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Music

We Interviewed Lunice from TNGHT

If you’ve ever heard music by TNGHT, aka the project of Glaswegian producer Hudson Mohawke and Canadian beat-thumper Lunice, you know it’s completely fucking insane.

If you’ve ever heard the music of TNGHT, aka the project of Glaswegian producer Hudson Mohawke and Canadian beat-thumper Lunice, you know how completely fucking insane it is. Imagine Waka Flocka’s rowdy mechanocrunk, but filtered through every movie about the future except for Blade Runner, with a dash of post-industrial wasteland thrown in, and that’s almost the sound of TNGHT. Words really can’t describe their self-titled EP, but 16 minutes can, because that’s how long the disc is. You have no excuse not to purchase it. I talked with Lunice on a Wednesday afternoon over Skype to discuss time zones, TNGHT itself, and the rapper Lil B (obviously).

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VICE: You’re in Canada, right?

Lunice: Exactly. Montreal. I just got done with some studio sessions in London, and doing some TNGHT shows. I’ve been back here for two or three days, and I’m headed out again in the morning.

How was your layover back home?

The whole “time zone” thing is pretty interesting. It’s gotten to a point where I just wake up when I need to wake up. It’s crazy nowadays. I just go by whatever time I need to get up. If there’s no time for me to get up, I’ll be sleeping for a while.

Not having a set sleep schedule is supposed to fuck with your brain, right?

Definitely. You’ll find me waking up when I’m back home at 6am. I don’t mind, it’s pretty cool. I’ll stay up til 3 AM and sleep until 6 AM, so I get a lot more stuff done. It definitely weirds me out in a way where I’ll get lost in time.

Tell me about the TNGHT shows with Hudson Mohwake.

I just got back from doing Sweden and Edinburgh, Scotland. Those were really crazy. Every show is always on point. It’s no stress, we know what we’re doing, and we’ve both got our own roles in terms of presentation of the music, and we go from there. When it’s showtime, we just go from there.

What are the roles that you take live?

It’s pretty collaborative. We do have a setlist I’d say, but it’s composed of our original work. It’s a good mix, we’ve got chopped up parts from original work we’ve done, and we’ve got full songs of ours we’ll play.

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Tell me about how the TNGHT project coalesced.

We thought about working together last winter, but the first idea I had to work with him was when I heard Hudson Mohwake’s remix of Gucci Mane’s “Party Animals.” I was like, “Yo! This is the first ghetto-ass track HudMo ever did! This is straight-ass rap shit.” I hit him up straight after that, and I was like, “Dude! We should do a straightforward rap collaboration.” We’ve all started to get interested in the theatrical side of rap music. Like Maybach Music Group, you look at them, and it’s like a big-budget movie. We wanted to do that, but from a technical side. We ended up not doing anything until spring of this year when I had a few days in London in the studio with him. He was working on a song and I was just chillin’, and the next thing you know we had like three or four rough drafts built up in a night. The next day we finished up three songs, and those three songs are on the record. It just clicked, and we kept going.

People are freaking out about the EP.

Yeah, man. We showed it to our friends and the whole response was like, “Wow! You need to put this out!” So we put out a record to establish our idea to the masses. I love the project because we consider it as a project. We don’t consider ourselves as a duo, more like individual artists who have come together to really collaborate on a project. It’s just two dudes working on songs and then presenting it. When we do shows, it’s as TNGHT, but also we’re showing people what we’ve created.

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Have rappers been hitting you up about making them beats?

Definitely. The only name I can really mention is Waka Flocka. They approached us about doing the “Rooster in My Rari” remix to be part of the whole package of the single. The rest is the kind of thing where until we actually hear a recorded verse we’ve got to keep it on the low. But it’s pretty cool. We never thought we’d be at the point where we had to keep anything on the low.

Hudson Mohawke contributed something called “additional instrumentation” on Kanye’s “Mercy.” What does that mean exactly?

It’s like, he had an involvement in the song in terms of adding an idea for the track. He hasn’t told me which part he did, but he added something to it.

In your Boiler Room remix, you paused the mix to teach the audience to do Lil B’s cooking dance. How did that go over?

That was last year, I think. I was on a mission, man. The cooking dance is a great way to connect with people. It definitely went well. I’ve taught cooking in Poland… a lot of spots, man.

So you’re big into Lil B?

Lil B’s the man. He’s dope.

@drewmillard