A collection of callers-in call out the shout-outs on an early-morning hip-hop radio show, aroused schoolies frolic on the banks of a river, a drunken teenaged dance is marshalled into line by an unimpressed teacher, and an icecream-van driver hawks his frozen wares. Crickets chirp, keyboards squirt, hands clap, guitars hit bung notes. Production flutters from lo-fi to no-fi, electro-pop to hip-hop, house to tropicalismo. Sometimes all in a single song. So it goes in the world of Soft Tigers, where nothing —least of all traditional song form— is musically sacred.

Soft Tigers were born in suburban Canberra, an overplanned land of circular streets from which few escape, let alone draw influence from.

Given that the humans in Soft Tigers count themselves as filmmakers, as directors and editors, perhaps it’s no surprise that their music —the natural, un-contrived output of their creative selves— seeks to not simply entertain, but render an imaginary world anew.

“We want the emphasis to be on ‘our world’, that’s what we’re trying to communicate,” says Bucky Toller, one of Soft Tigers’ two founding fathers. “We’re pretty ADD when it comes to music. For us, a song in just one style can get a bit dull.”

Befitting their birth in the age of the sampler, Soft Tigers flit in and out of genre like a cordial-swigging kid flicking through the channels. Fitting, vaguely, into some sort of post-Avalanches Australia personified by Architecture In Helsinki, Cut Copy, and Bumblebeez, Soft Tigers’ unique sound shows little fidelity to the norms of this land. In fact, they show a blatant disregard for the pub-rock rulebook that is, still!, Australia’s (bog) standard.

“We don’t really value musicianship at all,” offers Neil Harvey. “And we’re definitely not performers.” So, wait, Soft Tigers weren’t born as a live-band? “No.” And they haven’t cut their teeth playing scuzzy rock-clubs? “We haven’t really played live much at all.” And where do they fit into Sydney’s rock-n-roll scene? “I don’t think we really do,” Neil considers. “We’ve got a few friends in bands, like fellow Canberrans Young & Restless and Bumblebeez, but we certainly don’t feel as if we’re part of any community. For us, we’ve been doing this all in isolation.”

That sense of disconnect —“or more just disinterest, really” Neil chuckles— to what was going on in Olde Sydney Towne actually fuelled the founding ideology of Soft Tigers. “At the time, in Sydney, there was a lot of people playing rockstars,” recalls Bucky. “So, a big idea with the band, in the first place, was that we would try to demystify the process, and what it supposedly was to play in a band. What it supposedly was to be a band.”

Initially, Soft Tigers weren’t, like, actually a band. Harvey and Toller first started making music, in 2001, on cracked sampling software. However, it wasn’t until early in 2004, when they decided to fuse their dense webs of musical detritus into songs, that Soft Tigers was born in earnest.

Roping in long time pal Pal Gupta, they set about making their debut disc, Gospel Ambitions, with a definite sense of ambition. “We were conscious of it being a first album, and wanting to make something really bold and ambitious, that covers a lot of ground,” says Harvey. “We wanted to make something inspired by a really great first album; like the Wu-Tang Clan’s first album, or Daft Punk’s first album, in the way that they’re just so distinctive, and coming from a totally different place. That’s the sort of ambition we had.”

Recording at an old weatherboard home in Bronte, and a bayside beach-house in Mossy Point on the South Coast, Soft Tigers took the freedoms afforded by home-recording technology and ran with them. “We’d often just stick the microphone out the window, record the sounds of the backyard,” Toller recalls.

They a