice's annual Pazz and Jop poll, "D.A.N.C.E." was the fifth most popular single among critics, while the group's debut album, (pronounced "cross"), clocked in at number 36. These are remarkable achievements for two young men from Paris's tony suburbs who haven't exactly been sweating it out in dive bars and dirty basements.

"We are the 'anybody' who can make a record," declares de Rosnay, speaking of himself and his partner, the considerably less voluble Gaspard Augé. "We started out knowing nothing about music or production."

While it's true that the pair had minimal recording experience when they came together in 2003, they weren't novices when it came to making music. As young men, de Rosnay and Augé both did time in a parade of crappy bands. "They were really bad projects with, like, five guitarists and one drummer," de Rosnay recalls. "We never played concerts or made records."

These inauspicious beginnings, though, gave way to greater things as the pair began collaborating with rudimentary electronic music equipment. Inspired by Daft Punk, Cassius and French touch music — the disco-infused club genre native to Paris et environs — de Rosnay and Augé began casually experimenting, and tout de suite, there was Justice for all.

"I was meant to be a graphic designer," notes de Rosnay, who was finishing his university degree at the time. "We just started making music to pass the time." However, when one of those experiments, which heavily sampled from British electro-rockers Simian, caught the ear of Pedro Winter, what began as a hobby suddenly became much more for Justice.

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BY ERYC EYL Published on March 13, 2008