With Independent Television, the partnership of Arek Gulbenkoglu and Matthew Revert stages a broadcast that’s equal parts deranged variety show and forensic exhumation of the everyday. Drawing from a shared history in Melbourne’s post-industrial hinterland, the duo constructs a work that trades in jump-cuts, abrupt segues, and the unsettling juxtapositions of a midnight channel surf. This is musique concrète smuggled in through the living room, where found sounds, errant speech, and offhand gestures are folded and refracted - no two listens reveal the same sequence of ghosts.

The surface wobbles between reportage and hallucination, with textures that flirt with banal domesticity only to veer into passages shot through with mechanical anxiety and speculative fiction. There’s humor, but it’s corrosive rather than comforting; an ongoing subversion of the impulse to decode, where faux-familiar motifs are always slightly off-tune or a beat behind, as though the broadcast itself can’t remember its own premise. Instead of striving for easy coherence, Independent Television thrives on disorientation - buried drones, flickers of mangled speech, enigmatic non-events shuffled into a collage that unsettles as it seduces.

The release’s tactile rawness is underpinned by a deep attention to process: everyday actions transmuted into inexplicable rituals, field recording rendered uncanny by context and edit. The duo’s restless approach to composition is less about climax than the drift of implication, cultivating a suspension where every detail hums with the promise - or threat - of transformation. The album’s pacing, as circuitous as late-night insomnia, trades narrative momentum for the allure of perpetual tension and half-shared secrets. In this shadowplay, the mundane becomes mysterious, each passage a self-contained vignette that quivers on the rim of recognition.

Refusing nostalgia or glib experimentalism, Gulbenkoglu and Revert subtly critique the structures of entertainment and information. Theirs is an anti-television, one that broadcasts uncertainty, static, and speculative intimacy to the static-bound listener. Independent Television ultimately hooks its audience not through spectacle, but through an uncanny attunement to what culture so often edits out - the little slips, sidelong glances, and stammered signals, left resonating as the set flickers out.