“I’m a bit of a geek,” White says. “I’m really into space and science and looking at pictures of nebulae taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and reading books about quantum theory and astrophysics. I think that all really ties into what we’re doing. Y’know, universal majesty and standing back in awe of things, rather than standard pop songs which are constrictive to ideas. With instrumental music, a hundred people can listen to a song and have a hundred different interpretations of what the song is, what it means, how it makes them feel. When you hear a pop song, you hear the lyrics and you get the song explained to you and that’s that.”
The Television Sky describes their music as a fusion of classical and post-rock influences, but like any good instrumental outfit, such descriptions are best used as just a jumping-off point. The record was tracked over two days on a shoestring budget in a Brunswick living room. “The guy that recorded it for us, Peter Sergeev, has got all his own mics and whatnot, so we just did live recordings in a room that we recorded into a makeshift recording studio,” White says. Prior to the sessions, the band retreated to piano player Fabian Toonen’s farm in the country for a week to hone the material. Rehearsals took place three or four times a day. “We rehearsed so much,” White says. “We went into the studio thinking that if we got four tracks that were usable, it would have been a success.”
The Television Sky’s history stretches back to 2009 when Toonen and White started a folk band. “I was playing violin and he was playing piano,” White says. “We were going along to open mic nights at the Empress Hotel just to play our stuff to people without the hassle and pressure of having organised gigs.” At one such jam, the lads met guitarist Andrew Macrae. Macrae hopped up on stage with his electric guitar and a loop pedal and laid down some ambient soundscapeage, much to his future bandmates’ delight. “We got talking to him, we thought he was a cool guy and we liked his music and we just kinda started jamming together with no real ambition or focus. We all just like playing music, and The Television Sky just naturally developed over the year.”
White’s list of musical touchstones includes The Dirty Three, Explosions In The Sky and Mogwai. “I like bands with massive sounds and really awesome musicianship,” he says. In terms of non-musical influences, there’s the spacey, sciencey inspirations behind The Television Sky. “Chaos theory is something that comes into what we’re doing too,” White says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Mandlebrot fractal zooms but that’s something we’re incorporating into our live set and which will be featured at our album launch. We’ll have these massive kaleidoscopic fractal zooms going on in the background.”
