Everyone’s still a little concerned about swine flu H1-N1, but this sign TYPED IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS posted on the front door of the Institute of Design and Construction in Downtown Brooklyn seems to take the term due diligence to a strange—and even more panicky—new level. Should we assume the school won’t be celebrating Cinco de Mayo this year? ¡Ay, caramba!
Photo by Dazza
In their new tour documentary, Justice lay themselves at rock’s altar in the great name of music, sex, debauchery and exploitation. On the night of the film’s premier, they sit down with us to discuss how they made America their playground.
This is a story about a movie about two Parisians who are in the process of becoming rock stars. They are the stars of the movie, and yet you learn practically nothing about them between its beginning and end credits. The movie, a documentary about their first U.S. tour, aims to avoid rock ‘n’ roll clichés by exploiting them. Tits and guns and sex and violence and crazed fans and boring journalists and police all play large roles, but viewers can expect very little concert footage, because the film isn’t actually about what these guys do on stage (which is why they’re becoming famous in the first place). Long stretches of highway. Short bursts of hysteria in venues. Bizarre exchanges with strangers. Clichés. The tour-bus driver, Roger, sings religious hymns as he steers his employers to their next gig. His employers look at the cross, the symbol of Christian salvation, and see justice. One of them holds a crucifix up to his lips for the other to kiss before every show.
A Cross the Universe, the Justice tour documentary, has no journalistic ambitions. The band directed it with their friends Romain Gavras and So-Me, both of whom have directed Justice videos in the past. They filmed for 20 days, ended up with somewhere between 200 and 300 hours of footage, and then spent the next four months editing it down to a single cohesive hour. The movie is everything you want it to be because it’s nothing you would expect from Justice. Then again, audiences know so little about Justice, there was hardly any idea of what to expect, just a general sense of anticipation that the movie needs to feel as forward thinking and sexy as their music.
“Everything we do is always for us to experiment with something,” says Xavier de Rosnay, the more talkative half of the duo. (Gaspard Augé, notable for his towering curly hair, mutton chop sideburns and enviable mustache, mostly communicates in smiles, nods and varying levels of distractedness.) “For example, what we wanted to do with this one is change the timeline of a normal band and make a documentary after we’ve done just one album. But we wanted to avoid the normal plots: Not talk about the music and not talk about the band. And the only time that we can do that is now. We made enough music that people can get interested in watching the documentary, but not enough that we could focus on it. We’re not famous, so we don’t have to talk about us.”
Gaspard chimes in, “To us, it’s more risky to not talk about the music.”
“Some people think this documentary is 100 percent crazy,” Xavier adds. “Some people think it’s depressing. But I can understand the two points of view. People can think it’s either.”
A Cross the Universe shows Justice getting fucked up, brawling, flirting with insanity, marrying in Vegas, rummaging through junkyards, pillow fighting fans, sexing their groupies, going to jail, peeing on the cameramen and, of course, eating at Hooters. Along the way, Gaspard and Xavier try to set Kansas girls on fire backstage, and party with furries on stage. Having just viewed the film, and with this image of the duo fresh in my mind, it was somewhat jarring to see them in New York City’s Tribeca Grand Hotel bar during their Big Shot photo shoot, hours before their movie premiered at the IFC Center. They were sipping espressos. In leather.
The men behind Justice, it turns out, are seemingly 100-percent harmless and disarmingly friendly. Just as our interview is starting, an acquaintance who works at the hotel saunters up to the table and chides them for not booking their stay through him. (He would have gotten them a discount!) Then he invites them to a DFA party he’s organizing. They’re pleasant as can be, apologetic even, and invite him to their DJ set later that night, “with plus-100, if you like.”
I asked Justice about their rapport with the cameras, because you never get a sense from the duo that the eyes watching them are intrusive. They said it helps that they’ve been close friends with Gavras and So-Me for years. “It doesn’t ever feel 100 percent natural, but you get used to it,” Xavier explains. “It’s not like a journalist is watching you and you don’t know what will be on tape. We knew we could make the distinction of what we wanted to show. So we were just living our lives. And whenever weird stuff happened, we would have in our mind, ‘It’s OK, I can edit it out later.’” He adds that this film is about 0.5 percent of the footage they had to work with, so it’s not necessarily representative of what their lives were actually like.
“Some people think this documentary is 100 percent crazy,” Xavier adds. “Some people think it’s depressing. But I can understand the two points of view. People can think it’s either.”
The point of A Cross the Universe, they say, was to surprise themselves with their own behavior, to indulge in as many rock ‘n’ roll clichés as possible, to think up the wildest shit, do it, and then deal with the consequences later. The record label behind this release, Atlantic, surprisingly had no comments about any of its content. Says Gaspard, “You know what? The record label saw it when it was done. We did it and were like, ‘OK, It’s finished. I hope you like it.’ We just proposed it to them as, ‘If you want to release it, do it. You can turn it down, but you can’t tell us to take a scene out.’”
The fact that the cameras were rolling pushed them farther, they say, than they might have gone otherwise. Like Gaspard’s aforementioned drunken marriage to a Vegas fan as Xavier and the crew look on bemused. She disappeared after the ceremony, and no one knows where she went. “Even though it was not supposed to be a loving marriage, I would have liked to see more of her,” he says.
New York based DJ/producer Ezekiel Honig made a name for himself by producing gorgeous ambient records, then branching out into techno and sonic points beyond. Now focusing his energy on his fledgling indie label, Anticipate Recordings, can Honig still be all things to many people?
As the founder of both the renowned minimal techno imprint Microcosm Music and, more recently, the sonically adventurous Anticipate Record-ings, as well as an active producer and frequent performer in his own right, Ezekiel Honig has long since established himself as a towering presence in New York City’s sprawling underground electronic music community. Functioning as a dialogue between the producer and his surrounding environment, Honig’s impressive discography blends fragmented field recordings and processed acoustic instruments with elements of techno, house, and ambient. The resulting sound is a lush pan-genre bricolage that operates comfortably within a space nestled between the living room and the dance floor.
Honig’s latest album, Surfaces Of A Broken Marching Band, ranks among his most accomplished works. Envisioned as an encapsulation of what he hopes Anticipate Recordings represents, the album merges the myriad styles that have come to define the label’s catalog thus far into a complementary selection of tracks.
“The overt ambiance, the electro-acoustic processing, the muted, broken-up techno rhythms. I think these are areas that could develop into individual albums,” Honig says, “yet the combination of them is what the label is aiming for, whether that’s within a single release or as a larger statement.”
Far removed from the dub techno reductions that typify much of his earlier work, Honig has come a long way from the DJ music on which he cut his teeth. With the emphasis placed more fully on the acoustic sonic elements and pop structures that comprised the framework for his last album, Scattered Practices, “Surfaces Of A Broken Marching Band” can be downright cinematic at times, albeit in a hushed and reserved manner.
“For this album I knew that I wanted to keep going further with the idea of processed acoustic instruments, and I wanted there to be a stronger visual sense, a stronger sense of place…to at least attempt to take it outside the strict context of music and closer to sound that could relate to film,” Honig says. But it wasn’t until after he had wrapped production that the picture he had in his head all along came into focus: “Once the album was done, I was connecting the dots about the whole and realized that I was always thinking of an imaginary band with a bunch of broken, makeshift instruments.”
Initially introduced to electronic music during the heyday of New York’s rave scene back in the ‘90s, Honig was enamored with the DIY nature of the culture and the many new styles that were then beginning to emerge. He started playing out as a DJ during that time, but only made the jump into the studio in 2000. “I’m glad that I had large blocks of time observing and learning more about several kinds of electronic music, initially just going to events for years, and then DJing for years before making the jump into producing,” he says.
“Anticipate is where my heart’s at,” he explains, “and really closer to the label I always wanted to have.”
But rather than referencing dance music specifically, the wide spectrum of influences he encountered as a DJ have found their way into his work. “I think it allowed me to get more of a sense of things and I think/hope that it lets me acknowledge different styles of music in what I make—not necessarily in an overt sense, but in a filtered way of making certain choices because of influences that are trickling towards me from years ago, in a subconscious way.”
After relocating to Berlin, Kid606 is still bent on rocking you like a hurricane.
Miguel Depedro has been releasing electronic music under the Kid606 guise since the late ‘90s. His debut, Don’t Sweat The Technics, referenced everything from Skinny Puppy to Aphex Twin, and still stands as one of breakcore’s defining statements. Since then, he’s founded two record labels—Tigerbeat6 and its younger sister-imprint Tigerbass—and has gone on to release over a dozen full-lengths and virtually countless singles that run the gamut from sleek synth pop to blistering drum ‘n’ bass and back again.
Recently relocated to Berlin from San Francisco, a move Depedro, who was born in Caracas, says was necessitated by the “decline of America and California… and more about politics and the whole class and over-consuming culture [than music],” at the end of ’08 he dropped a fresh EP, Die Soundboy Die, which finds him trafficking in the same sort of raucous party music he’s built his name on, infusing it with a higher-than-usual dose of UK rave and even a smattering of dubstep’s trademark wobble.
“I would have gone apeshit crazy over the music I am hearing and making now when I was a kid.”
An artist seemingly driven by the sheer possibility inherent in electronic music production, Depedro is very much in love with his craft. “I would have gone apeshit crazy over the music I am hearing and making now when I was a kid,” he confesses. “Lots of the stuff that you can do now with computers and putting so much control into the hands of really young people I dreamed about and predicted for years, to see it come to life is really satisfying.”
Having successfully dabbled in nearly ever genre within the multi-faceted electronic music universe, Depedro has grown into a producer as prolific as he is skilled. Holed away in his ever-expanding studio, Depedro already has two new Kid606 albums in the can for 2009, both of which he claims are complete stylistic turns from his recent efforts. What’s his secret, though? “Overall, just pushing myself and changing things up and hopefully inspiring as many people as I piss off,” he says, adding: “live fast, die hard, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
Words: Carl Ritger
as featured in Issue 25