LIMITED TIME FREE VIDEO DOWNLOAD:: Gotye Making Mirrors: Making Real Music

Source:  Universal Music Canada

Ask Gotye about his new album Making Mirrors and he’ll speak not of songs, but of sounds. He’ll describe the various valves through which strings and choirs cycle on his Lowrey Cotillion, a vintage organ bought for 100 bucks in a second-hand shop that features on the record. Or how he constructed a bassline by sampling the Winton Musical Fence, an unlikely instrument he discovered in the outback of Queensland, Australia, comprised of five large metal strings attached to wooden fence posts and a resonant chamber. He may mention the horn break from a traditional Taiwanese folk song he discovered on a 1970s Cathay Pacific promotional record, which he sampled, sped up and dubbed out, before introducing it to some Turkish drum sounds. Or the unique, virtual versions of acoustic instruments- among them a chromaharp and an mbira - he created by painstakingly multisampling every note.

Video for Somebody That I Used to Know (feat. Kimbra) is a free download on iTunes as well until Monday, February 6th – go HERE.

Listen to Making Mirrors and you’ll be drawn in by the details, transported to a world where every moment matters. This is pop at its most precise, but also electronic music at its most emotional. The record delves into dub, Detroit-era Motown soul, stadium-size politipop, synth-folk and world music on glorious, sprawling, huge-hearted songs.

Gotye (pronounced Gauthier) first found fame in his native Australia with his second album, 2006’s Like Drawing Blood. Radio station Triple J named it their album of the year, as did iTunes on its release in Europe in 2008. It was recently voted the 11^th greatest Australian album of all time. In Britain, Like Drawing Blood became a cult hit while in the States, it made waves after Drew Barrymore fell in love with single Learnalilgivinanlovin’ and used it in several of her films.

Making Mirrors, its extraordinary follow-up, was more than two and a half years in the making. To write and record its dozen sumptuous songs, Gotye moved from Melbourne to a barn on his parents’ remote five hectare block on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. There, he had the space to permanently set up his growing array of instruments and recording equipment, and found the isolation that allowed for sonic experimentation and recording at any time of the day.

Like Drawing Blood was constructed almost entirely from samples of old vinyl, so for this outing Gotye set about using more physical and acoustic instruments.

“I ended up sampling a lot of them note-by-note and turning them into virtual instruments,” he explains. “It’s a slow and sometimes laborious process, but it can completely change the sound of the instrument and how you approach playing it. You can buy so many virtual instruments online these days, but it’s not nearly as personal as making them yourself. I found a beautiful old chromaharp at an antique shop, and ‘virtualised’ it in this way. It ended up sounding more like an unusual hammer dulcimer when played on a midi keyboard or programmed with software”

Meanwhile, Gotye continued to raid local second-hand shops for obscure vinyl to sample.

 “A lot of samples came from 1950s and ‘60s exotica records,” says Gotye. “Guys like Les Baxter; these amazing orchestrators and producers who experimented so boldly with musical colours and the stereo spectrum”

“For Bronte, the closing track on the new record, I used a sample of ‘60s orchestrator Leo Addeo. He made an exotica record called Calypso which featured lots of wildly out-of-tune steel drums. I pitched some grabs of these around, really messing with the overtones of the samples, and it became a gentle, beautiful loop, while still being quite odd sonically.”

Gotye’s first instrument is the drums, yet on Eyes Wide Open he played live drums for the first time on one of his records.

“I wanted there to be more live playing on this record. Carefully crafting and programming samples allows me to create parts I might not otherwise come up with while playing an instrument, but it also means an element of spontaneity or humanness can be lost. The energy that comes from playing drums was what I really wanted to capture at the centre of this song. Around this, the bass sounds from the Winton Musical Fence and the languid pedal steel guitar could combine to create this sense of an isolated plateau, a post-apocalyptic wasteland maybe. They’re quite otherworldly sounds”

The strange dub of State Of The Art, with its pitched-down sci-fi vocals and layers of idiosyncratic electronic sounds, is an ode to the Lowrey Cotillion organ, with lyrics that playfully examine its various functions while these sounds jostle for the listener’s attention. But the song also functions as something of an allegory for our relationship with technology from a bygone era.

“I’m fascinated by how attached to certain pieces of technology we can become. I mean, I love this organ!,” laughs Gotye. “But I was also interested in how these relationships don’t often hold between generations. Certain pieces of gear that once captured peoples’ imagination can now appear quaint and outdated to younger people. Yet those who experienced them when they were at the vanguard of technological achievement, sometimes still hold onto that glorious vision of the future they provided. It’s like we inscribe our dreams on these machines sometimes; we can develop these peculiar yet profound personal relationships with them.”

In contrast, the joyous, up-tempo I Feel Better feels like it echoes a time when technology was not as central to music production as it is today, revisiting the Detroit-era sound of ‘60s Motown soul.

“That song was a direct response to listening to Martha Reeves’ Dancing In The Street when I was driving home one day,” says Gotye. “I was struck by how massive the tambourine sound on the recording is – it feels like it’s being hit by the hand of God. I thought it was cool that such a wall of sound could be dominated by a physically quite small instrument like a tambourine. So I arrived home, played a tambourine backbeat at a similar tempo and put an impossibly big plate reverb on it. Sitting down at the piano in response to this percussion track, I had I Feel Better written in about an hour.”

Making Mirrors is already making waves thanks to the stunning Peter Gabriel-esque first single Somebody That I Used To Know, a collaboration with New Zealand pop-superstar-in-waiting Kimbra. Within three weeks of its striking, stop-time-animated body-painting video being posted on YouTube, the song had received more than a million views. Yet it is not an obvious pop song by any stretch of the imagination, foregrounding husky, under-enunciated vocals from Gotye set against a hypnotically loping grab of classical guitar. It takes over a minute and a half to get to the first chorus, and doesn’t truly reach its apex until the last quarter of the song, when Kimbra’s showstopping feature leads into Gotye’s exasperated, almost screamed chorus vocals. Hear the song once though and you will be haunted by it for weeks, such is the compelling combination of heartbreak in the lyric with alternately restrained then explosive instrumentation.

Gotye launches Making Mirrors in Australia in August at Sydney Opera House, followed by a tour in the autumn. For the first time, he will be playing Gotye music completely live.

“I have a ten-piece band, in which everyone sings and plays multiple instruments,” says Gotye. “These are by far my most ambitious shows to date. There will be no backing tracks used. All visuals will be triggered live too. We’ve been rehearsing twice a week for the past 3 months, and it’s exciting because it’s dangerous. It could go wrong on every song. I’ve never been one to make my life easy.”


www.gotye.com