We put the duo head to head to chat about their schoolboy days and modern hip hop as they release the sounds from their collaborative project
Joining forces for a blaring collaboration to be reckoned with, Hudson Mohawke and Lunice aka TNGHT, have brought together their signature full frontal sounds for an addictive debut EP on Warp and LuckyMe including their epic track, 'Bugg'n' featuring 'the baby cry', ominous bell chimes and of course, heavy, heavy bass. Here they go head to head and chat to us about fights at school, DJ Paul BBQ sauce, and how they dodged the bullet that was 'LuMo / Hunice'...
Lunice: HudMo, what kind of dude were you back in high school, were you a backpacker or like a weird hippie type?
Hudson Mohawke: I was like a Happy Hardcore guy...
Lunice: Okay, I didn’t know that, that’s cool.. Did you hate people in high school? Did people look at you weird? Were you the only dude listening to that type of stuff in high school?
Hudson Mohawke: Not really... I mean it was fucking Scotland... Everybody was like, well not loads of people but enough people would... and I used to like DJ at school discos and stuff like that...
Lunice: Did you ever try to punch a dude in class? Did you ever try and fight a dude in class for being a bitch? ‘Cause I know I did!
Hudson Mohawke: I was only ever in one fight in the whole time I was in school. I wasn’t really like out there punching people in the throat everyday. I did get in a fight with this one guy and then the week after that I found out that he got E. Coli, during the whole E. Coli scare... [laughs] I was a big guy in school as well you know what I mean, I would have flattened him... and then he was all like in intensive care... How about you?
Lunice: I was like a backpacker ass motherfucker, kinda like a safari hat and a skateboard, and I put in these two speakers in my backpack and I had a CD player with like Busta Rhymes on it and skate around town just like blasting it, and people would hate that shit because they were into Sean Paul and shit... I remember running the radio station at school, it was me, my homie Kevin and we were so happy to finally have that radio station. And we'd play like... we went crazy man, we were just rocking MF Doom, Madlib all that shit, and we’d ALWAYS get complaints man. I remember fighting with bitches all the time, they’d always come up the booth and be like ‘what the fuck are you playing?’ and I’m like ‘shut the fuck up, we’ll play what the fuck we want!’, like slam the door in their faces and high-five my homie. I hated high school for real though, I love my homies but the whole concept of high school is bullshit to me... erm yeah, high school’s wack. Right, ok, what’s the fastest meal you can do if you’re lazy? Like I’m fucking starving but I’m too lazy to make anything, what’s the go-to food that saves your life?
Hudson Mohawke: Recently it’s DJ Paul’s barbecue seasoning. The guy from Three 6 Mafia has got his own line of seasoning... some of that, throw it on some chicken. Done.
Lunice: Shout out DJ Paul for that. Me? I just order man, I just order fast food, that’s it. I’m too lazy I just order it up man. My favourite thing to do is to order chicken wings with my card, order online, and just get it, that’s the best fucking feeling. You work, work, work and you’re like oh I’m starving, but I’m too lazy to do anything, just go on like Dominos.com and order that shit up and just wait, ding-dong, oh shit, that like, that blew my mind because that’s high-tech, like.
What’s the best thing you’ve seen on YouTube recently?
Lunice: When black girls like, straight up fall off tables and shit, from like dancing and twerking, [laughs] I love that shit so much. I love it when black girls just fall off tables yo. I ain’t hating on them, I ain't dissing 'em... Or the most fucked up shit I've seen is young girls posting up videos like, 'am I ugly?'... like really? Damn.
Hudson Mohawke: How do you end up watching that?
Lunice: I dunno how I cross these things! Like one minute you're watching cats and then... you could be watching like, a guy tying on a tie - I've done that. And then you're watching babies, and then you're watching girls like 'am I ugly? Leave a comment'...
Were there any discrepancies between how well you'd work on paper as opposed to real life?
Hudson Mohawke: I think it's the other way round, we'd just fuck around, not for it to be a serious thing really or to have intentions to release it, because both of us have done quite a lot of collaborations before... it’s like you collaborate with a lot of people, but it’s not necessarily going to be a great click, whereas I think both of us somehow managed to click straight away and not get too caught up in it, we’ve both just kept it moving.
What’s interesting about this project too is that if we tried the collab a year or two ago, I don’t think it would have worked, it wouldn’t have vibed right. For some reason now it vibes right because I think we’ve both been on a thing where we’re just making our beats a lot more simple, and you know it’s mostly about challenging ourselves, seeing what can we come up with with just a few layers, like how big of a track can we make with just this? But, like a few years ago we were just mostly like experimenting with electronic sounds and rap music and just making like weird stuff...
What's been the best thing for you each to work with each other?
Lunice: Working together sort of enables us to really make big songs without thinking about it too much. Or do stuff we wouldn’t necessarily make each on our own.. Yeah... because then we’d be thinking too much in terms of, okay I’ve got to make a huge tune or something, and a lot of hits that you hear in the rap world in the States are produced by more than one dude all the time, and even Hit-Boy, or Lex Luger had somebody else add something to make it more tight. So, that’s what's cool about this project, it’s like double the power in terms of the tunes, and it seems to come off pretty good.
What do you think is the most exciting thing about modern rap today?
Lunice: Today? Like, um... US!... period. Man, about modern rap today, what I’m loving is that... I’m this dude that comes from like listening to a lot of old Memphis tapes from like 1990 to like 1996/7 and those are like old DJ Paul, Lady B, all those kind of people, but what a lot of dudes my age are on to that sound but more modern version, for example A$AP Rocky, Spaceghostpurrp, Lil Ugly Mane...
That guy has the best name ever.
Lunice: I know haha... like all these dudes man, they’re like totally all on that Memphis shit, which is the shit I’ve been listening to for so long, and to see dudes my age just making a more modernised version of it, it's just like mad hype because I’m all about that. And now there’s homies of mine in Montreal like Tommy Cruise, and he killed that shit man, because it was so weird and lo-fi, it wasn’t like the usual type of rap stuff you listen to. And also, more and more, they’re starting to have like more rappers onto the Golden Age type thing, and there’s Joey Badass who’s killing it right now, Young Gully - he’s really dope too... Recently, Dom showed me this other rapper from Brooklyn, called Ka, he’s so dope too, on like a Raekwon type of thing. So that's really exciting...
TNGHT's 5-track EP will be released on vinyl and digitally on July 23rd via Warp Records and LuckyMe Records
