NEW YORK -- You've got to travel way downtown to get to the Knitting Factory night club, past Greenwich Village, Little Italy and Chinatown. But it's always worth the trip, because you know that any band booked there is not going to be run of the mill.

And, it doesn't hurt that the pints of iced coffee are only $2 at the front bar.

Among the most recent visitors to this downtown musical oasis was the eclectic British duo Moloko who appeared there Thursday night. In fact, after seeing them perform, it would be hard to think of a better space in New York for these guys to play. Not quite jazz, not quite techno, Moloko exist on multiple sonic levels -- sort of like the Knitting Factory itself.

You see, this is a club on three floors, with three tiny bars, two tiny stages and a 24-track studio in the basement. It's a place that regularly cybercasts avant- garde concerts over its own high-speed T1 line, and which has filled up the wall in one tiny bar with its own live recordings. And it's even a place that made the diplomatic newswires in May when performer John Zorn asked the noisy chatterboxes in the balcony to "shut the fuck up," not knowing they included Czech president Vaclav Havel and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Moloko were there as part of the Eastern leg of their U.S. mini-tour, promoting an allegedly new release called Do You Like My Tight Sweater? In the U.S., it may be new, but back home in England, Moloko's debut album on The Echo Label Ltd. is already two-and-a-half years old.

Roisin Murphy, the sultry singer who fronts the band, said the CD may be old back home, but Americans are just warming up to it. Plus, she said the band is constantly toying with the arrangements, giving for instance a jungle kind of beat to "Day For Night," instead of the "O Superman" kind of electronic treatment it got on record. "Every time we go out live, we change it around," she said.

And there were other changes. On this tour, Moloko's core of singer Murphy and keyboardist/ guitarist Mark Brydon were joined by drummer Slowey and keyboardist Tim Vine. And they brought along new toys to play. "We never toured with sequencers before," Murphy said. "We've always been totally live before. So it's a new experience for us."

During a new tune called "Baby Blink," slated for release on Moloko's second album next year, Brydon even broke out one of those old voice synthesizers made famous by Peter Frampton in the '70s classic "Do You Feel Like We Do?" and Joe Walsh in "Rocky Mountain Way." The rest of the night, Murphy displayed almost jazz-like phrasing atop electronic funk rhythms, stretching every syllable to the max in songs such as "Boo."

They opened the set at 10:30 p.m. with "Sugar Honey Sweet," a slow number that closes out their Sweater CD, though it's not listed. In another club on another night, it might be called hip-hop or R&B, but on that night it was just beautiful music. Next up was "I Can't Help Myself," a toe-tapper that got the women in the house moving down front, mimicking Siouxie Sue (or P.J. Harvey?) with their vogue-ish hand movements.

Dissonant electronic tracks from the CD such as "Dominoid" and "Killa Bunnies" have been known to induce nightmares in the children of Goth parents, but Moloko mellowed the live arrangements so we could all sing along to "Filthy fluffy creatures/ Teeth as sharp as knives/ The long-eared ones are coming/ Run run run for your lives."

They played their U.K. and American singles back-to-back: first the tongue- twister "Where Is The What If The What Is In Why?" and then the crowd-pleasing "Fun For Me." If a city inspector had come along at that exact moment, the Knitting Factory might have faced a violation for operating a dance hall without a license. But the audience settled down in time to hear the new ones, "Baby Blink" and "Be Like You."

For encores, Moloko broke out another preview off the new album, a tune called "Lamborghini Guy." Everyone knew this was it, and -- fire marshals be damned -- the crowd did the forbidden dance. Kieran McAteer, standing nearby, remarked of Murphy, "She sure is one funky chicken."

For those who haven't heard it, "Fun For Me" is the song that starts off with lots of "La, la, la, la's" and then hooks you with the chorus, "Fe fi fo, fun for me." If you still don't know it, go rent Batman IV. (Or just buy the soundtrack, it's got a good Smashing Pumpkins song on it.)

Murphy smiled when asked about how it felt to be part of a summer blockbuster. "It's awful, it's awful," she said, referring, we think, to the feeling, not the movie.

But maybe not. "Fun For Me," she explained, "is where Alicia Silverstone robs the motorbikes and goes off on a mad spree in the middle of the night." "We went to see it, and we walked out after we saw our song." [Sat., Oct. 25, 1997, 9 a.m. PDT]