EXPERIMENTAL Australian band PVT, formerly known as Pivot, have just released second album Church With No Religion, which they'll be promoting with a UK tour next month. Jack Young catches up with the band's Richard Pike.

What was the creative process like with the new album and did it differ much to 2008's O Soundtrack?

Well it was a similar process to O Soundtrack in that we were avoiding clichés and trying different things. We came at it from every angle and a lot of the vocal melodies were improvised. There was a lot of jamming and adding of layers, so the process was quite natural and organic for us. Of course, being a kind of 50 per cent electronic band we have that privilege of recording stuff and seeing what sticks and then scrapping the rest.

Do you accept the album being described as more accessible than the last?

The word "accessible" is something most artists cringe at. We're always trying to challenge our listeners. With the new album the process was pretty experimental and we felt we were trying stuff we never tried before and it felt like people maybe might not get this record at all. But people have had a really great reaction to it so far.

Why do you like to try something different?

I guess we get bored easily and have short attention spans. We always want to kind of surprise the listener. Maybe with this new one what we aimed to do was not just surprise the listener by doing jarring things or doing deliberately spikey things. We'd rather surprise the listener by taking you somewhere new.

A lot of people have described you as an instrumental band but the new album has prominent vocals.

We never set out to be an instrumental band or pigeon hole ourselves. This is just us doing what we do and experimenting with music and sound.

Did you find this album more of a challenge than the last?

Definitely, as creatively we challenged ourselves a lot more. We did a lot more writing and had a lot more extra tracks we didn't put on the album. It was hard to pull the album together as there was a lot of ideas happening. The label didn't like the first version so we kept working and writing on it and we're definitely a lot happier with the final product.

What is it like to work with the legendary Warp label?

It's good. They're much the same as any record label, trying to make sense of the new music era. They just have this kudos for picking out really challenging and interesting music, which for us is fantastic.

How do you transfer what you have on record to a live setting? Do you try and recreate what you do in the studio or go for a different feel?

We take elements from the tracks which are triggered from a computer but we try and make it different from the record, for sure.

You have been played Nottingham before. Any memories?

We played Dot-to-Dot and I remember there were pretty drunk characters quite early in the afternoon. That's all I can really remember from that festival.