08/11/08
Text: Nik Mercer
Photographers: Nilina Mason-Campbell
Written interviews are so passé, right? Who wants to scroll through three pages of tiny text when you could just click through our fine filmic offerings instead?
That may be a bit of an overstatement, but there's some truth to it: it takes a good band to be able to "verbally joust" with an interviewer who just wants to geek out and intellectualize music. Editing pieces down for video is, usually, an easier and more flattering way to present a group.
Such is not necessarily the case for Justice, everyone's favorite Parisian electronic pop duo, though. Xavier de Rosnay chatted with Pitchfork for literally the longest Justice interview we've ever read. Sit through the whole thing; it's worth it.
Here's an interesting excerpt:
X: No—we don't do remixes anymore.
Pitchfork: Why not?
X: We are no longer excited by remixes apart from [for] friends. We did three after the album—two were for friends: Klaxons and Tiga. And we did one for Justin Timberlake, because we just listened to the song and we had an idea really quickly. So we just said, "Okay, we're just going to need one afternoon to do it," and we did it. But no—if we do more remixes, it's going to be for sure for friends. We are turning down every request now.
Pitchfork: Did you just see them being a tool to get your name out there?
X: It was really exciting for us. Not to make a name, but just to see our names on records of people we like. Our motivation was to get a Britney Spears record with "Justice" written on it. That's it. We've never tried to make efficient remixes or clever remixes. We never tried to make them radio friendly or DJ friendly, we just wanted to have our name written on these records.
It was also a good way for us to learn to how to use a computer.
