Mini interview In the mix avec Gaspard Augé

Thu 30th Aug, 2012in Features

If you’ve ever watched an interview with French duo Justice, you’ll likely have noticed that Xavier de Rosnay does most of the talking while Gaspard Augé tends to focus on sitting silently, smoking and looking fucking cool. So when it comes to getting much out of the man, an interview with Augé is always a bit of a gamble. Luckily enough, this time around he was quite the talker.

With the Ed Banger heavyweights currently in the midst of a mammoth tour, we caught up with Gaspard to find out how life on the road is going, whether we can expect to hear any new material soon and just what to expect when Justice touches down for Parklife 2012.

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Where are you guys right now?
We are just having a 10-day break before going back on the road to play the UK festivals. I’m actually moving house at the moment, so I’ve been busy packing thousands of records and books and stuff.

It seems like you guys never stop touring, how has 2012 been treating you so far?
We have been really amazed by the reception we have had with the live show so far. It has been better than we could have expected. This record Audio, Video, Disco is a bit special – it’s not necessarily radio-friendly or club-friendly, but people still seem to enjoy it when they come to the shows. So yeah, it has been great.

We started in Australia in January and since then we have been constantly improving the live show. We’ve been working on improving new things every single day to make it as efficient as possible, so it’s still a work in progress, because obviously it will never be perfect. The only way to improve it is to keep playing, find out what’s good, what’s really good and what needs to be improved.

Do you feel that as a dance artist, it’s important to find new ways to evolve your live show, as opposed, to say, a traditional rock band?
I guess there is a different solution for everybody, but for us, we said that we needed to do a full live show as it is more faithful to the music on our records. Our live show is even different from our records because we don’t like making something that we spent one year making in the studio, to sound exactly the same for one hour live.

When we DJ, as we are about to do at Parklife, we just play party music and dance music that we love, and we just want everybody to have a good time. But when we do live shows, we only play our own material – it’s just a way of letting the record take another format.

Which do you enjoy more, your live performances or the DJ shows?
That’s really hard to say. I don’t think I have any preference, that’s like asking me if I like my father or my mother better.

So now that you’ve had time to reflect on your two albums, how do you feel you changed between the two releases?
I don’t think that the second time round was that different for us, in the sense that we always have the same musical obsessions and the same concerns when we make music and when we’re writing. We focus on very simple and straightforward emotions.

We don’t want to make functional music – we are looking more to something that moves people in a very universal way – making people happy, sad or melancholic…or wanting to have fight.

source : http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/53638/Justice_Constantly_improving