Architecture In Helsinki’s (AIH) Kellie Sutherland could be in the middle of Siberia given the time delay on the phonecall. Seriously, 15 to 20 seconds between St Leonards and Bondi Junction. Weird. Have you ever tried interviewing somebody with a delay on? You end up talking over each other and thinking they’ve hung up or you’ve been cut off. Sometimes there’s just a big fat silence as both parties pause, uncertain about who’s supposed to be speaking. So we battle through.

We battle through because AIH are worth battling through for. Sounding like some unearthly mix of Frank Zappa, The B-52s, TISM, Talking Heads/David Byrne solo, To Rococo Rot, and heaven knows who else, AIH are profoundly tropicalia gone crazy. Its new album, Places Like This, the third for the now six-piece (in earlier days it biasted octet status), is adorned with a splendidly bright - and mad - illustration from the much feted UK artist, Wil Sweeney, that sets the scene for what’s inside. With songwriter/vocalist Cameron Bird relocating from Melbourne to New York in 2006 and ending up in a largely Puerto Rican neighbourhood it’s hardly surprising that steel drums and calypso rhythms waltz with blissed out atmospheres, bizarre vocal arrangements and grandiose back drops. This mob remain genuinely zany.

Kellie seems sane enough though when she crosses the great divide of our own private time warp. She’s just returned from a month long tour that took in the UK, Europe and the US and surprised even the most optimistic of band members with splendid turnouts in most of the clubs they played.

And then … drum roll … and then Bruce Willis said he listened to them: “I’ve got three great daughters who play me all their cool music… Architecture In Helsinki, The Strokes, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club …” Apparently they program his IPod so Mr DieHard (yes, Bruce could still save the world you know) is grooving to the polyrhythms and cutting up to these former Melbournites. That has to be a whole lot better than hanging out with certain folks at the MTV Music Awards.

Kellie laughs, “That all happened after the tour. I was in hysterics when I heard. I mean, I can’t blame the guy - he wants to boogie - or his daughters. It’s good taste.” It’s also priceless publicity that will make its way round and round the world as AIH set off on yet more jaunts in support of Places Like This. Sutherland says the album began life in both Melbourne and Brooklyn with the band writing collectively and individually using the Internet to swap material. Tracks went backwards and forwards and by the time they got together to play them for the first time they had already been recorded.

“They came alive with a new energy and then, last year, we took them out on the road, playing them until they had this bursting energy, then we said ‘okay, let’s record now’ so we went into the studio in Brooklyn and recorded the album in six days. We wanted to do it quickly as we have lingered over our songs before. As a result the music was imbued with a different kind of energy but it’s still definitely a studio album with layers and effects. We’ll never escape that because we’re all into that. It does sound like we were sounding live at the end of that tour though. There’s that live energy.”

AIH has been working up to this. Kellie, who’s been there since pretty much the start, will tell you the band wasn’t really a band until 2004 when it embarked on its first US tour and that formalised matters but history cuts deeper. Architecture In Helsinki began with Bird in the late 1990s in the sometime trendy Melbourne suburb of Carlton. Prior to that, he and fellow Architecture in Helsinki members, Jamie Mildren and Sam Perry, were members of a high school funk-grunge outfit they tagged, The Pixel Mittens. Some name. Dumping their small country town existence for Melbourne they soon went into semi-hibernation, only emerging in 2000 after Bird met James Cecil. The pair connected musically and Cecil was soon filling the drummer’s seat of what was now Architecture in Helsinki. Around that time, Bird met also Sutherland at a party and invited her to play the clarinet on some of the band’s songs. He also learnt to play guitar and began looking beyond Primus and Led Zeppelin for spiritual inspiration. Three years later, AIH’s debut album, Fingers Crossed, was released, to be followed in 2005 by the critically acclaimed In Case We Die. Unlike its successor, Die was produced, somewhat painstakingly, by Bird and Cecil over five months in a room with no windows. Claustrophobic it might have been but the end result captivated a growing audience worldwide and AIH spent a good part of 2005 and 2006 touring the world from the US to Iceland, Europe and Mexico. David Byrne popped backstage at a NYC show, festivals welcomed them aboard.

Sutherland says she’s happy with the trail blazed so far then adds a cautionary, “But anybody who gets happy and content doesn’t do anything good for the world so we’re mindful of that. We are ecstatic though. I didn’t ever think of touring in a band, then all of a sudden I’m doing it for the last three years of my life and getting to travel the world. That is amazing.”
More touring looms with a series of Australian shows then the band is off to Europe on August 1 for six weeks, then on to the US for another six weeks.

“I try not think of things in terms of making ‘reasonable inroads’ or to judge success by the length of our tours,” she says. “This is what we are doing and I’m just seeing where it takes us. There are lots of summer festivals and our UK label wants us to do 10 days of shows, and we’re going to Finland and Poland for the first time. I’m looking forward to going back to France - they treat us well there. They give you copious amounts of cheese and wine. That’ll do me.”

Places like this and places like that.