"We're definitely a post-Napster band," said Casey Spooner, singer for the New York City-based Fischerspooner. The band's first album, "#1," has already spent several weeks on Amazon U.K.'s Hot 100 list of top sellers along with Eminem and Queen, even though its first single won't be released until July.

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"We've had responses from the French West Indies, from Russia, from Israel -- you name it," Spooner said. "It's not because the record is available, it's because people have found it on the computer. It's great because radio is completely dead for the most part in the U.S. -- the Internet is really radio now."

Advance play of the album on such Internet stations as SomaFM's new electro channel has put Fischerspooner at the forefront of a flamboyant backlash against the willfully faceless electronic DJs of recent years.

Such techno and house artists "are being tried and true and formulaic," said Chris Torlinski, an engineer in Silicon Valley who frequents nightclubs. "Fischerspooner are transforming this boring electronic dance music that's been going on into something new and exciting."

In addition to their campy, catchy synth-pop music, Fischerspooner are equally known for their theatrical live performances, choreographed but chaotic spectacles featuring Spooner's ever-changing costumes, an MC who doubles as wardrobe assistant and over a dozen singers and dancers.

But in contrast to pop stars like Britney Spears, who defensively insist they do all their own singing onstage, Fischerspooner shows -­- which reportedly cost up to $250,000 to produce -- celebrate the joys of lip-synching.

"There's a mix between playback and live vocals, but this is basically how every major pop performer does a live show," Spooner said. "Once you become aware of the idea of playback, you realize it's how most people experience most musical performances. In movies, on TV shows, even concerts, everyone is lip-synching."

Dropping that pretense, he said, was part of Fischerspooner's founding ethos. Spooner and co-founder Warren Fischer met while the two were students at the Art Institute of Chicago, and began making pop music together in 1998.

Former indie-rock guitarist Fischer took it upon himself to create the band's music entirely on a Mac with no outboard equipment. But the duo quickly jettisoned the idea of taking Fischer's laptop onstage after watching live electronic acts in the vein of Chemical Brothers.

"We realized electronic music wasn't taking advantage of all the possibilities technology afforded for live shows," Spooner said. "They feel the need to represent the creation process of the music. They stand on stage and turn knobs, but they aren't really doing anything except triggering sequences or doing filter sweeps, things that aren't really about virtuosity."

"Once you put that aside and don't worry about these issues of musical integrity ­-- this illusion that people are manufacturing the music up there, which they're not -- you have all this time and energy and space and freedom to do lots of other things. You could stage a Busby Berkeley musical, because you don't have to worry about playing the guitar."

Stage performance, lip-synched or not, is a core of the Fischerspooner ethos. The forthcoming single, "Emerge," is disrupted twice by loud beeps akin to the audio sync tone on film reels.

"We put those in there as cues," Spooner said. "When you're doing choreography, you need some sort of musical cue to start from. But the song builds so slowly that oftentimes we'd play in a nightclub, and we couldn't hear anything clearly."

The beep has already spun off its own career, appearing in remixes of other artists' music.

Spooner says the band's backing-track gambit appears to have paid off at recent shows in London: "People come up after the shows and say, 'I swear to God, that sounded even better than the CD,' even though they know it was the CD."