Aptly titled ‘Under a Different Sky’, Via Tania (a.k.a. Tania May-Bowers) named her debut full-length album for her immigration experience from Australia to Chicago, where she developed her dreamily myste-rious sound. "The sky is different in Australia - it's hard to explain," she says on the phone from Sydney. "There are so many colors and it's more intense. Even the trees and grass are a different color."

On the 10-track album, she sings about lost love and other snapshots of life and plays guitar, bass, and keyboards; Jeff Parker and John Herndon of Isotope 217 and Tortoise contribute, and Prefuse-73 co-produces two of the tracks.

Your music reminds me of Bjork, Portishead, and Massive Attack. Do peo-ple say that you're as mysterious in everyday life as you are in your music?

Sometimes people say I'm not very extroverted. I'm quite happy to listen to other people's conversations and not say a word. People can be uncomfort-able with people like me. But a lot of people are like that - if they could express themselves in the moment, they wouldn't feel the need to make art.

Like how they say poets don't have much to say in person because they've got a world to write about on paper. When did you get your start in music?

When I was 16, I started a band with my sister, a friend, and the only girl in school who could drum and was into heavy metal. I sang and played bass. The band was called Spdfgh and I did it for seven years.

Spdfgh? How do you say that?

Spuh-duh-fuh-guh-huh. It comes from science [a compound's molecular struc-ture}. It was silly but it stuck. We had to explain the name forever. It was nice because I had a great history with this band and we made a record, but we did-n't go overseas. It was a fun growing-up experience. After Spdfgh, I moved to Chicago and it was a nice break. My new music is really different from Spdfgh, which was poppy, garage-y, noise-y stuff with three-girl harmonies. After high school, we supported the Breeders the first time they came to Australia, and we also opened for Bikini Kill, Elastica, Supergrass, etc. Then it started to fall apart - I wanted to make much more mellow music and I was into it more than anyone else in the band. I was sick of playing in stinky pubs and stuff. ... I ended up meeting Casey [Rice, now her husband] because he was on tour in Australia - we recorded some songs, and that was the start of my new stuff.

And that's when you decided to move to Chicago?

I moved there in 1999 and stayed there for three and a half years'. ... I was born in South Africa, moved to Melbourne and then to Sydney, which is where I spent my teens and 20s. There's this thing in Australia where you have to back-pack around the world, and I was feeling a need to travel, so Chicago was quite a surreal move for me. Casey had recommended Chicago as a good place to make music - and it is. I met a lot of people and worked with Joan of Arc, Rob Mazurek, Archer Prewitt, the Eternals, and others. It's an amazing community. Now that I'm back in Australia, I think I'll be visiting Chicago a lot more - it's where I want to make music. I think people go to New York to become famous, and you go to places like Chicago if you really want to make music. It's more sincere. I think Los Angeles would be the worst place in the world.

This is kind of random, but I've heard that Australians are really into magazines. Is this true?

That's how they see the rest of the world - through magazines. Their lives are really influenced by magazines. I'll walk down the street and see people who look like they came right out of an i-D photo shoot. It's the only way that Australians can get excited about the rest of the world. Before I left, I was a total magazine junkie. I used to rip out the pages. I think a lot of lot of people buy the crappy tabloid stuff, which is a waste of money.