How long are you home now?
Well, um, I'm going tomorrow actually. We're playing Glastonbury.

Have you played Glastonbury before?
We did. It was so shit.

We doubt that.
No, we just played the worst gig of our lives. Ever. It was terrible and I was really ill and we had 15 minutes to play and our keyboard broke, which is maybe two thirds of the sound. Yeah, it was a horrible, terrible performance, and I feel sorry for anyone who was there.

So are you looking forward to it being different this year?
Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, we'll see.

Do you have a lot of festivals on your tour this summer?
Yeah, we do have a few. We just did Sonar in Barcelona, which was exciting for us. We had a great time. Amazing bands played and there were lots of DJs. Really interesting and diverse program.

Who were you excited to see?
Unfortunately I missed Omar Souleyman, which sounded really interesting and Konono No 1. I saw Fever Ray which was amazing, Bass Clef we saw, Joker, a Dutch guy who DJed at Bristol, Grace Jones a bit... It was a really cool festival.

So which do you prefer, playing festivals or playing smaller shows?
I don't know, doing this professionally, you don't have to have a preference. The good thing about festivals is you get to see a lot of bands.

It seems like summer music festivals are a much bigger deal in the UK than in the US.
You have spring break right?

Yeah, but not really a music thing.
Oh, okay.

Your parents are both musicians. What do they play?
They're classical musicians, they play piano and cello.

So you were studying classical music from a pretty young age, right?
Yeah, I started playing when I was really young. I was failing all of the other subjects.

Did they care when you failed all the other subjects?
They cared because it means it's not easy to get ahead in life if you don't have all those grades. My education was always in classical music. I went to a performing arts school. It wasn't very diverse, which is a bit of a shame, really. Then I got into collecting records and interested in electronic music when I was a teenager. At my school, there was a computer with programming software and I just got completely addicted to it.

Did you take classes, or just teach yourself?
At that stage, I just got on with it myself. It's really the best way to learn that kind of thing. When it comes to composition learning about it just facilitates you to be more articulate and more refined in the skill, but there's something really good about figuring it out yourself. I started listening to like dance music and stuff and hip-hop. I was listening and trying stuff out.

As a teenager in London, did you go to a lot of clubs?
We went to Plastic People, it was a club where producers could just take their sketches and songs and play them. It was a supportive environment with a really, really nice sound system and really cool music. People were friendly, but we were so young. We weren't meant to be there anyway. I also started listening to grime then. When I heard it, I was quite far away from its development, it was so fresh and it was British, you know?

What is grime really? Can you explain it for all of us Americans?
It's quite...the start of it uses a lot of old school hip-hop references. It sped up and a kind of slum funky house sort of thing. Grime is more of a UK hip-hop thing, more about fan culture.

What attracted you to grime and dance music?
I guess, to me, it was sort of explaining this side of us that I didn't grow up with. I don't know, it's the same reason I love hip-hop: it's collectable, it's fast-moving. You know, it's not about love songs. The style of it is really heavy, it's really exciting, I can't explain. It just has real attitude to it.

When you compose your own music,
how much of your classical
education do you use?
I don't know I mean, I guess, I was quite
shit at all the theory stuff anyway, It
wasn't something that I tried to do, I
wasn't actively using skills that I
learned. It was just taste.

When did you start making your own instruments?
About two years ago. It was more of an experiment. It was just enjoyable to think up something and actually get on with doing it. Really satisfying.

What were some of the first instruments that you made?
I've only made two, but they are the ones we still use. One's built from a CD rack, uses guitar pick-ups and it's got a paddle that plucks a series of strings, kind of like a hurdy gurdy. And it's got different things you can do with it. I'm still working it out. You play with a piece of metal with thimbles on your fingers. It sounds really hectic. Raisha in my band plays it, she also plays the chu, too, she's a really fast learner. She can kind of just play anything you give to her.

How did you meet your band?
We all went to a concert together, yeah I wanted to start a band and Marc and Raisha sort of just happened. It was pretty simple, it was really fun, our first few rehearsals were just so fun. We were really into it, and now we are a professional band, pretty much.