We all know the single that broke multiple records, becoming the earworm of the 2010s, but Making Mirrors as a complete body of work offers so much more than ‘Somebody That I Used To Know'.
“ This philosophy of bringing together sounds in such a fortuitous manner brings to light an entire landscape of sound so familiar, yet so completely untouched. It’s this meeting of sounds that have had no reason to be fused other than a vehement curiosity...”
It was in fact a barn conversion on his parent’s Mornington property that fostered the sonic result of Gotye’s intelligent fondness for the weird and abstract. Wally De Backer, a Belgian-born, Victorian-raised composer found his feet with his third studio album, Making Mirrors, released in 2011.
The record is drenched in 1980s art pop and experimental synthesiser backdrops, both of which were captured by the relaxed environment in which Making Mirrors was recorded. The familial ties Gotye had to his recording setup was one that allowed for this free rein of experimental exploration, and resulting fruition of an interesting temporal philosophy.
Making Mirrors challenges the idea of a moment. One could argue that authentic artistry strives to create a moment through music. It’s this seeking of complete and ultimate attention to music and the required respect for its ephemerality, that is so often sought after by musicians. We want to create music that stops people in their tracks, and to consume them entirely. But this idea of a moment is so often placed in present tense. What we find in Making Mirrors is this philosophical underpinning of temporality and the celebration of specific moments, under the guise of pop – a style attractive to the masses.
There is a sonic voraciousness about Gotye’s compositional accent; he is an accumulator of sound. Whilst to the ear we are greeted by a multitude of futuristic keys and pads, diverging here and there with a few acoustic licks, the album is one based off of a celebration of bygone eras — to the music researcher/nerd, the album is an ode to musical pasts.
Equipped with a lingering reverberation of musical influences from Bach inventions, Electric Light Orchestra and Kate Bush, Gotye’s musical diet has rendered him an architect of modern retro-pop. Built on pillars of simple piano structures, Gotye elects sampling as his main compositional tool.
Amidst the musical alchemy of his tracks alone, the magniloquence of Making Mirrorsis tied by an interest in reintroducing sounds from the past within an accessible, contemporary setting. We hear this in the album’s prelude, an orchestral overture with hard stereo panning and soft vocals doused in crackly reverb and uneven delay. The minute long track sounds like morning, and with eyes dusted of sleep, Making Mirrors leads you to a realm of fantastic discovery.
Untangling myself from the more hardcore rock timbres of ‘Easy Way Out’, the smoky jazz club vibes of ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ and the guileless innocence of ‘Bronte’, I realised that picking a few top tracks on this album would be a feat.
However, with an appetite for creating eerie country soundscapes, generally approached by acoustic folk, Gotye addresses themes of emptiness and loneliness in ‘Eyes Wide Open’, thus bringing us to my first album pick. A true lesson in sampling and provoking conventional genre confines, this heavily electronically-modified track lies underneath a surface level traditional rock setup.
This philosophy of bringing together sounds in such a fortuitous manner brings to light an entire landscape of sound so familiar, yet so completely untouched. It’s this meeting of sounds that have had no reason to be fused other than a vehement curiosity, which in this case, Gotye has moulded into a track that speaks to the anxieties of contemporary living. The track is founded off of a repeated train sample, a bassline pocket-recorded on a fence in outback Queensland, and whale songs, yet assemble themselves beneath crisp, passionate vocal harmonies and gallop tom beats; the track’s musical idiosyncrasies are embraced by an alternative rock feel.
As a side note, my favourite part of ’Eyes Wide Open’ is the interplay between sampled and tracked sound. Gotye shares a lot with western folk music, perhaps not audibly, but there are specific values of performance which bind them. Blood harmonies are those found when siblings or close family members sing together, and their voices are able to combine flawlessly. We hear this in the works of the Finn brothers, or Angus and Julia Stone. We get a similar feel in ‘Eyes Wide Open’, however these blood harmonies appear without any vocal line whatsoever. The languidness of the pedal steel guitar converses seamlessly with the humpback whale sample, creating a delicate latticework of sound, and at times, its impossible to determine where each sound begins and ends. These musical interactions run throughout the entire album, and are an absolute pleasure to the ear.
The past meeting the present in a futuristic soundscape, perfectly encapsulates my next pick, ’State of The Art’. This brings us back to the idea of the moment within Making Mirrors. The album becomes a conduit for thought, with ‘State of The Art’ being one possible solution to the question; how else is time treated in music, if not for its given ephemerality?
Formulated around a traditional Taiwanese folk tune, the track’s bassline is transposed down an octave and quantised to fit in a new rhythmic groove. Layered with sampled Turkish drums, the track is ultimately an exploration of the sounds that the Lowrey Cotillion D575 Organ has to offer. Gotye utilises its extensive sound bank and creates this creepy musical narrative on the power of technology. What may be the pinnacle of technological advancement can so quickly become quaint and outdated. An idea which is investigated musically through sampling “the old”. Very meta. Very cool.
Whilst Making Mirrors has become archetypal of modern pop done well, it is Gotye’s artistic restlessness and alchemic endeavour that renders the album musically available to both the drive home and the avid researcher, alike.
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