CALLING MICHAEL STIPE

Advances in technology are working their way into recording all the time. However, when the influential British dance duo Utah Saints and R.E.M. singer Stipe were looking for a way to collaborate on “Two,” the first U.S. album from the Saints since 1992, they turned to the old-fashioned telephone.

Stipe lent his voice to four tracks on “Two’--which comes out July 30 on Nettwerk America--simply by having an hourlong conversation with the Saints’ Jez Willis and Tim Garbutt, which the pair recorded. They then chopped up the conversation and put music around Stipe’s words. Out of that were born “Sun,” ’Punk Club,” ’Rhinoceros,” and “Wiggedy Wack,” the last title coming from the term the three used to describe the process of making music via the phone.

“Michael Stipe has a very musical voice, even in conversation,” Willis says.

But it’s more the mixing that gives the tracks--referred to as interludes rather than songs--their musical quality, turning them into avant-garde dance pieces.

Each of the tracks has a distinct feel, but the two standouts are “Sun,” a song about the weather, and “Rhinoceros,” which Willis says came about when “Michael Stipe was telling me about a favorite scene from the Fellini film ‘And the Ship Sailed On.”’

The collaboration itself came about as spontaneously as the techniques employed.

“We had nearly finished all the tracks on the album,” Willis says. “And someone told us that Michael had done a feature in Mojo magazine on his favorite album of 1999, and he said that it was our first album, which came out [in 1992]. This was a big surprise for us, as there was no link between us and him. This ... prompted us to write him a letter, saying thanks for his kind words. And we thought we would take a chance and also ask him if he might be interested in collaborating with a vocal on a track. We suggested that it might be interesting to do it over the telephone. Michael thought that this would be fun.”