The French Touch: Justice’s Management Talks Band’s Mind-Blowing Light Show

Jet Management’s Tyler Goldberg and John Scholz won’t say much about how they came to manage French electronic superstars Justice back in 2017. The two Americans mention just a few brief highlights, including a phone call on a Monday morning, a stolen golf cart and a bottle of tequila. Before either of them knew it, they were on a plane to Paris.

Few electronic artists are as critically acclaimed as the duo Justice, consisting of Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay. They stand in league with very few peers, the majority of whom also hail from France and broke ground in the scene decades ago. They don’t tour frequently, taking several years off between records. But, when they’re on the road, everyone is dying to go and many will go out of their way to catch multiple sets. The shows themselves keep other artists on their toes, setting the precedent for what the next few years of the genre will look like.

“John and I always preach that we want to work with artists who have a very distinctive vision, who want to push boundaries and are ambitious both musically and touring-wise with the shows they want to build and present to the world,” Goldberg says.

“We are just such big fans of those guys and they inspired us to fall in love with electronic music. So when the guys voiced their interest in working with us, it was a no-brainer. Those are the kind of opportunities you dream of, going into this business,” Goldberg adds. “We had started working at C3 Management at the time, we only managed a couple of smaller artists — it was a career-changing opportunity.”

The current touring cycle started a year prior to Justice’s 2024 Coachella performance, which kicked off their new show supporting their album Hyperdrama. They sat down with their lighting designer, Vincent Lérisson, and their production manager who had been float-

ing around the idea of a light show since the pandemic started and shut down touring. The concept took three or four years to come up with and troubleshoot, but the final result was one of the most stunning productions in electronic music. With today’s live shows so often centralizing on visuals (which has gotten even more apparent with the creation of Sphere), Justice’s decision to forgo them completely was an especially bold choice. The result was an impressive light show that features several displays moving up and down throughout their performance.

“When they started working on the new album, they started working their way towards a new cycle,” Scholz says. “The live show is in the back of their heads as part of the conversation the entire time. There were a number of big planning meetings even a year or two before we really got rolling where we were plotting out where the tour was going to be, what the targets were going to be and what potential timelines would be, all of them depending on when the creative was going to be ready. We even had multiple tours routed and we rerouted them. The planning phase for this we’ve been anticipating for a number of years.”

Scholz adds, “One thing that doesn’t get spoken enough is every time the guys build
a live show, they’re making an entirely new album. They’re remixing their own songs, creating new versions of their own songs, piecing together their entire catalog. It’s a massive undertaking that’s very time-consuming and very detail-oriented.”

The current show isn’t programmed or on rails, as Lérisson is the one who performs with the guys behind the control board every night.

Goldberg and Scholz emphasize the same show will never take place twice, with every aspect happening live each night. The whole team has been working together for quite some time, with management deciphering how to let this tour be as ambitious as the creative team wanted it to be.

“How do we cultivate the business and environment around them so they can have an uncompromised vision and really go
for it?” Goldberg says. “They can have an uncompromised vision and we can pave the path financially and creatively to put the tour together. That’s where we’ve added the most brain power into the equation.”

Justice performed several festival dates ( including Coachella and Montrose Music Festival in Europe) before officially kicking off their latest tour at Brooklyn Storehouse in Brooklyn, New York, July 25-26.

“They played 20-some odd shows thus
far across the world on this tour,” Goldberg says as he spoke with Pollstar shortly after
the New York dates. “There were only three at the time, after the second New York show, that the whole team determined were perfect, technically, with everyone hitting their cues. The live elements the guys were playing happened perfectly. The sound was exceptional.”

Building out Justice’s new show takes time and varies from venue to venue. The team flags challenges in advance if they realize setting up the light show will take extra time, and they do their best to get in on the first night of festival performances so they can have more time to build out the stage and allow them an extra day to load-in and soundcheck. They also need to ensure they have clearance for the set-up, and they’ve run into challenges with load-bearing and horizontal clearance. They’re bringing in 23 tons of lighting equipment for each date, so the stages need to be sturdy enough to handle it all.

Following a few festival appearances, Justice’s tour continues with North American dates booked throughout October. In December, the duo heads to Europe. Goldberg and Scholz say they’re most looking forward to Justice’s Oct. 4 show at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles — a milestone for the band and team.