Expanding the City limits

Ned Collette says City City City create the sort of music that rarely gets played any more, a kind of experimental pop.

Ned Collette and his band City City City are injecting the stuffy world of instrumental music with a sense of humour. "A lot of the time instrumental rock either sounds like naive classical music played loud or like a band's forgotten to bring their singer along," he says. City supported Scottish post-rock noise-makers Mogwai last night in Melbourne and the 26-year-old is hungover. "And we've got to play with them again tonight."

As with the Scots, City have been labelled post-rock. But listening to their latest album, The Perimeter Motor Show, there's also elements of improvisation, pop and rock.

City play with Napier's Jakob and Dunedin's Operation Rolling Thunder at the Kings Arms tonight. as part of a nationwide tour called A Low Hum.

They'll also be going to Hamilton tomorrow (all ages, 2pm at Upsett Records and the Castle at night). And on Sunday there's a gig at the Takapuna War Memorial Hall.

But don't expect a pretentious arty experience.

"I can't bear that really serious instrumental rock vibe," Collette says. "There's no sense of humour in it. I don't mean the music has to be all crazy and have stupid sound-effects, but there's no pathos in it.

"I really don't get into seeing bands where the crowd is supposed to be having this spiritual experience."

The music he finds spiritually enlightening are the songs of artists such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.

"Everybody says Leonard Cohen is suicidal, but it's rubbish because his music is full of good humour and wit. And I think we try to get that into the notes, somehow."

Other influences extend from being "mad about the Beatles when I was 10", to 60s and 70s prog-art-rockers Soft Machine, and the music of that band's founder Robert Wyatt, through to bands like Mogwai and TV On the Radio.

Collette's mum is a New Zealander, but he was born and raised in Australia.

He got into rock'n'roll and hip-hop when he was growing up and developed a love for improvisational music while at university. It was there he started "an instrumental, free, improvising kind of band".

But the student environment had little to do with him getting into that music scene. "There was a night they called the Make It Up club, which we helped run, and at that time I met a lot of older musicians who were into the improvised thing."

Even though City's music can go in odd and obscure directions all within the space of one song, Collette doesn't see it as experimental.

"If you look at the great canon of experimental music nowadays, this is pretty tame.

"But at the same time I think that, for pop audiences, we do confuse them. But people who like us tend to give up on where we do fit.

"We tend to fall in the gaps. A couple of years ago people were calling us a post-rock band, and we got the usual comparisons to Tortoise and Mogwai. But then we alienated all that mob because the next one had singing on it and had a few more Krautrock pretensions.

"So it's frustrating falling into those gaps and not being able to be put into a box in that way, but at the same time it's great that that exists."

Instead, Collette prefers to think of City as creating music that rarely gets played any more - a kind of experimental pop music. "There's a band we got into last year called the White Noise - a late 60s thing in England which came out of the BBC's stereophonic workshop, which is like its experimental music arm. They were this crazy pop band and to us City City City just come from a really long tradition of that stuff."

Collette also plays solo shows and his latest album, Jokes and Trials, in more of a singer/songwriter vein, comes out on Monday.

After the release last month of The Perimeter Motor Show, City also dabbled in some singing, so strictly speaking they can no longer call themselves just an instrumental group.

But Collette is quick to point out that there's a lot of improvised material on the album as well.

It was all done at a one-day recording session. "We went in and played until the tape ran out," he says.

You can't get more improv than that.

City City City

What: Melbourne-based improvisational pop band

Playing: With Jakob and Operation Rolling Thunder on the A Low Hum tour.

Where: Kings Arms, Auckland, tonight; Upsett Records, Hamilton, 2pm, tomorrow (All ages); The Castle, Hamilton, tomorrow night; Takapuna War Memorial Hall, Sunday (All ages).

Albums: City City City - The Perimeter Motor Show, out now; Ned Collette - Jokes and Trials, out Monday.