#loud 168

— First, please tell us about the documentary! What were your reasons for setting your North American tour as the backdrop of the film? Xavier de Rosnay: The first reason was that we'd never filmed anything over such a long period before. Like, for example, for a whole year... The American leg of the tour happened to take place over twenty days, so we thought we'd be able to film that in an aptly compact way. And the second reason was that every time we went back and forth between the USA and Canada, we could experience all of the four seasons. Unthinkable in almost any other country.

— That's true. Xavier: This tour began in the West Coast of America, and it felt like spring there - but cross the border to Canada and we were right in the middle of winter! It was so cold! Then we moved towards the East Coast and then it felt summery all around. You move around just a little, and everything down to the season and the surroundings change - how could we not film that? Even in Europe the scenery barely changes throughout the year.

— I knew it! Xavier: And I guess we were... kind of anticipating something big to happen? You know, just because it was America? That feeling was strong in both of us. We supposed that if we were going to film this, we might as well choose a location where a lot of things were bound to happen.

— The documentary truly did end in a rather rock-and-roll fashion, it felt that the behind-the-scenes aspect of the tour was laid out bare. This may be a rather direct question, but wasn't it overtaxing a little, showing off your darker sides, or were you genuinely all right with it? Xavier: I see what you mean, and yeah, we were. (Laughter.) And in addition to that, the parts where we limited ourselves... I mean, I guess... they did exist... Basically, no scene in this documentary was forced. It was filmed according to the meaning and value of what was actually there. So anything that was repetitive was edited some, but otherwise we showed it all, whether we were unsightly at the time, miserable, or being complete idiots. The terrible habits we showed in the documentary might well have been, uh, illegal... Gaspard Augé: Ahahahaha. Xavier: But right now it's 2008, and from the present perspective, I don't think there's a problem.

— It's an attitude that still suits your appearance in the work [A Cross the Universe] immensely. Xavier: Thanks a lot. Though we did have to follow regulations some. Like, for example, we had to edit out everything that showed an alcohol brand name. There’s a regulation that says that any scene or footage depicting alcoholic beverages have to be blurred out; but honestly, I never heard of anything so ridiculous. If you saw a video where somebody was drinking a thing, and if it was all blurred out, wouldn’t it be more obvious upon watching it that they were consuming alcohol?

— You're right. (Laughter) Xavier: And also, there was the rule that you couldn't show a woman's nipples. But seriously! Who goes through life without ever seeing a nipple? If you blur that out, you'd be like 'oh my God, these are nipples, all right!' for sure; isn't that more lewd? (Laughter) And if you blurred out a woman's panties, it'd probably look like she wasn't wearing any. It's a real paradox, that. Censoring such things make them more grotesque than if you'd just let them be!

With the Cross

— Returning to the topic at hand, what ideas did the mutual director of the project - Romain Gavras - contribute to the making of this work? Xavier: He was the director, if anything it's us who tossed small ideas towards him. Of course we participated in the production, but this documentary wasn't produced in a pre-structured way. Romain and So-Me had a bunch of videos and images they took of the tour, and we connected them afterwards to craft the scenario [for the documentary].

— I see! Xavier: The work led them to create some interesting methods of operation, which might have meant that Justice wasn't at the forefront of things. There's a lot showing the tour manager - you know, the gun maniac - and the tour bus driver, and that was their idea. Romain and So-Me were the ones who decided to film them, so they did. And as a result, I think the documentary ended up a lot more entertaining than it could have been.

— It wouldn't have been as entertaining without the driver or the tour manager, no! Xavier: That's sort of why the camera wasn't on us a lot of the time. (Laughter) And during our live performances, Romain was always next to the stage and So-Me always in the innermost parts of the venue. The differences in camera angle from them both, as well as what they chose to focus on, really helped to lend a new depth to the work.

— In addition to that, the title A Cross the Universe seems to be a homage to the Beatles' Across the Universe. Whose idea was the title? Gaspard: From yours truly. A Cross the Universe seemed like the most fitting title to what happens in this documentary. Xavier: Having such a simple and effective title is what helped to complete this documentary, no lie. What's the most memorable thing in live Justice performances, it has to be the cross. And we - ourselves and our staff - sure are roaming the universe with a cross in tow!

— Did Gaspard also come up with the stage structure as well? The cross, the martial amps - the hard rock-esque atmosphere? Gaspard: That's different. We came up with that together. But as you said, that stage set was inspired by the hard rock feel of the seventies. We had some help regarding the theatrical light effects from a fellow member of staff who'd actually worked in theatre, as well. I think that restorative, monotononous mood was exactly right for our overall image. Xavier: Everyone seems to think that Gaspard's in charge of the metal and I'm in charge of the disco and pop, but that's not the case. As Justice, every idea we produce is something that the two of us discussed together beforehand. There's no one factor that only one of us is in charge of.

The Evolving Live Sound of Justice

— Please tell us about the live CD, which is also at the heart of the film. The live CD gives the feeling that what you play live is very different to what is on the original album ([Cross]). Xavier: That's right.

— How do you feel that Justice's sound has evolved through your live performances? Xavier: Eh... how our musicality's evolved over time, you can probably tell at sight from all the grey hairs we've got. We can barely goddamned breathe nowadays! Gaspard: Hahahaha! Xavier: Or all the hidden kids we fathered all across the universe... (Laughter) Things like musicality are influenced by our spiritual world, too, most certainly...   I mean, we're forgetting how to speak French. For real, it's all growing dim. All those things are probably reflected in our live sound in some way.  

— Back to the serious discussion. (Laughter) How much ad-libbing is there on average in your live sets? Xavier: Almost none, we barely touch it nowadays. This tour's taken eighteen months in total, and for the first few months, we sought the best format for our performance through trial and error, but around halfway through we felt deep in our hearts that we'd completed the best set we could possibly make right now. And we've played that arrangement ever since.

— Why is that? Xavier: We're a team: the sound engineer, the lighting staff, everyone moves as one. Someone ad-libbing in that scenario would break down everything we worked so hard for, wouldn't they? Our live performances, therefore, are all based around the thought - how complete can we make it? And if you think about it, someone who saw us live in Tokyo today is unlikely to see us live again in Berlin tomorrow. That's just a part of it, but we're always trying to make each performance the best that we can.

— I see. So what's on the CD must be the best set you've played until now! If this is so, where was it recorded? Xavier: The San Francisco live. From March to September this year we've recorded something like seventy to eighty live performances, but only the five or six recordings that we thought were the best made it through. It's a far more perfect set than the one done in Summer Sonic this year, by the way. Festivals, you can't skimp out on.

— What was your favourite thing about the San Francisco performance? Xavier: We made a few little mistakes here and there, but I think we had the most excellent chemistry with the audience there. We recorded this performance with the mic stood in the audience section, that was completely intentional. You know, the weirdly bootleg-like feel. By the way, we actually thought that the live performance in Belgium was the absolute best for us personally - but the audience was so loud that none of that could make it into the CD! (Laughter) They were screaming, like, 'kyaaaa~' for over fifteen minutes straight...

— What a shame! Then, before we bring this to a close, please tell us about your future plans! Are you working on any new songs? Gaspard: Nah. Xavier: We were busy editing [A Cross the Universe] as soon as the tour was over, after all.

— Are you taking a break for a while? Xavier: Nah, it's not about that. We've had our break, as you might have guessed from the film - while we were touring, it was exactly like being in holiday, all the time. (Laughter) I feel as we've mucked around for an entire year and a half, to be honest with you. Thanks to that, we're actually geared up to put some genuine work in at the moment!

The wording of the translation is © 2017 luminatranslations. First posted 27 March 2017. The full PDF version and documentation are available. 

The wording of the translation is © 2017 luminatranslations. First posted 27 March 2017. The full PDF version and documentation are available.

I wish I could say that this interview was manageable in most extents, but that’d be lying. LOUD 168 is one of my absolute favourite interviews, and maybe that played a part in it, but it was also an absolute pain to get right. Nothing in it was simple, not the interview, not the ad translation, not trying to pry apart illegible kanji... it was worth it, but believe me when I say that I was working for days on this, and that I needed all of that time to make this translation the best that I possibly could.

Well tell a lie. I was working on the translation a long time ago. I was just really lazy and didn’t get to it properly until recently, is all. 

[ Article source: (x) ]

Unfortunately, that is because I am not that good at Japanese.

I can link the above image without pixelation because 1) the article is freely online and 2) the parts relevant to the translation I’m talking about are not in that image. I don’t distribute scans or document versions of the original language text on this blog as a rule, and try to blur out as much as I can/reveal as little as possible, but: chances are, a lot of you already have seen the LOUD 168 scans a long time ago. (I did not work with those precise scanned images when it came to cleanup + translation, because those aren’t big enough to create legible PDFs - but attribution is attribution.)

But yes. Anyway, a lot of disclaiming aside, I’m not that good at Japanese. A huge hurdle in any hanzi-based language that I know is the fact that if I can’t read it, I can’t translate it - my Japanese simply isn’t good enough to figure things out from context unless I sit there with dictionary in hand, going through each kanji bit by bit. It’s very exhausting, and unfortunately this interview was chock full of those moments. A big part of why it took me so long to write out this translation and edit it was because, when I was working with only the above scans (because I had the illusion that I could just skim-read and jot down my notes, or something), I could flat out not read half of it.

That’s not pixelation. I just zoomed in on the A Cross the Universe ad from the above post and tried to make out the kanji. I face this problem all the time. What the hell is it? I don’t know, just looking at that image. I’m not good enough to figure things like that out by looking at small or scribbled text. Until I had the idea to start looking in archives and old ad copies of this film - because it did not appear to be a magazine-specific ad, the one given in LOUD 168 - I had no idea what to make of most of that text, and thus gave up.

(I finally found the online version, linked up there. HMV ad. Of course. The kanji is 撮影.)

What I’m trying to say is that a lot of mental gymnastics needed to be done simply to make this translation legible and accurate. I don’t get the choice to walk away from a kanji I don’t know, and I rightly shouldn’t; even if I have to search by radicals and scour every bit of joyo kanji for a likely fit, I need to find it and gather the correct meaning through any means possible. I claim days of work on this interview, and I must clarify that I’m counting this by the hours - I really must have spent 48+ pure hours working on this interview, a good chunk of which was devoted to pure comprehension. 

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. I was able to have some fun with the text while I was translating - they don’t actually mention A Cross the Universe by title all that much in this interview, at least not as much as I’ve mentioned it within square brackets in my translation. I attempted to make up to this by having a couple of relevant quotes reference back to the title.

The better translation is ‘... roaming the world’. I just couldn’t miss the opportunity, that was all.

Eheheheheheheh

That’s actually in the text, too. That’s not just me being silly. The nipple discourse is also word for word, pretty much. Why would I need to put in so much effort to be humourous when the masters of electro can do the job so much better eh

and of course it’s just the best feeling in the world when your translation length doesn’t fit

This happened a few times in this interview, though admittedly, not as often as I feared. The interview has such a weird layout that any mistake or under/over-writing would have affected the cross-shapes negatively later on.

A preview of the full title page. Originally the translation at the bottom was ‘Chosen By Our Top DJs’, but there was no way to make that fit.

Finding the right font for the surprisingly long ad was an art form on its own. I’m satisfied with the end product, but I do wish that it could have been a bit shorter - I don’t reckon there would have been a good way to do so, though, without compromising too much of the content. You make do.

I hope it doesn’t look so claustrophobic. Thankfully, my text was much more co-operative when it came to the actual interview. Forming the cross shape wasn’t as awful as I thought the task would be, having to resort to literally putting tape measures on my monitor aside.

And the preview of the full PDF!

That’s about all that needs writing down for the documentation. I’m honestly very exhausted after finishing this project, I think I’m going to go light for a while. There are some big projects I have in mind - Daft Punk Crossbeat 2001, Electro Book 2010, and so on - but for now, they can wait.

Next up is some good old Brodinski, I reckon. Thank you for reading this far, and for enjoying the translation! My readers make it all worthwhile. <3333