[Jeff Weiss boned up on his French and surveyed the scene at the South stage on

Saturday night:]

Justice’s Coachella

performance and subsequent Echoplex set have already passed into the stuff of legend.

Those who were there described it with a level of hyperbole akin to a Moses parting the

Red Sea armed with nothing but a pair of turntables and a crate full of old Daft Punk

LPs. Truth be told, conventional logic suggested that by mid-May, at least four Silver

Lake hipsters had perfected lustrous Gaspard Auge mustaches, purchased plane tickets to

France and sought employment at various Parisian boulangeries to support their

aspirations in the emerging Gallic techno scene.

So, perhaps it was these nearly insurmountable expectations that caused me to be

unimpressed with the red-hot Parisian techno duo’s Detour Festival performance.

Unadorned by any stage show accoutrements, the set consisted of little more than Auge

and his partner, Xavier de Rosnay, hovering over some turntables, rocking back and forth

and periodically pumping their fists. There was no stage banter (do they even speak

English?), no light show, not even a Girl Talk-esque wall of dancing bodies dotted with

random B-list celebs (I’m sure they were lurking around somewhere) [Editor’s note:

lawn].

Instead, one of the festival’s most anticipated acts turned in a ho-hum set, techno

jams that would’ve sounded at home during the brief rave boom of the late ’90s and the

occasional dirty Southern hip-hop track. As one person in the crowd put it, “Couldn’t we

just go home, put the record on shuffle and turn it up really loud.”

But it

wasn’t even that loud. You could carry on a normal conversation a mere 50 feet from the

stage. Yet that didn’t seem to trouble the swarm of garishly clad hipsters who turned

the City Hall South stage into a dancing neon mob of headbands and sweat. Word on the

street is that Justice’s Monday and Tuesday night performances will be much better, as

the duo trots out “the live set,” filled with allegedly dazzling background visuals. But

either way, the set was a detour from the popular mythology that Justice are going to

save the world, one glow stick at a time. 

||| Justice’s show Tuesday at the Music Box @ Fonda is sold out, but a

show Monday has been added.