Justice gives us the keys to his “Hyperdrama” tour

A few hours before going on stage at the Nuits de Fourvière festival on June 17, where they offered the four thousand two hundred spectators a memorable show, as powerful for the eyes as for the ears, the Parisian duo Justice, spearhead of the label Ed Banger, gave us an interview. Both smiling and thoughtful, Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé return to the intentions that guided the creation of their new album, full of surprises. Hyperdrama released in April, and on the “making of” of their carefully tuned live performance.

Franceinfo Culture: Were you surprised by the success of your new album, Hyperdrama ?
Xavier from Rosnay : Nothing is ever decided in advance. Basically, we make niche music, in the sense that it does not respect any of the rules that make music popular. Neither formally, nor in the time we take to do things, since our previous album dates back to 2016. Eight years during which, apart from Gaspard’s solo album, we were completely absent from the social and media landscape. So for us it’s always a surprise to release an album eight years later and that people are simply interested in what we do. Is it out of nostalgia or to find a new proposition? We have the impression thatHyperdrama is rather received as a contemporary album. In the audience for the first concerts of the tour, we see a lot of people who are in their twenties or a little younger, sometimes even with their parents, and it’s surprising. This is what we hoped for without really expecting it.
Gaspard Augé : It’s all the more satisfying when we do things without compromise : we are neither trying to be fashionable, nor to be danceable, nor to be radio-friendly. In any case, we hope that it’s a record that doesn’t sound like a group with a 20-year career.

It’s a very accomplished album but it requires a few listens because it’s always moving and makes the listener lose his bearings before settling on it. It was wanted ?
Xavier : We always loved music that we didn’t understand exactly how it was made. Every time I hear a piece and I can’t see the matrix it interests me, whether I like the piece or not, I find it intriguing and it makes me want to know more. From a technical point of view, we have worked for a long time to blur all the boundaries between what is digital, what is analog, what are instruments, what are not.
Gaspard : This is undoubtedly the most new thing on this album. In the previous ones, the accidents were more harmonic accidents.

With this record, there is really a desire to be less linear and to constantly create surprises. Already for us, and then for the listener.

Gaspard Augé

at Franceinfo Culture

How did you construct this live?
Xavier : For us, a live performance must be readable and intelligible at first listen. Everyone has to have fun immediately, and in this type of music, predictability is part of the fun. That is to say that for a rise and an explosion to go well, the public must be able to anticipate the moment when it will start again. This is also the reason why the caricature of the current DJ does a countdown – one, two, three, four – on the microphone before each “ drop », that is to say the moment when the song starts. Because the more we can predict the moment of the explosion, the longer it will take. Besides, there are only two of us on stage so everything has to be simplified. Accidents come from clumsiness or malfunctions, because our live is very written.

Is there room for improvisation on the scene ?
Xavier : There is a lot of freedom but very little improvisation. In fact, when we improvise it is generally to get around technical problems. It is part of the job. : When things don’t work out, you have to find the most painless way possible to move on. When a show is too different from one day to the next, for example if we play two nights in the same city, it is because there were problems on one of the two and we were forced to improvise (laughs).

The room for maneuver is enormous but above all we try every evening to produce the best possible version of this show which is very written, by testing and improving things day after day.

Xavier de Rosnay

at Franceinfo Culture

Gaspard : Above all, at the start of tours, it is such an effort of memorization, of synchronization ! Because we must be careful not to create actions that are contradictory to what the other person is doing. And we also have to be in sync with our lighting designer…
Xavier : Our lighting designer who does everything by hand, because there is no timecode, just like the person who takes care of the machines and everything that is mobile on stage. The four of us are like a group and everyone has to know in advance what the others are going to do, because otherwise it doesn’t work.

On stage, you mix and remix your new songs with an increasingly large number of old hits that the public demands. Is it a constraint or a bonus to have to play these hits ?
Xavier : It’s a bonus ! We’re grateful to have these songs that work and it’s a pleasure to hear the voices of We Are Your Friends or D.AN.CE in new contexts, it’s not a burden at all.
Gaspard : That way, we can keep the best of the four albums. For us it’s really efficiency above all else. We’re not like Radiohead who’s tired of playing Creep.

At the rate of a tour every 6-7 years we haven’t reached that moment where we can no longer stand to hear certain songs. Because they are revived and mixed.

Xavier de Rosnay

to Franceinfo Culture

Which songs did you have to rearrange the most compared to the album? ?
Xavier : They all need to be reworked from top to bottom for technical reasons. We can’t play the songs as they are on the albums because they’re not made to work live, even in the way they’re produced and the way they sound, because we’re really making them for home listening. , it’s car discs, actually (smile). Live, the sonic constraints are completely different and then we have to find a place to interact inside once they are remodeled.
Gaspard : And then we don’t say to each other : you have to play as many songs from the new album as possible. If it doesn’t work naturally, we don’t play them.

The lighting design looks spectacular. What did you have in mind?
Xavier : The aesthetic idea has been the same from the start. It is to dress the technical elements of the stage, in particular the rigging bridges and the flight cases, these boxes in which the equipment is transported. We start on a bare stage with banal elements and in fact, little by little, each of these elements which normally do not move, move, light up and become a source of light. Our lighting designer Vincent Lérisson comes from the theater, he worked in Chaillot before working for us. However, in the theater it is pure light and trying to do as much as possible with as few elements as possible.
Gaspard : As we thought about this show, nothing is free. Everything has to illustrate something that’s happening in the music. That’s why you don’t have a 20-foot-tall dancing clown. Everything must be justified by what is happening in the music so that the experience is more intense and purer. There is a bit of an illusionist side too because what you thought was inert comes to life at a moment.
Xavier : It is a radical proposal in this sense that it is only light with very few colors and never figurative images. Figurative images are too distracting. So we cut them to refocus attention on what’s happening on stage. Not on us, but on the stage.

It is a device which is constantly deployed, which advances. Not everything is given in the first ten minutes. Normally, something happens until the end.

Xavier de Rosnay

at Franceinfo Culture

You canceled your concert at Primavera Porto (Portugal) on June 7 at the last moment. What happened ?
Xavier : Before accepting a date, often months in advance, we send very precise technical specifications required for our live shows. But there, their stage was not strong enough to accommodate ours and we had not been warned. In the morning, as soon as they hung the first elements, the stage collapsed. They stopped immediately because it was too dangerous. Solutions were sought all day, in vain. Fortunately this happens very rarely, I think this is the first time we have canceled for this reason.

What is the technical problem you fear the most on stage?
Xavier : Everything can happen. The worst technical problem we encountered was at Red Rocks, in a Denver venue dug into a canyon. The “façade” had been cut off, so the public no longer heard the music, but for us everything continued to work, we could hear what we were doing and we still had the feedback in our headphones. We were therefore not aware of a malfunction. For two minutes, we continued on a silent stage, people seeing us playing on our consoles without the sound. But problems keep arising. It’s actually very rare for shows where everything goes well. Our production manager knows it so well that he says : “On the first date on which there are no technical problems I get a mullet cut“. (smile) He is quite confident and he knows the job well enough to know that he is safe from the mullet for a while…

Justice continues its festival tour this summer : June 30 in Glastonbury (GB), July 4 at Beauregard in Hérouville Saint-Clair, July 6 at Main Square in Arras, July 11 at Déferlantes in Barcarès, July 13 at Musilac in Aix-les-Bains , July 14 at Terres du Son in Monts, July 21 at the Dour Festival, August 17 at the Cabaret Vert in Charleville-Mézières… before in particular two Accord Arena Paris-Bercy on December 17 and 18, 2024.