It's clear from the moment they hit the stage that Pattern Is Movement want to become everybody's friends. The Philadelphia duo immediately invite everyone down to the stage, eliminating the awkward horseshoe shaped barrier that sometimes exists between band and audience and immediately plunge into their visceral yet symphonic tunes from last month's release, All Together, that include such disparate influences as Radiohead, math rockers like Deerhoof and Broadway musicals. Then they ask the audience to join in for hand clapping and sing-alongs, whether they know the words to the songs or not. Andrew Thiboldeaux's vibrant tenor and friendly manner of speaking and the cheerful exuberance of drummer Chris Ward make the show an inviting experience. Thiboldeaux will even take his shoes off. We caught up with both Thiboldeaux and Ward after their Baltimore show to ask them five (actually, six) questions about covering Radiohead, which city has given them the best sing-a-long and what they had planned for last night's show at the Black Cat Backstage with another duo, Phoenix Subpoppers, Helio Sequence.

Since your last album you've changed from a quartet to a duo. How has that changed the way your live show has been set up?

CW: More gear and less people. So, our backs are hurting.

AT: Yeah it’s hard to move all the stuff but it’s funny because I think that there’s more responsibility onstage than there was before because we all could share the responsibilities of sound and parts and everything. But we had to really be on our game all the set, doing a good job the whole time.

CW: It creates a really interesting dynamic because you have just two people on the stage moving at such a pace that creates like a whirlwind of sound. With four people it wasn’t as much of a whirlwind. It was almost more subdued. With two people we can’t be as subdued. It just can’t be because you have just two people to play all this music. So, I think that the two piece actually works out and a lot of bands like Wye Oak are doing it. It creates a dynamic that’s very unique and seems to translate really well at small clubs. I mean Mates of State pulls it off in front of thousands of people. Not that I’m comparing ourselves to that but I mean the two piece idea, really translates well into crowds so I mean, we’ve been really happy. We were scared out of our minds when we did it the first time. I felt like I’d never played music before in my life. My knees were knocking.

Has there been any transition from what you’ve created in the studio to the stage with two people since there’s a lot that can be added in with the mixing not necessarily in a live setting?

CW: That’s always a fundamental thing for us even actually when we were a four piece. The live setting vs. the setting of a recording studio was always two events for us. We always took the live setting as almost like another event, so we a lot of times appropriate songs, even in the past for the live setting. Like, oh this is really rad in the studio but it sounds like crap live. We appropriate that part and have somebody do something else. And so with this live setup, I would say it’s the exact same thing, if not more so. It’s like, let’s hunker down on this riff here and really ride it home because it’s cool, it’ll really translate live. I mean, we’ve added stuff to songs that makes it a fuller sound when we add things that aren’t on the record. I would say that we have a mindset for the studio and a mindset for the live stage. I would say that the live set is a little more pragmatic and we’re a little more like, "Okay, what’s going to be as visceral as possible" and when we’re in the studio it’s a little more idealism and it’s like, "Let’s think about the song and what idealistically can we accomplish." The recording comes the ideal but when you translate it to the stage it becomes the pragmatic relation to that ideal, let’s just rock this song and we don’t do that as much in the studio. We take our time in the studio and create kind of like a big symphonic masterpiece.

I hadn’t realized this until I was looking through your merch but all the songs on All Together were inspired by photographs? Where’d you come up with that? Who took the photographs?

AT: My brother found those photographs. He does antiques; he’s an antique dealer and he found those photos in the trash. And I thought they were so beautiful and I thought "Man, wouldn’t it be fun to look at these photographs and come up with songs based on the photographs." It worked out that we came up with the idea of doing one character through all these different sort of lives, experiencing what it’s like to be an elephant or what it’s like to be an evangelical or a homosexual or any of those things. Trying to see what it's like to be those and trying to do those in songs and translate those experiences into songs and it was really exciting and just are beautiful to look at, too.

Is there a certain atmosphere that you’re trying to create with the live show? It seems like you’re trying to make everyone feel at home. Andrew, your shoes are off. You’re both playing on a rug.

CW: I agree. We try to break down the wall of the audience and the performer as much as possible because it seems that when you break down that wall, you can create an event that everyone feels like they’re participating in. The crowd’s like, "I’m participating. I’m singing along or I’m clapping or hooting and hollering" and obviously we’re participating. We’re like, "hey, we’re making music for you" and it becomes like this symbiotic relationship. That’s just the best, it’s just so much fun when you feel as if you’ve created an event that is now moving at a pace that you’re not setting, we’re all creating this event. I agree, we try to have a party. We’ve never been the kind of rock band that’s like, “I’m so f***ing cool man, I’m just gonna play our stuff.” I mean that’s awesome, there are parts of me that’s like man, I wish we could just get onstage and be that way but it just doesn’t translate to our personalities. We just want to get up there and be buddies. We just want to be your bros and hang out.

AT: Well we want it to be an experience for us, too. We don’t do this just to make money and we’ve agreed that we give up a lot of things to have the chance to be on the road and make songs and sing them for people so we want it to be an experience every time we do it.

You definitely have a singalong aspect to your set. Have you found any cities that were better singers or worse singers than anywhere else?

AT: I would say that Baltimore was probably the best "Everything In Its Right Place" singing. Yeah people were loud and crisp and great and in pitch.

CW: I would say out of every single time we’ve ever done this we had one situation that really floored us and that was in Bloomington, IN. We were playing Culture Shock Fest and it was like 200 kids under a tent and they were having power issues. The power was dropping out. The power dropped out in the middle of our set so Andrew went and started playing a song and it came back and we played it. We were playing “Right Away,” our last song and we were at the end of the song where we were just kind of slowly jamming, “I Will Go Right Away” and then the power just went out and it’s just my drums now so I just got real quiet and Andrew’s like, “Get ‘em to sing!” And it was like a movie. I was like “Alright.” And 150 or 200 kids knew that song and sang it and overtook it and it moved us like nothing ever. It was so amazing to hear that many voices sing “I Will Go Right Away.” And they didn’t wait a beat, because it goes “I will go right away” and then bar and it was just like “I will go right away. I will go right away.”

AT: It’s like alright. If that’s how you want it, I’m not changing it. What am I to do?

CW: It was brilliant. That’s what it was. I was floored. I was like, “God, what’d it be like to play in a 900 room capacity and have somebody sing that song." That’d be brilliant man.

Is "Everything In Its Right Place" a staple of the live show right now?

CW: It is right now, I don’t know if it’s gonna be in the future. It actually was a complete accident getting into the set. The first time we ever played as a two piece was last fall, so, October 2007. We had never been a two piece. We had just finished the record and then we went out on tour. So we recorded the whole record and we rehearsed just a bit as a two piece but we didn’t rehearse like a month or two, we rehearsed like, a weekend. Then we were going on tour and the first three nights were gonna be with Dan Deacon and it was gonna be rad. Three nights of Dan Deacon. He canceled. He was sick. So we get a call from the promoter who was a college student and he was like, “Hey, can you play more songs.” We ‘re like, “No way,” We barely have 30 minutes. They’re like “Hey, we can possibly offer you some more money.” Then they told us what the money was and we’re like, “Oh. Okay.That’s a lot of money. We’re poor. “ So we’re driving from Pittsburgh to Cleveland and we’re figuring out all the songs that we can cover and that was one of them. And the first set was so-so but that song we hit and people loved it and the next night Dan Deacon canceled again. Same thing. Three nights in a row we had to do it. It was rad. It came out of nowhere and it was so much fun so we just kept it. There’s some other songs we were considering covering but that one is just such a jam. People love it.

AT: It’s fun to play, too.