Gotye - A Game of Mirrors

Bruges, Belgium; the year is 1980, and the De Backer family welcomes the birth of little Wouter. Two years later they leave his native land for Melbourne (Australia), the city where the young scion (later known as Wally for school reasons) will see his passion for music blossom: the instruments he'll focus on are piano and drums.

Wouter's friendship with bassist Lucas Taranto began when the two formed the band Downstares, which, thanks to intense live activity and solid pop-rock songwriting, caught the attention of the Australian press. Wouter's youthful love for Kate Bush and Depeche Mode is well known and plain to see for all web-surfers, but less familiar is his curiosity about Japanese language and culture, and about law — the erratic progress of his university studies would be the reason the young man didn't follow his family in 2001, instead staying on at the house in Montmorency (Victoria), which would become the logistical base for his new musical adventures.

It's the most important period for Wally's musical development — accounts tell of legends and anecdotes about the Frat House, with its growing stream of friends and musicians coming and going, and above all the artist's frustration at finding no outlet for his creative drive. Drums are the only instrument the musician owns and knows inside out, but technology offers new frontiers: thanks to sampling and laptops, Wouter discovers the possibility of virtually expanding his arsenal of instruments.

It would take an unexpected, almost providential event to provide the decisive input: an elderly neighbor, struck by his passion for music and remembering his gigs with Downstares, gives him his late wife's record collection. A friend, convinced of his potential, suggests using that huge mass of vinyl music to extract the sounds and suggestions needed to create new songs.

Persistence and tenacity help Wouter in this new creative phase, which begins to bear its first fruit with a four-track EP pressed in fifty hand-drawn copies. The mini-album includes "Out Here In The Cold", the future opening track of his debut.

Meanwhile, meeting Kris Schroeder and Tim Heath gives vent to his appetite for live music with the formation of the band Basics: the fusion of pop, reggae, ska, electronica and country is well documented across the group's four albums. Although some creative roots are shared, the two sonic projects retain their own distinct identity and artistic autonomy.

Wouter preserves his laptop-music philosophy for the Gotye project, which arrives at its first true album, Boardface, collecting the twelve tracks from the three previously released limited-edition, hand-drawn EPs. The artist also inherits his father's passion for painting, and pays tribute to it by using one of his drawings for the album cover.

Boardface presents twelve tracks composed within the welcoming confines of his bed, with the help of an Intel 386 computer. The ideas and exploits of Moby are easily evoked, but it's only a shared attitude. Curious and sensitive to a wide range of sound sources, the musician seems drawn to vintage tones and 1950s soundtracks, to the point that "Out In The Cold" opens the album amid Hollywood references and a sensual, decadent melancholy. "True To You" is excellent, a funk track steeped in noir eroticism that features the vocal cravings of Michaela Alexander; "What Do You Want?" is a stunning, sly and mischievous rumba rich with exotic sounds lifted from old 4-Phase Rca vinyl records.

The tracks are almost all mid-tempo, framed by drum'n'bass, with the abrasive exception of "The Only Thing I Know", an electro-rock piece that would later resurface on the international version of Like Drawing Blood.

Blues, soul, rock, jazz and house sounds slip deftly through the hands of young Wally (from now on "Gotye"), who proves to be a skilled and refined composer. His happiness is made of small things — the sweater embroidered with a teddy bear is the fruit of sales that meet his modest expectations. When his parents sell the frat-house, Wally moves to Melbourne, Australia, splitting his time between working at a local library and making music.

An Apple G-4 and more comfortable mattresses see the birth of the songs that would make up his second album, Like Drawing Blood.

Released in 2006 as a self-released effort, the project won acclaim from the Australian press, earning several awards such as "best independent release of the year": the album's title (which many biographies mistakenly trace back to a difficult period in the artist's life) actually comes from an accident he had while licking an envelope to seal it. A 36th-place chart position in Australia and 35,000 copies sold marked the beginning of his conquest of the world.

Listening to Like Drawing Blood leaves no one indifferent: beautifully crafted grooves, trip-hop and a touch of jungle, stirred together with a wide range of influences spanning reggae, soul, rhythm and blues, right through to lounge and dream-pop — an album that sounds familiar for all the reference points it draws on, yet also feels fresh and stimulating thanks to the sheer strength of the songwriting.

Recorded entirely in his bedroom in 2006 (an earlier version was privately distributed by the author) and only licensed for release in the rest of the world in 2008, the record immediately stands out as one of the decade's most brilliant examples of laptop-music.

Wally De Backer's music flirts with the mainstream, yet it conveys a sense of modernity by rejecting the bombast typical of supermarket pop music. There's an immense care given to the sounds, which brings his style close to the art-rock of artists like Peter Gabriel or Blue Nile, while at the same time a taste for the unpredictable adds a freshness that sets it apart from the genre. A true breath of fresh air, its vibrant sound paired with a delicate melancholy.

The critics' excessive caution fails to grasp the album's complex variety, which ranges from the Arabic pop of "The Only Way" to the Depeche Mode-style dark-soul of "Thanks For Your Times", all the way to the dance pulse of "Like Drawing Blood", an impetuous track wrapped in exotic, sensual scents reminiscent of Trans-Global-Underground. The music moves confidently through dub excursions ("Puzzle With A Piece Missing"), lounge and western flavors ("Seven Hours With A Backseat Driver"), and sugary romanticism ("Night Drive"), all without giving up the imagination and disenchantment that lend it lightness and good taste.

In the international version, the powerful rock incursion of "The Only Thing I Know" is reinstated by Boardface in place of the trip-hop of "A Distinctive Sound", giving the album even more depth. It offers further gems such as the frenzied "Learnaligivinalovin" – a Motown-school rhythm & blues track, dirty just enough to get bodies moving – the delightful trip-hop ballad "Heart's A Mess" and the euphoric madness of "Coming Back", a sensual electronic tango graced by a spectacular arrangement.

The seventy thousand copies sold in Australia and the success of the singles lifted from the album ("Learnalilgivinalovin", "Heart's A Mess") bring Gotye success at home, topping the music press's readers' poll. Wouter never loses his natural curiosity for alternative sound sources – old records, cassettes and videos bought in secondhand shops, a passion he shares with some of the musicians involved in the remix project Mixed Blood.

There are no fewer than three remixes of "Heart's A Mess", among which Joe Hardy's excellent nocturnal version stands out, but it's Ens's rework of "Puzzle With A Piece Missing" that's the real surprise: sensual and refined, it surpasses the original in quality.

Not everything, however, lives up to the original project: "Learnalilgivinanlovin" stays in limbo, "The Only Thing I Know" loses its shine and energy, while "Coming Back", in Inga Liljestrom's reinterpretation, intrigues and introduces powerful dream-pop atmospheres.

Around the same time, Gotye sends the press a promo version of the album, which also includes the instrumental tracks without vocals – a CD that becomes a sought-after item among collectors, partly for its curious packaging.

Having settled permanently in Melbourne, Gotye sets up a recording studio in his parents' old farmhouse, and transforms an old painting by his father into the cover for his new album, Making Mirrors. His curiosity about different and unusual sound sources leads the musician to get hold of a portable stereo recorder to capture random sounds (taken from plastic pipes, wooden beams, frogs, tambourines) and field recordings.

But the real novelty of the project is the greater presence of live recordings with real instruments. Contributions from other musicians make the sound even more vital: Michael Hubbard (pedal steel guitar), Gareth Skinner (harmonic sound effects on cello), Lucas Taranto (bass) and, above all, Francois Tetaz (additional production and mixing) give shape to the Australian musician's ever-inspired ideas.

The new album marks the artistic peak after eight years of exploration. The Technics 1200 keeps drawing strange voices and sounds from disparate sound sources with no obvious stylistic coherence, while Gotye's brilliant rhythmic intrusions and the minimal contributions of a few musician friends carve out every breath of these new, inspired laptop music creations. Rock and soul, laced with a gentle psych-folk and art-rock touch, merge the sonic solutions of Peter Gabriel with r'n'b as reinterpreted by Beck and Mgmt, in a style that is by now familiar and distinctly his own.

A brilliant and rare example of creative perfection, "Somebody That I Used To Know" is the hit single that the rich and imaginative 2011 was missing: a few bass lines introduce exotic instruments (a mini-xylophone), and Kimbra's magnetic voice unfurls in a harmonic interplay of barely perceptible timbral shifts that make the track enchanting. The listener remains captive to a sonic spell that runs through the whole album. Sixties pop ("In Your Light"), lively guitar riffs ("Easy Way Out"), excellent tribal rhythmic interweavings ("Smoke And Mirrors") all fulfil Gotye's ambitions with extraordinary results. The vintage touches and Motown echoes of "I Feel Better", the reggae fragments accompanying the vocoder in "State Of The Art" and the noise-electronic contaminations in "Don't Worry, We'll Be Watching You" round off one of the most skilful art pop records of the decade. Making Mirrors distils years of musical languages, regenerating familiar sensations and restoring credibility to the subtle art of pop.

The success of Making Mirrors is slow but overwhelming: the UK chart is stormed, and before long the single "Somebody That I Used To Know" appears on charts everywhere, including the Italian one – an event that, in an age of multimedia and fragmented output, sounds nothing short of a miracle. The endless string of covers of the track shows that Gotye has pulled off the difficult feat of captivating a vast audience seemingly numbed by the "golden mediocrity" of contemporary music. Now, though, things get tougher for the Australian musician: predictability lurks around the corner, but his skill in handling different sound sources is still largely unexplored.

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