Definitely gonna go the distance…
In an era where EDM, trap & hip hop reign supreme, it’s safe to say we’re always craving those timeless acts, those artists that pay homage to the past while pushing music forward in new and exciting ways. And what better period of music to pay homage to than the 80s? Easily one of the most influential periods for pop and just music in general, if there’s any genre of music to draw inspiration from, the 80s is probably it. And luckily for us, Sydney cosmic-synth sibling duo This Week In The Universe are doing that very period the justice it deserves, all the while venturing ever so further along their own creative journey.
Their latest tune ‘Distance’ featuring Ric Rufio from Flight Facilities is a total soundscape reminiscent of the cyberpunk genre, a tune we can so picture in the next Bladerunner, Total Recall or even Beverly Hills Cop (it’s a timeless classic and it deserves to be treated as such). It’s a masterclass in the art of the synth, and if you’re at all yearning for an escape in these crazy times, ‘Distance’ will blast you off into space faster than a Space X rocket, hurtling you toward the glorious unknown with a cheeky Yamaha DX7 by your side.
We got to catch up with the brothers to talk the new tune and to get an insight into their love affair with the synth. Check it below.
I wanna start this off by asking a super important question: What makes a good synth line?
Beau: Ooh. That is a good question.
Casey: That is good. Okay. Let’s have a think. I reckon it’s all about the sound more than the line, to be honest.
Beau: Yeah. I reckon you’ve got to start with a sound or something that you’re vibing off. And then kind of musically from that, I think the inspiration often comes from the sound. We’ve got a tonne of gear, so that’s kind of how we work. Usually we’ll boot up all that stuff and then find something that we think’s cool and then work from there. And often, you don’t really realise. Like, we’ll have a line that we’ve just smashed out pretty quickly that doesn’t sound great. But once we run it through gear and find the right sound that we’re looking for, the line suddenly sounds great. So, I’d say, yeah, the sound is kind of where we go from.
Take us back to the beginnings of your guys’ relationship with the synth. Give us a quick rundown on the love story.
Beau: I guess we were both forced into playing piano as kids when we were like five and you know, kind of classical and jazz stuff. And then, I remember being a teenager and I’d saved all my cash up and bought this Roland synth, and I would just kind of… I didn’t really know what I really bought or how to use it, but it was like suddenly I had thousands of these sounds in reach. And then, that was kind of the of start of us being like, “Whoa, this is cool.” We can kind of do stuff that’s not just acoustic piano. And then from that point, it was a bit of a sharp decline into spending all our cash on vintage gear and stuff we’d heard on records. We’d always be like, “How did they do that sound? How does Stevie Wonder make that kind of sound?” And we’d google what gear he used, and we’d try to kind of get that. Obviously, it’s hard in Australia getting the stuff that’s… a lot of synth stuff’s built in Japan or the U.S. So we’re always kind of scouring the internet to find that.
Casey: I remember when I was a teenager, I was right into ’70s prog rock, as you are sometimes when you’re a young teenager. I love these old … you see all the old videos and stuff of giant walls of modular synths. So, I thought that was pretty cool. And then I remember I bought a DX7, which is a classic ’80’s synth. I bought that when I was maybe 16 or 17. And I was stoked because that was a name synth, I remember, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But I still have it and I love it now. But now I know what I’m doing [laughs].
Now onto ‘Distance’, congrats on the record! Now that it’s been out there for a couple of weeks, how are you feeling?
Beau: Yeah, I feel really good. Our previous record was kind of weird experimental/ electronic stuff. So this was our first kind of stuff with a vocalist. But I think the reception’s been great. We’ve had heaps of people come out and say they weren’t expecting it from us, which is cool. We started it in 2018. So, that’s the sound we had in our head when we started, I think translated into a type of way where people were kind of like, “yeah, this is cool.” It’s kind of retro, kind of also futuristic-y type of vibe. But yeah, I think we’re really happy with it.
Casey: It’s nice because we’ve been working on it for ages. So, I mean, you could say that it’s a lot of music, but we’ve worked on it for so long and kind of came back to it and changed bits and pieces and everything. So, now that it’s out, there’s a very… it feels very nice to have it finished and you can just sort of enjoy it as a track. I really like it. It wasn’t like that for a long time, you know?
Just going back to your 2017 album ‘Tellurian’, the album listens like you guys just wanted to flex your production muscles and not worry about vocals, but just craft a sort of sonic symphony. Is that an accurate summary?
Beau: Yeah, that’s a great summary. That record, for me I think, I wanted to write stuff that’d be cool. Kind of like driving a… I don’t have a convertible car, but if I had a convertible, like driving around like a sports car in the middle of the night with this pumping ’80s soundtrack. So, we thought of it almost like a soundtrack when we were writing it.
Casey: Yeah exactly.
Beau: I think that’s definitely how a lot of the actual compositions came together. We definitely went pretty hard and we just love hanging out and playing with gear. So, a lot of the motivation was more just us having fun hanging out and doing this stuff. So, we ended up spending ages and going extremely hard with the keyboards.
Casey: Yeah. We do a lot of it at our home studio. We probably did about 85% of it there. So, kind of having no deadline is a really awesome thing, and also a tough thing sometimes. Because it’s hard to say, “Oh, it’s finished now.” Because you’re like, “Oh, we’ll spend another week on it.” And then it’s like, “Oh, we’re actually just spending more time on it.” That’s the kind of positive but also makes it tricky sometimes.
Yet, ‘Distance’ is a big departure from hits like ‘Frostilicious’ and ‘Challenger’ and just the ‘Tellurian’ album in general, as it features vocals as well as a more poppier sort of sound. Had you guys sort of grown tired of that style? Or was that a natural progression?
Casey: I think it was a natural progression. We definitely haven’t grown tired of the other side of things, but we do want to challenge ourselves and push forward, but I don’t think we were actively trying to do something different. We just thought, this would be a cool thing to do. And some of the music that we’re currently working on also has vocalists on it, so we’re kind of moving in that direction a bit anyway. So it felt pretty natural, but I agree, it definitely feels like a departure and a new step for us.
The ‘Distance’ cover has these two astronauts looking at what appears to be Mars in an old 80s comic book type of vibe. What was the reasoning behind that?
Casey: That’s a good question. I wish there was a better answer [laughs]. In some respects, I don’t know, I thought the second… I think it’s around three minutes into the track, it goes to this drop with a big baseline and soaring bendy synth kind of thing on top. And that, to me, just always reminds me of this image of, I don’t know, an astronaut in space type of thing. And we were super into comic books and all that kind of stuff growing up as well. So, that kind of imagery was just, “Oh, that’s a kind of cool fit.” It kind of fits like the retro and the futuristic vibe of the song.
So Beau kind of got the ball rolling with the artwork and showed me and I was like, “yep, great”, straight away. I was like, that just kind of works with the vibe.
Were movies from that period at all an influence to you? I get a real ‘Bladerunner’/ ‘Total Recall’ sort of feel from the track in general.
Beau: Massively. Yeah.
Casey: We love all that stuff, man. We’re constantly talking about ’80s movies and all that kind of stuff. We were actually talking this morning about Beverly Hills Cop.
Eddie Murphy?
Beau: Yeah man. It’s hard to beat those, especially the first two Beverly Hills Cop‘s. That’s a perfect reference for how we sound designed our project initially, when we first started doing This Week In The Universe stuff. That was definitely a reference of how the sound design would be aimed at.
Casey: And what Beau was saying before with the last record, how we’re almost writing a soundtrack to something that doesn’t exist. But yeah, we’re definitely huge on all of that.
You’ve said that Ric Rufio from Flight Facilities was the first person you thought of for ‘Distance’. You guys have racked up quite the list of vocalists and collaborators. Why was Ric at the top of your list?
Beau: That’s a good question. I was actually hanging out with him… we were doing some stuff, it would have been 2018. And I think he was sending me demos and stuff he was doing, and he was talking about how he had just got the Flight Facilities gig when he was touring with those guys. And he was showing me this new Flight Facilities music he was working on and I was like, “Man, we should do some stuff together.” Because we’ve done weird bits and pieces together, like he was singing backing vocals for Daniel Johns when I was playing keys for Daniel on his solo record. So, he was at the front of my mind, and I think with the kind of harsh, rhythmical element of the track that we had, I thought that his kind of R&B voice would be a really cool fit. And yeah, I think it worked out good!
Just speaking of those collaborators, you guys have worked with everyone from Daniel Johns to Lily Allen to Claptone and Vera Blue. Has working with those artists taught you anything about your craft?
Beau: Yeah, absolutely. I think Daniel Johns is a really good example because he doesn’t really ever stop creating. He’s constantly on his phone, singing ideas and lyrics and writing, scrawling down lyrics on paper. He’s the only artist I’ve seen where there’s no off switch, really. I’m good mates with him now actually, and we’ve known each other for probably five, six years. He’s the kind of guy who will just send you voice memos and ideas all day and all night. And that’s really inspiring for us, because those are the kind of artists we look up to. People like Prince and all those artists like that, who’re kind of just the true artists in a sense.
So I think he’s been inspiring, because he shows you that you can work on something all day and all night to get it perfect. That’s been really cool. Working with like Vera Blue was great. She’s a perfectionist as well. And she’s an absolute monster singer as you’ve probably heard. Claptone was cool too, it was really cool to work with him. He was a bit more mysterious as you’d imagine [laughs].
But yeah, we definitely try to take some stuff from everyone we work with, for sure.
Now concerning the creative relationship between the pair of you, how does the creative process work when you’re siblings? Does it get competitive?
Casey: I think we’re both pretty open. Like, we might’ve have been competitive in the past, in our lives, but not in this project, I don’t think. We’re pretty open to stuff. Like we’ve said, we’ve spent a lot of time on this, so we might be working on something then one of us will suggest the other to do something and we’ll work on that and then get that sounding good. And then we might scrap it. But we’re never going to shut the other one down. So I think that’s a nice vibe.
Beau: Yeah, I think that’s a good way of looking at it. Like we’re definitely harsh at each other, if we think something is not good enough. We won’t not hurt each other’s feelings, but on the other hand, we’ll keep open enough to let an idea be like, “Man, maybe this idea could be cool,” and we’ll see how it goes.
I think maybe more so than if you’re working in a professional setting with someone else. You’d probably be quicker to kind of dismiss an idea because you’re more time constrained. But with this new stuff, we’ve been definitely on the same page with everything.
Onto the future, even though gigging and the music world in general is in a weird sort of suspended animation at the moment, what are you guys currently up to for This Week in In The Universe? Any albums or EPs in the works?
Casey: Yeah, well, one good thing about this has been we’ve actually had the time to work on new music, which has been great. So we’re working towards an EP and we should have some… we’ll definitely have some more tracks out this year. So, that’s pretty fun. And yeah, we do want to play live. That’s the goal, but like you said, it’s pretty weird at the moment. So that’s been heaps of fun just setting our gear up and working out how we can do it and how it’s going to sound and the kind of approach we want to take.
Beau: Yeah, totally. We’ve got some really cool features on the next track, so really excited about that too. Really looking forward to having them.
Lastly, and this is a bit of a fun one: who, out of the pair of you, is better at coming up with a sick synth line?
Beau: Ooh yeah. I think that’s a good question. I think we both have… I don’t know, by default in the way we write, the way we’ve written this new music, I’ve written a lot of the baselines for stuff and Casey’s written a lot of soaring synthly stuff. It’s hard I think.
Casey: I would say Beau’s good at… He’s really good with the pitch and mod wheels and stuff on a synth. So, he really can get those sort of bendy sort of pitch bendy sounds straight away. I can’t do that off the top of my head. I can dial in sounds pretty well, I think.
Beau: Yeah, absolutely.
Casey: But, I’m more “here’s the notes and here’s the sound”. Where Beau’s very good at integrating that straight away, I would say!
‘Distance’ is out now. You can buy/ stream it here and be sure to follow the boys on Facebook and Instagram to stay up to date on all things This Week In The Universe.
