TNGHT are right here, right now

Even if we may not have realised it until the release of their new track ‘Serpent’ in September, we’re all in dire need of TNGHT. While contemporary producers stand accused of over-conceptualisation and humourless comments sections are shut down, TNGHT hammer out tracks instinctively in slapstick jam sessions. They even insist that they’ve never verbally conceived an idea together. “It’s never done with a notion of setting out to make a particular thing,” says HudMo.

The pair got together again after HudMo invited Lunice to come and stay at his new place in LA earlier this year. Lunice flew over without telling his manager or agent. The two of them began messing around in the studio at the back of the house, trying out some ambient sounds on HudMo’s new Mellotron keyboard, among other things. HudMo then left to get something from the house. When he got back, Lunice played him a melody that he’d just come up with. 

HudMo suggested that they record it. He then added some drums, which Lunice liked: “I was just wiling out, screaming,” he remembers. “He was like ‘Let’s record that, too’.” They recorded Lunice wiling out, screaming, ad-libbing vocals. Such a din was forming that it woke the neighbours’ dog, who started barking at them. Lunice barked back. Soon the two of them were pissing themselves laughing. The resulting track — barking, laughing, and all — was ‘Serpent.’

Both of them still compile their tracks on FL Studio, the production software formerly known as Fruity Loops. Lunice started making music in the mid ’00s after reading about Fruity Loops in an interview with 9th Wonder, who famously used the software in making his unofficial Nas remix album, ‘God’s Stepson’. “In some sense people do have the impression of it being this fucking toy programme,” says HudMo. “But at the same time, you’ve got these fucking highly decorated producers who are like, ‘Ah fuck, can you teach me Fruity Loops?’ Because it’s such an immediate, direct way of getting ideas down.

“But to be totally honest, I always find it’s never that fucking interesting to read about, like, a gear list,” continues HudMo, “because, ultimately, you could probably do any of this shit with any gear. It’s not like you could only do this with a certain piece of gear, ‘this synth and that synth’.” The pair say they’re good at stopping each other from obsessing over minor components in a track, or spending hours working on a kick drum. Has electronic music become fixated on the minutiae, too — to use a popular buzzword — chinstroke-y? 

“That’s a very loaded question!” HudMo laughs. “I don’t want to give any quotables on that.” He won’t be drawn into “mad shit-talking mode,” but points out that, when TNGHT started, many of the DJs booked alongside them would play music they liked regardless of genre or BPM, whereas now those same names seem largely confined to house and techno. “I'm curious to see how that works,” he says. “Us going back into those kinds of shows, where audiences are so conditioned into purely house and techno. But in a sense it’s almost like a challenge.” “Yeah, it will be pretty fun,” grins Lunice.

Fun seems to permeate their recording process. “It’s very much randomly painting a canvas,” says HudMo, “and then going back to whittle it down to a final form. It’s not like ‘Oh now we've done drums, now we need this element, now this element’.” 

“Oh yeah we’ve never said that,” Lunice jumps in. “Never. At most we’ll just say ‘Yeah’, ‘Nah’, or a grunt, or a nod, or a giggle. Especially if we start giggling at something then we put that sound in the bank. We don't even think about where it’s going.” 

HudMo bounces off Lunice — “It’s a feel thing rather than ‘Hmm, let’s think, where does this necessarily sit?’. It’s not a vocal discussion” — and Lunice bounces off him. “That just made me think of the Blue Man Group for some reason.” They both laugh loudly. “The way they just look at each other, it sort of feels like that, I swear!” 

Making each other laugh has always seemed like a primary concern for these two. In fact, part of the reason for their hiatus was that they were almost getting on too well. “When we took a break from the first project, not that anything happened,” says HudMo. “But we didn't really speak for a while, just because we’d been on the road together for a long time and were like ‘Right, let’s just do our own shit’.” 

After ‘TNGHT’ blew up, picked up by rap, techno, and EDM DJs alike, they were on the brink of superstardom. But they were wary of the project eclipsing their own solo careers, which — as they often stress — have always been their priority. “We’re trying to make everyone know that it’s me and Hudson Mohawke,” says Lunice. “It’s not a duo.” With that in mind, they put TNGHT on ice in 2013, ignoring the encouragement of their agents, managers, and baying fans. 

Catering to the masses might also have meant limiting their sound — and essentially becoming an EDM act, something they never wanted to be. “You might make a bunch of money short term,” says HudMo, “but you’re sacrificing your own creative freedom.” 

More than simply turning away from EDM, you’d be forgiven for thinking that TNGHT have one eye on poking fun at the genre. In 2018, HudMo produced a track for DJ 5olitary, a fictional character in Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy series ‘This Is America’. A cacophony of drum-stomps, clattering keys, and salacious vocal samples, ‘Cell-by-date’ was by all accounts an EDM parody. It also sounded more like a TNGHT track than anything else in HudMo’s solo catalogue. ‘Club Finger,’ from the new EP, makes a similar racket out of a slicing trance riff and a few giddy vocal snippets, albeit with fewer expletives. Is TNGHT in some way satirising EDM?