Our chat with Anna Lunoe

The girl is killing it.

International DJ/vocalist Anna Lunoe is killing it at the moment. Her impressive resume includes sets at Coachella, Lolapalooza and Electric Forest, work with the likes of Flume, Touch Sensitive and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and she is the woman behind runway beats for fashion heavyweights Prada, Sass & Bide, Hugo Boss, Chanel and Louis Vuitton. 

An Aussie expat now living it up in LA, she is seriously making her mark on the music world. We talked sneakers, making music for models and how there’s no such thing as genres.

So your ‘All out EP’ hit Top 5 on iTunes Dance chart. That must be exciting…

Yeah. It was my first major American label release, and its just a whole different experience over there you know? There’s no triple j, there’s no alternative radio station, so your impact in the marketplace is really hard to read. To make Top 5 on iTunes was such an exciting achievement. 

You go through so many different genres, could you ever pick a favourite? 

I mean the idea of genre just doesn’t exist in my head. I don’t think I could choose, because that’s like saying one song you could choose for the rest of your life. The idea of a genre is so hard to define, and anyone in music will tell you it’s so watery. I just don’t think about music that way.

What was it like making music for Prada, Hugo Boss, Chanel..

Before I started doing Fashion shows I was only doing DJ mixes. I had started making music but I was finding it really difficult. By having this safety net of not having to decide what I wanted to say, but by just creating a sound for a visual, it really gave me a great guide. It allowed me to stop thinking ‘what do I want to say? What do I want to do?’ and just be like ‘ok, let’s just make sound that looks like this.’ 

It was a really important stepping stone for my creative journey and it was SO exciting to see it come to life and have the girls walking and dressed amazingly. 

Any epic festival memories? 

Omg, like so many! I mean the Holy Ship is unlike anything you ever experience in your life. It’s four days on a ship 24/7, there are parties all day, parties all night. You’re with all your friends running around this ginormous luxury boat. 

They have an artist area with this incredible piano bar with a DJ set up, and everyone from the line-up is just going back to back all night. There’s constant food and constant drinks, it’s like a kids playground. It’s everything you could ever think of. You can completely be a kid and let loose, it’s incredible. So that would be one of my favourite ever EVER memories. 

What’s your style like?

I think my everyday style is probably a mix between masculine and feminine elements, and keeping comfortable while also expressing things through what I wear. I definitely still live by the rule of expressing myself and my interests through my clothes. 

Especially as a teenager, you kind of wore clothes that would attract people that were into what you were into. Like, you’d wear band tees that only some people would know, or you’d reference certain things. 

In a way I definitely still dress like that, where I’m almost sending out messages to people like ‘oh do you understand why I’m wearing this? Then we should be friends.’

Your website says you’re a high heeled killer in the music industry, which begs the question, sneakers or high heels?

I’m totally a sneaker kinda girl. The line is always misread. It came from an LL Cool J song where he says ‘I’m gonna make you dance so hard you snap your high heels.’ So it’s like I’m killing your high heels. It’s actually the complete opposite. 

Any advice for an aspiring DJ trying to find their way in a competitive industry? 

It might seem easy to jump on bandwagons and follow the crowd, but what will make you last the longest is when you change shit. When people think of you and they think, ‘Damn, she just went and did her own thing and found her own path.’ That is something you will be proud of for the rest of your life. 

Wrapping up her Australian tour earlier this Month, Anna is now touring across the Canadian countryside. This is one inspiring girl and definitely one to watch.

www.annalunoe.com