Genesis

The device

Second track on †, appearing immediately after the album opens (position 1 on the record — some sources invert the order). Produced by Justice (Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay) on Ed Banger Records / Because Music. Released in 2007 in the album version; an official audio version is available on YouTube (ID: VKzWLUQizz8). Duration: 3’54”. No outside collaborators, no voice whatsoever. The recording is entirely instrumental.

The title Genesis is a statement of programme: in Hebrew, in Greek and in the Christian tradition, Genesis denotes the origin, the beginning. Placing this title at the opening of an album called † (the cross, a universal religious symbol) is not accidental — Justice constructs a deliberately heavy-laden iconography of sacred references, without being a religious band. The sacred is an aesthetic material, not a belief.

Structure of the track

Genesis has no pop structure (no verse, no chorus). Its form is closer to the baroque toccata — a continuous development without strict repetition, ascending progressively without resolving in a final cadence. The track develops a single musical idea, enlarged and densified until its disappearance.

Structural stages identifiable on listening:

• 0’00”–0’30”: harpsichord intro alone, melody exposed
• 0’30”–1’00”: bass entry (low, progressive, minimal saturation yet)
• 1’00”–1’40”: kick and percussion entry, spectrum densification
• 1’40”–2’45”: plateau — all layers simultaneously, synthesisers filling the mids
• 2’45”–3’30”: thickening — progressive saturation, rising pressure
• 3’30”–3’54”: progressive extinction, return to silence

The process — the saturated harpsichord

The harpsichord is a keyboard instrument with plucked strings, used primarily from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Its timbre is crystalline, percussive, without dynamics (unlike the piano, one cannot play loudly or softly — the key always delivers the same volume). It is not amplified in its original use.

Justice takes this instrument and applies light saturation — a low-intensity overdrive or distortion effect that rounds the attacks and adds harmonics in the mid-high range. The result is a sound simultaneously recognisable as a harpsichord (the crystalline timbre remains audible) and contemporary (the saturation gives it a slightly aggressive character). This is the same logic as the rock-electro fusion: take an element from one register (the baroque) and subject it to a sonic treatment from another (electronic distortion) to create a hybrid belonging to neither.

This process is structurally identical to what baroque composers did with style borrowing: Bach quoted Buxtehude, Vivaldi quoted Corelli — not to imitate but to transform. Justice quotes the baroque harpsichord not to evoke the seventeenth century but to extract a sonic texture usable in the twenty-first-century club.

The arrangement

The bass in Genesis is the second striking element. It enters progressively, low, in the 60–80 Hz register — the physical register, felt in the body before heard by the ears. This bass is slightly saturated — not as much as in Phantom or Stress, but enough to create a tension with the pure harpsichord of the intro. The juxtaposition of crystalline-harpsichord + saturated-bass is the central tension of the track, its main sonic argument.

The kick enters progressively, reinforcing the rhythmic pulse without ever dominating — in Genesis, the kick serves the harmonic development, not the reverse. This is a notable inversion relative to much electronic music, where the kick is the primary structural vehicle.

Lineage and resonances

Upstream: the baroque toccata lineage is the most direct — Bach’s toccatas (BWV 565 for organ, for instance) develop a musical idea over a short duration without strict repetition, in a continuous ascent. Genesis reprises this structural logic in an electronic context. Closer in time: the long instrumental introductions of 1970s krautrock (Neu!, Can) — pop-structure-free developments, by progressive accumulation.

Downstream: †‘s instrumental opening with Genesis influenced a mode of album introduction that several electronic artists would adopt after 2007: beginning not with an obvious single but with an instrumental declaration of principle. The harpsichord/saturated-bass tension, specific to Genesis, is not directly reprised elsewhere — it remains a Justice singularity. The logic of continuous development without pop structure, however, becomes a marker of the “post-dance” genre of the 2010s (Four Tet, Jon Hopkins).

Reading in light of the permanences

Permanence 1 — Saturated rock as dance music: in Genesis, saturation is present but discreet — it is the most sublimated version of the permanence. The saturated bass and four-on-the-floor kick are there, but they do not dominate. What Genesis shows about this permanence: it can function even at low intensity, even when the baroque harpsichord and toccata development occupy the foreground. The rock-electro fusion does not require violence to be present.

Permanence 2 — Classical-baroque citation as raw material: Genesis is the most direct and most bare expression of this permanence in the Justice catalogue. The harpsichord is not one layer among many — it is the lead instrument, carrying the exposed melody from the very first seconds. The title Genesis, the toccata structure, the harpsichord: everything refers to a classical Western musical vocabulary used as raw construction material, without ironic mediation. It is the technical manifesto of the second permanence.

Why Genesis opens †: because it announces the rules of the record before anything else is said. Before D.A.N.C.E., before Phantom, before Stress — Genesis says: here is our grammar. The saturated harpsichord and the rising bass are the Justice grammar. Everything that follows is application.

Critique + listening — no official score published; structure identified by direct aural analysis. Baroque-toccata references from comparative analysis, unconfirmed by interviews. Krautrock lineage from generational context.