When Brooklyn-based “guitarlectro” band Ratatat hit the Phoenix stage this Saturday, they’ll be capping off an extensive tour of North America that has seen them play in sizeable venues, often for capacity crowds. It’s a notable accomplishment for any live act, but especially so for a hip-hop- and house-influenced post-rock duo that record and perform sans vocalist.

“There aren’t that many instrumental bands that people get excited about,” says beat and synth whiz Evan Mast, speaking from a hotel in his home state of Ohio. “At the shows on this tour, there’s been crowd-surfing and moshing. It’s amazing to see people reacting to the music that way, without having a singer.”

Mast and fellow multi-instrumentalist Mike Stroud started Ratatat in 2001, developing their minimalist, spacey-yet-specific sound and aesthetic along the way. Never once — despite a shared love of pop and rock such as The Beatles, The Kinks and the Rolling Stones — have they been tempted to put a voice up front.

“Neither of us likes to sing, so that might be a big part of it,” says the soft-spoken Mast. “I do like working on music with vocals, but it’s a whole different thing because you have lyrics to deal with, and that takes up a lot of space. Instrumental music is more interesting to me because it leaves things more open-ended — it’s not like you’re nailing the subject matter down to words — and you can make the song arrangements and melodies more complex when you don’t have someone singing.”

Ratatat’s music has indeed grown more multi-faceted through the course of their three studio albums, Ratatat (2004), Classics (2006) and their latest, LP3. Earlier singles like “Seventeen Years” and “Lex” have shown that Ratatat have a way with hooks, but the songs of LP3 are less obvious and far more varied in their approach. It seems that Mast and Stroud have fully found their way as production partners.

“We have pretty different strengths and weaknesses,” laughs Mast. “Where one of us is falling short, the other steps in. I tend to be more about the production side, getting the sounds and just getting weird ideas for arrangements, melodies and things. Mike is really great at keeping it all organized. He knows music theory much better than I do — he’s like a virtuoso on guitar and piano. If I have an idea for a melody, I can hum it to him and he’ll know immediately how to play it and know all of the chords that it suggests.”

Recorded in the Catskill Mountains of New York state, LP3 was completed in just three weeks (“Which is bizarre because it’s always taken us forever in the past. We made a song pretty much every day.”), incorporates a lot of new instrumentation and sees Ratatat adding dub, dancefloor and Middle Eastern flourishes.

“We came back with way more music than expected,” says an excited Mast. “And I feel like, at this point, we’ve gotten ourselves into a nice position. We can do the more rock songs, more hip-hop, electronic or we can do stuff that’s really mellow and kind of classical. When we first started, we had to narrow it down more, but now it feels like we can get away with anything in a way. It’s always the surprises that are more interesting.”

Which may be why the men of Ratatat have also been devoted to constructing a wide array of remixes. They’ve created official reworks for the likes of Björk and The Knife, and have independently released two collections — Remixes Vol. 1 (2004) and Remixes Vol. 2 (2007) — of playful mash-ups and reconstructions of songs by artists including Raekwon, Missy Elliot, Dizzee Rascal and Notorious B.I.G.

“Doing remixes is fun because you don’t feel the same attachment and responsibility to the song as when we’re working on our own stuff,” says Mast. “I can get a little more goofy with it. I can throw out some weird ideas and they tend to come together a little more quickly than our own songs. Plus it’s fun to work with vocals for a change.”

As for the rumour that Ratatat will soon be working closely with hip-hop producers and remix artists extraordinaire The Neptunes?

Evans coughs and chuckles, “The stock response is that we’re not allowed to talk about it.”