Photos by Christina Kernohan

When producers Lunice and Hudson Mohawke made their live debut as TNGHT at this year's SXSW, their minimalist hip-hop blasts were forceful enough to shake intestines, rumble brains, shatter glass. Like, really. After their Four Loko-fueled set ended and everyone cleared out, the immense garage door above the auto body shop-turned-venue was rolled down-- and shards of glass from the cracked door rained down to the floor. As it happens, the final track on duo's self-titled debut EP (out July 24 on Warp/LuckyMe) prominently features a glass-bashing hit. TNGHT break things. They can't help it.

The pair originally met in 2008, when Lunice booked the Glasgow-based HudMo (aka Ross Birchard) at one of his Turbo Crunk party nights in Montreal. Then, after a few years of solo success-- and with both looking to pare down their respective kitchen-sink sounds-- they got together for a few days in a London studio last year. The resulting EP boasts some of the most progressive (and aggressive) hip-hop instrumentals of recent times, somewhere between Timbaland's dumb-out heyday and Lex Luger's fight-music manifestos.

In our conference call interview, both Lunice and Birchard stress that their individual solo careers are still paramount-- each one is readying a new album for release later this year-- and that they view TNGHT as more of a rap-production outfit. Indeed, there are already MCs lining up to rhyme on the EP's beats. And their forward-thinking styles have already caught the attention of Diplo (who is currently working on a project with Lunice) and Kanye West (who enlisted Birchard for a few recent studio sessions)-- one listen to TNGHT, and it's easy to see why. Check out an EP sampler and our interview, below:

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Pitchfork: How did this collaboration originally come about?

Lunice: We were both at a point where we wanted to simplify our production. I used to be all over the place, trying to push how weird I could get, but the more I continued, the more I wanted to compress and refine my style to a point of, like, "What if I just made a song out of one snare?" It's natural: After you've been experimenting, you calm down. It's kind of like how, in the jazz era, Dizzy Gillespie was the type of player who was really fast, and Miles Davis was the dude who was like, "This guy's dope, but I want to make something cool where I just hit a few notes." That idea goes from generation to generation.

Meanwhile, Ross was starting to make really simple, huge, stabbing productions-- I approached him after I heard that amazing Gucci Mane ["Party Animal"] remix he did, sent him some new songs, and he was like, "Yeah, we should do something."

Hudson Mohawke: You say that all the time, but it rarely works out. I've done loads of collaborations and I'm never totally happy with the outcome because it feels like you're compromising something of yourself in it. But this was a proper click. We never aimed to release a record together, we just bought quite a few bottles of whiskey and did the whole EP in a couple nights at this tiny, cupboard-sized studio off Oxford Street in London.

Pitchfork: Why did this collaboration work more than others?

HM: I think it was the really cheap supermarket whiskey Lunice bought.

L: I didn't know the brand! My bad, man. [laughs]

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Pitchfork: Listening to these beats, you can't help but think of people rapping over them. Are you guys interested in that?

L: We're bringing this straight to the rap game.

HM: Obviously, I'm really into mainstream rap and R&B, but I never saw myself as intertwined in that world. But now we're in a situation where we might as well just go for it ourselves rather than releasing records from our own little world and having mainstream pop and rap producers ripping all our shit off. [laughs] Pretty much all the tracks on the EP are placed with MCs; most of them are gonna have MCs on them at some point, though we can't talk about who those people are at the moment.

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Pitchfork: Ross, you worked on the new Kanye West single "Mercy" right?

HM: Yeah. We did a couple of sessions together, and I did the end theme song for his film [Cruel Summer]. And he used a [non-EP] TNGHT track for his fashion show as well. Hopefully, we're gonna do a bunch more, but I'm not certain about it.

Pitchfork: What was it like working with him?

HM: Whenever we've met, it was in a quite subdued studio environment, where you can actually speak, so he seemed to be a pretty normal guy, really. I was expecting to meet a complete maniac. I'm probably saying too much here already. [laughs]

Pitchfork: What did it take for you to make that jump from just listening to the radio to trying to be a part of that world?

HM: I've always had it in my head that I was this guy who was working in a tiny studio on a PC with cracked software in Scotland, and all the major stuff was in huge, enormous studios with the best equipment. But once you dip your toes into that world, you realize that most of the stuff that's on the Billboard chart is being made on a cracked copy of Fruity Loops on some laptop. I realized they're doing the same thing I've been doing for the past six years.

L: You'll see big producers on YouTube, and think, "Oh, they work on that?" Like, right now, Lex Luger is chilling on his laptop, killing the game.

Lunice: Stacker Upper EP Sampler (via SoundCloud)

Pitchfork: Now that you have access to more professional studios, would you say there are advantages to those setups?

HM: There are huge advantages, if you know how to go about it. And, if you don't, then you can get somebody else to do it for you. If you come up with the original idea on your laptop, anything else is an embellishment of that idea. It's nice to have the option to mix inside a big studio, but at the end of the day, it comes from an original spark, which often happens while sitting on the couch.

Catch TNGHT at London's Village Underground on July 21.