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Consider your expectations just another instrument for The Fiery Furnaces to toy with.

Safety, convention, and tradition all seem like foreign concepts to the brother-and-sister-led group.

Before every tour, the Chicago band spends weeks rearranging its songs, from tempo to vibe, leaving some with only the lyrics recognizable, into a seamless medley.

The exercise has as much to do with entrusting siblings Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger with the wheel as it does with not wanting to cheat fans with a predictable show.

"Bore-core? That's what other bands play," said Matthew Friedberger. "I don't want to mention any names."

This unique approach to touring has given The Fiery Furnaces a lot of material, as evidenced by the band's upcoming live double album, "Remember," a retrospective collected from performances dating to 2005.

"Remember" is a good representation of the live Fiery Furnaces experience: freewheeling, scatterbrained, filled with reprises and surprises.

As you might expect from its unorthodox techniques, The Fiery Furnaces probably won't ever headline stadiums.

"We don't have a lot of fans, but we do have a lot of songs," Friedberger joked. "And we've played them a lot of different ways."

The twists are just as varied on the group's recorded work.

The Fiery Furnaces followed up their critically acclaimed 2004 album, "Blueberry Boat," with 2005's confounding "Rehearsing My Choir," a concept record about the siblings' deceased grandmother that no one seemed to understand but the Friedbergers.

The group has since bounced back with a string of more accessible releases, the latest being 2007's "Window City."

Talking from New York City one morning, Friedberger sounded semi-resolved on future tasks.

Upcoming Fiery Furnaces albums include a funk record, tentatively titled "Quality Eviction Since 1986," and 12 songs the Friedbergers wrote with the help of fans, creating a genre called "Democ-rock."

For Democ-rock, the band asked attendees at shows to drop whatever they had in their pockets — receipts, pieces of paper, whatever — onto the stage.

The band collected the material and then wrote 12 "poppy" songs based on what they got: If it was a receipt, they could use the cashier's name in a song or even take the price, say $3.99, and translate it into music like a "triad and then two nine chords."

If this all sounds a little strange, the band also plans a six-part musical based on the work of Italian poet Giambattista Basile.

Wait . . . seriously?

"Yeah, sure," Friedberger said. "But we have to get the time and the money."