London-area duo AlunaGeorge (producer George Reid and singer Aluna Francis).

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Pitchfork.com

Interview

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It's a story you're plenty familiar with by now: Two friends start messing around on a MacBook in a bedroom, discover they can make music that actually sounds halfway professional, and gain a small online following. Even so, it's an unexpected tale coming from the 24-year-olds in London-area duo AlunaGeorge-- producer George Reid and singer Aluna Francis-- whose aimless fiddling somehow resulted in a remarkably slick hybrid of radio-ready 90s R&B vocal melodies and experimental production that tends toward the wobbly loops coming out of Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder camp.

After uploading a scattered handful of one-off tracks and an ultra-polished video for crystalline-funk single "You Know You Like It" to their YouTube last year, Reid and Francis release their first official three-track EP, also dubbed You Know You Like It, digitally via Tri Angle.

We recently called the duo in their London studio, where they're prepping a debut full-length.

Pitchfork: How did you two originally come together?

Aluna Francis: We met on Myspace when it was still a useful tool for musicians. George got in touch with my old band [My Toys Like Me]-- it was left-field electronic, weird, quirky stuff-- and we asked him to do a remix. Then we met up and started writing to see how we got on.

Before that, I worked so many jobs. One of the big ones was basically foot rubbing. It's called reflexology-- if you press certain points on your feet, it makes you really relaxed. My mum always said I had really good hands; she'd ask me to give her a massage. I needed to give as much time to music as possible, so I needed a flexible type of job, too. But it wasn't a particularly good backup plan because reflexology is not very popular.

Pitchfork: A lot of people are nostalgic for radio R&B from the 90s and early 00s nowadays. Is that something that influenced you?

AF: You can't really help it.

George Reid: You grow up listening to it.

AF: I had a big rejection of R&B for quite a long while, so when I started working for George, I was still trying to be something else. But it was so ingrained in me that our music ended up sounding quite R&B without meaning to.

GR: I've listened to a lot of Timbaland and the Neptunes. The production on some of the big R&B tracks over the last decade or two is amazing. At one point, people weren't being so afraid to do something a bit weird.

AF: But if I was quite consciously looking for inspirations, I'd be more inclined to listen to the Knife or CocoRosie or maybe PJ Harvey, more caricatured voices-- it gives you a lot more space to experiment and feel more like yourself when you're singing. If you try to go straight for R&B, it's easy to fall into some traps.

Pitchfork: Your song "Disobey" was featured in the show "Skins". How'd that come about? Did you see any money from it?

GR: Aluna was with an old publishing company from a previous band, and they put us on the U.S. "Skins" before we'd even released anything ourselves. It ended up as background music in a scene where someone was... having a good time with themselves. Then, recently, it was in the UK "Skins", too. And that scene, again, was people getting down.

AF: I don't know how it works in the U.S., but in the UK any artist can sign up for PRS [Performing Right Society], and they just collect your royalties for you. But we've never seen any money from the "Skins" appearance.

Pitchfork: The song "Put Up Your Hands" on the new EP makes a lot of references to unread emails and messages. What's it about?

AF: I have the worst inbox in the world, it's got over 3000 unread emails. Basically, I had over 100 emails from this guy that was I was trying to get out of a situation with. He sent me so many long, long, long emails, and I'd never even read them. I thought it was kind of weird. Most of them were him trying to win an argument he'd already lost.

Love this song. And the video. Didn't realize the back-up dancers were the singer until watching it the second go-round.

The other two songs on their EP are just as good as this one.