IF YOU THINK spoken word artists are all kufi-rocking vegans who sit in circles, slap bongos and spout oversized words, then you haven't met iLL-Literacy.

"People have this idea of spoken word that is so contained," says Adriel Luis, one of three creative forces making up San Francisco Bay Area-based iLL-Literacy, aka iLL-Lit. "The way we approach spoken word is the opposite. We feed off the audience. We move around. The slam/open mie format - one person behind the mie with the crowd seated - didn't work for us."

At its inception in 2002 at the University of California, Davis, iLL-Literacy embodied a new idea of performance poetry. Since then, the group's style has constantly evolved. iLL-Literacy's recent national tour, which featured the live band Hi-Lifes, was a menagerie of music and poetry, incorporating funk and soul, hip-hop and electropop.

"We've always wanted to create [an arena] where people can dance to spoken word," says Luis, 25, whose stage name is Drizzletron.

This year, iLL-Literacy - minus founding member Ruby Veridiano-Ching, who recently left to pursue a career in television - makes its first foray into recording as a group. For five days, Luis and crew members Dahlak Brathwaite and Nico Cary (aka N. I.C.) hole up in their studio finishing the crew's first EP.

iLL-Literacy's recording space at God- like Studios in Sacramento, CA, resembles a tiny frat house that happens to be strewn with recording equipment. From the looks of it, the group subsists solely on In-N- Out burgers, taco truck burritos, Doritos, gummy worms, Go Girl energy drinks and Patron ... lots of Patron.

At 3 in the afternoon, producer Ada Clock is passed out on the couch after a long night of making beats. Meanwhile, Brathwaite, 23, sits concocting sounds amidst a Roland keyboard, turntables, sampler, box of records and drum machine.

Braithwaite is the conductor, creating skeleton beats for the others to build upon. His eclectic array of influences spans the likes of art rockers Animal Collective, obscure 70s funk band Pure Essence and mainstream rapper Kanye West.

The music made here isn't hip-hop. In fact, iLL-Literacy's sound - encompassing funk, electronica, jazz, doo-wop and soul - defies classification. Accordingly, the crew has created its own genre: "digit, ill.funk" or "iFunk." Working backward, iLLLiteracy re-creates in the studio the aesthetics of performing with a live band.

On the road to pick up tacos (and a bottle of Patron, of course), Luis plays rough cuts of an untitled track from the forthcoming EP: a rousing, funk-heavy carnival ride, with Luis declaring on the hook: "I'm on that Kooool-Aid, I might see Heaven's gate!"

Indeed, as one quickly realizes when hanging out with iLL-Lit, these guys inhabit an elevated plane of creativity.

The still-in-progress iLL-Literacy EP will inaugurate a series of free EPs dropping this summer, along with one by RSA (N. I.C. and Ada Clock) and one by the Pretty Buoyant Society (a collaboration between Drizzletron and Los Angeles-based DJ Phatrick). By way of its first release and a move to New York this fall, iLL-Literacy hopes to win over many new believers.

At bottom, though, "this (EP) is something to have in our back pocket," Brathwaite says. "More than to satisfy fans, it's really to put out a classic piece of music."

Writer Zoneil Maharaj

Zoneil Maharaj is Hyphen's music editor and still hung over from drinking Patron.

Music editor ZONEIL MAHARAJ took a break from his normal Hyphen duties ("get advance copies of albums, bootleg them sumbitches and slang 'em in the Mission") to profile iLL-Literacy, a spoken word crew he calls "some of the most creative live performers I've come across." San Francisco-based Maharaj has learned a few things about unconventionality from his own family: "My dad still kills goats in the back of his car shop. And there's a huge Hindu trident on my parents' front lawn. That right there should sum up how we roll." After two years with Hyphen, Maharaj is, sadly, leaving to focus on his role as editor in chief at urban culture magazine Oh Dang!, which he co-founded.