At your DJ set last year in Las Vegas, most of the songs were Justice originals, and it appeared you guys were mixing a lot of them in real time. Given that, how dramatically will this upcoming “live” performance differ?
It’s completely different. We are not using any records for the live shows. Basically, it’s just the two of us—using machines and computers and music controllers—and we have the split parts for all the tracks and remixes we’ve done, and we try to make the best hour-and-a-half sequence with all these elements. We have a big synthesizer in front of us, with the lighted cross inside, and we also have Ableton [Live] to be able to put the tracks together, so it’s a mix between some hardware and software. It’s a big mess to set up, and it was bit like hell in the beginning, but as we tour we are getting more used to the setup and a bit more confident.
Do you feel like Daft Punk’s recent pyramid touring has raised audience expectations for the visuals that should accompany an electronic-music performance, and have you adjusted yours as a result?
This is mainly why we decided to make something a bit more real and a bit more theatrical, in the old-school sense—to have just white lights and to have the black Marshall [amps] stack. We were not really interested in high-tech effects. We didn’t want any visuals or lasers, because a lot of the electronic acts [today] are based on those tricks—they have huge LED screens and stuff—so we wanted to make ours look more like a ’70s hard-rock show.
Your music has caught on so quickly over the past year, appealing to a lot of people who normally might not listen to electronic dance music. Did you see that coming, or has it mostly been a surprise?
It’s still really weird for us to see so many people buying our tickets, because we only started, like, five years ago, but it’s been increasing in a very progressive way. It’s getting better and better for us, and it’s really cool because we have kind of [outlasted] the hype. In France, especially, we have some very young audiences, from 12 years old to 20 years old, and it’s really good to see such young people going to the show because they have a very sincere relationship to music. They are not thinking too much [about] if it’s cool or not to go. The main concern of Justice is not to be stuck in one genre, but to gather people from many music backgrounds, so it’s really cool for us to go beyond the club scene.
With Diplo, Fancy. March 30, 7 p.m., $25-$30. House of Blues, 632-7600.