Justice - (Cross)

I was listening to this album today and yesterday. I can only really describe it as French electro-house. The first two tracks alone are extraordinary - packed with references to Aphex Twin, Prefuse 73, Grizzly Bear harmonies, Daft Punk and Air homages especially prominent, also less clear stuff like Cassius (!) and old-school funk bass lines straight from Parliament and James Brown. Treatment of samples from Orbital, fascination with aural properties from Chemical Brothers. Huge beats and tunes from Basement Jaxx. More than anyone I've heard for a long time they are fascinated by the real quality of a sound - when you do this to a Moog and let it sit and dwell, what is the nature of the resulting noise - fluctuations are drawn out and made to carry harmonic weight. It's very French, very European LCD Soundsystem. Fuck you, they say - this is how we do it here. White noise and glitches thrown in from Squarepusher and unplaceable samples from DJ Shadow on out.

Something that they do that really grabs me is that they insert blocks of silence - silence made to sound like glitches. Huge gouges, effectively, cut into the texture of the thing (and texture is more than in most things the way to listen to Justice). It reminds me of Dr. John taking 5 whole beats out of a solo just to let his phrase sit for a bit.

Then I wondered - could you make music in which silence was the beat - say white noise punctuated by silences? But the problem is that you can't differentiate silences. They are not variable in pitch - silences are the absence of pitch, the absence of anything. They are a null. So you couldn't, because anything more than marking time would be confusing and undifferentiated - and of course a beat is always in tension with the time that it is marking.