Architecture in Helsinki makes everyplace a place like this

Australian pop sextet Architecture in Helsinki blends 30 years of radio-friendly tricks into its heavily-textured compositions, as if each song is a compact history of electronic dance music. But as much as time gets traversed, it’s a sense of geographic movement that fuels the irresistible hooks and often zany lyrics. Phrases like “leaping off the edge of this world” and “legs like little sprinters” only add to the frenetic energy of the music. Even the videos carry this sense of movement, with the one for “Hold Music” featuring the band in brightly-colored ponchos jumping impossibly high on mini trampolines.

The vocals are a trade-off between cute-as-a-button keyboardist Kellie Sutherland and the band’s lanky, bouncy founder, Cameron Bird, whose singing has evolved into a desperate, throat-clenching falsetto attack on the band’s latest release, Places Like This. Crossing the globe for a second time with the new material, the band stops into the Rio Theatre for a first-ever visit to Santa Cruz on Nov. 3. GT caught up with Bird during an off-day for the band in New York City.

“Traveling with a band is bittersweet,” Bird says. “You get the taste of a place and an idea of what it’s like to be there, but you never get the full experience. It’s like having a relationship with someone who’s not real, even though you know all about them.”

While Santa Cruz will be a new stop for the band, they’ve spent quite a bit of time in San Francisco, even naming an instrumental track from their sophomore release, In Case We Die, “Rendezvous: Potrero Hill” for all the time they spent hanging around in that neighborhood. The band indeed seems at home anywhere; earlier this year, they made a clip with the French online music magazine La Blogotheque that saw them playing an impromptu concert in a square, Bird and Sutherland shouting their vocal lines from the fourth-story windows of an apartment building.

“We had powered amps we wanted to play through,” Bird explains, “but the batteries weren’t charged, so I got the guy who was filming to ask someone through the window of the apartment building if we could plug in with extension cords. And then we thought it would be cool to sing from in there. So we got to go up into these random people’s homes while they were having dinner and cooking and stuff.” The feat was accomplished through what must have been innovative gestures—Bird claims to be “as monolingual as they come.”

In Australia, where the following is beginning to reach epic proportions, the band is well-known for Supermelodyworld, a recording studio that began in a Melbourne church hall, but is now more of an idea that goes where they go. “It could be someone’s bedroom or a tour bus,” Bird says. “It’s an undefined place.”

 Or perhaps, for the moment, it’s everyplace. Places Like This was recorded after a whirlwind month-long tour of Australia. “The songs have this kind of spontaneous energy to them because of that,” Bird says. “The ideas behind our music have become louder and louder, and brighter and brighter. We wanted to make something people would be shocked by, and tried being just really reckless with the way we recorded these songs. It was just a part of the honesty of our live performance.”

Bird says those live performances are now at the heart of the band’s music, and the feedback with audiences has become crucial. “We have a much better show if we feel the energy of the audience,” he says. “We don’t play with a set list anymore. We have a vague idea of what will happen, but we try to keep it as loose as possible. The way we play the songs changes a little bit every time, but that’s great. In every aspect, we’ve always been about changing things up and not being complacent with where we’re at.”

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