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Justice & Oizo | Bang your Ed
Hooligan disco” is a term Ed Banger’s head hool Pedro Winter likes to use to describe his label’s output, which has been dominating dancefloors for five years without wasting a lot of effort on decorum or political correctness. “If they were gay and had had a baby, I reckon I could be Rick Rubin and Timbaland’s son,” said the 33-year-old Parisian to the reporter from the English “Guardian.” But how Rubin and Timbaland could have an almost two-meter-tall, blond, lanky skater boy for a son—that would be something for genetic research to investigate. Ed Banger’s success, however, is empirically proven. The label’s most successful act is currently Justice, which hasn’t entirely reached the sales figures of Daft Punk at its height, but are superstar performers enough to—after only one album—up the ante with a film and accompanying live album. “A Cross The Universe,” the DVD/CD package with which Justice is now making more waves documents the two musician’s USA tour, where in April 2008 they had to carry their cross from the East to the West Coast. Another label release is the third LP by Mr. Oizo’s, who, thanks to his invention “Flat Eric”, the accompanying “Flat Beat” and an excessive Levi’s campaign in 1999 is also known to people who usually associate French music with Gainsbourg, electronic music with Kraftwerk and funk with Prince. But above all Oizo is the big outsider of French electronica whose 1999 album “Analog Worm Attack” transformed him into a highly respected producer-figure moving between techno, hip-hop and breakbeat and who has since shone with a very sparse output.
So-Me is a modest person, but Ed Banger’s art direction is under his wing, and it turns out to be more than just a graphic design job. So-Me gave Pedro the name Busy P and thinks: “Eighty percent of our artists could be turned into comic characters. That’s unusual because most electronic music labels actually only have nerds under contract. We have total characters on our label. Oizo is the crazy-sad type, but who can also have something of a serial killer about him. Sebastian is such a cool, unusual figure. Somehow DJ Mehdi has charisma, is a really charming guy, and Pedro rivals Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald.” The artworks by Ed Banger, a world between US graphic novel aesthetics and Pop Art, are concise and not lastly also ideally suited to be sold as T-shirts. Today, merchandise revenues are clearly more important than ever, but, like Pedro, So-Me is always rejecting master plans that aim for maximum profit. And if Ed Banger soon diversifies with its own clothing label (Cool Cats), then that’s something that just arose.
So-Me filmed “A Cross The Universe” together with Romain Gavras (director of the notorious Justice videoclip “Stress”). The film is digi-video pseudo verité, the experiences and encounters of the two cute Justice guys in America: There is the tour manager, a firearms nut who constantly draws his gun. There is the bus driver who would like to be in the “Guinness Book of World Records” for deepest human voice (“The record lies at 8 hertz. I think I can beat that”) and who does vocal exercises on country roads. There’s drinking, whores and at some point fighting. But most importantly every night they get to indulge their passion to perform. The mixture—hailed by critics as a combination of Metallica, Jay-Z, Beastie Boys, Jeff Mills, AC/DC, Run DMC, Guns’n’Roses, Mantronix, Jackson 5 and Public Enemy anno “Bring The Noise”—works just as fine in transatlantic areas. The secret lies in the right kind of teasing, sexual metaphors intended.
“Actually our music isn’t at all danceable. We start slowly. Then it gets heavy, and shortly before it’s about to explode, we stop everything, leaving only piano and voice. Time and again things are slowed down, material inserted, breaks too. That’s why we play our music live, because that’s how we can do things, and we also record it. If we DJ, it’s different,” says Xavier, the more chatty of the two. “Some people don’t like it that way, because they just want to dance,” adds Gaspard, who in the film and at a distance generally comes across as the inaccessible, unaffectionate, real cool ass, the ladies man who in person makes a rather shy impression and starts to stutter a bit. At the press conference before the interviews, voices could be heard complaining about the touring troop’s blatant moral decadence in the film. “You have various sides to your personality, and sometimes on tour we just really let go. We can get away with it because we aren’t always like that. Sometimes it’s a bit hardcore, but that’s not how we live in real life, otherwise it would get boring,” is how Xavier explains Gaspard’s brief marriage in Las Vegas, why he smashes a beer bottle over the head of a groupie’s aggressive, jealous boyfriend, pours hard liquor over drunk girls backstage and tries to set them on fire or sings Red Hot Chili Peppers songs to Anthony Kiedis in bad English. All things that you/we shouldn’t do at home. Because that’s what we have veritable rock stars like Gaspard and Xavier for, who let themselves be filmed doing stuff like that.
Pedro Winter doesn’t have a problem with his roles and the different sides of his personality, but agrees that he has to have many faces. “Yes of course. I like to be able to DJ in Tokyo one day then meet the Youtube boss the next day. Fun and business are things I like to play with. I am not into a conflictual dilema, I handle my two or three lifes well.” The man is manic but straight, he prefers leaving it to others to create the cacophony. He once described his concept of Ed Banger as a vision of Marshall amps that land on the dancefloor. He likes “mental music,” repetitive music, likes it when funk becomes trance and when his act Mr. Flash produces a track for Mos Def, “Yeah!” Because while the German hip-hop community increasingly takes Ed Banger’s metal-technoid sound as its reference, the French continue to have tremendous respect for the American original. Along different lines, this year a certain pop act did not earn that much respect. When Madonna wanted to have Justice remix her “4 Minutes” and invited the two to be a support act for her tour, Pedro Winter had to explain to her that the band had unfortunately turned down the offers. Gaspard doesn’t like the singer.
Mr. Oizo also doesn’t show a lot of respect—unless you talk about really great art. Pierre Henry’s “Apocalypse de Jean” (1968) for example, a three-hour electronic oratorio of the biblical revelation of John; or “Le chien andalou,” the surrealist film classic, which Buñuel made with Salvador Dali; or Miles Davis’ “drug phase” between “Bitches Brew” and “Big Fun.” Contrary to what one hears, Oizo is a very nice, normal interview partner. He enjoys discussing the concept behind the new album “Lambs Anger”: “There is no concept. I recorded the album like a monkey, without thinking about it. At some point I realized that everything I like in my discography was done very quickly. On my last record, I still worked on a 20-second-long beat for two weeks. This time everything went real fast. With music, it’s about energy and not intellectual stuff. Music has to be close to the animal side of things.” “Lambs Anger” is a megalomaniac concert for catalogue keyboards that’s bursting at the seams. The sound is cheaper and there are pre-programmed sounds paired with a talent for musical drama. Here, everything suits Ed Banger: Punk-plastic meets funkadelic invaders; there’s bass food for the suburbs; the “ordinateur” meets grand gesture, intentionally trashy acid, old school and self-references. All in all, a successful story.
There are many upcoming Ed Banger products to look forward to: Mr Oizo’s shortfilm to substitue any “Lambs Anger” video clips (“A dead medium I have no use for anymore”), Uffie’s album, should she ever get round to finish it, the new signing Mickey Moonlight (“a space disco genius”), a book with Belgian artist ERS, the Cool Cats fashion label, the Funkstörung-meets-Scooter-meets-hard-rock sound constellation which Sebastian’s first album will become, Busy P’s own album and the book about the record company. Mr. Winter, do you have a long-term masterplan for the label? „Of course, all is planned till 2004!“
Text > Dr. B.Lunt
