What were your first recording experiences?
It's a shame I don't have them anymore, but I remember me and my best friend, at age five or six, recording bits and pieces on cassette. I would record Sesame Street off the television, putting my little boom box in front with the microphone by the speaker. It would be intercut with me and my friend, Gerard, making little radio dramas and things. Then I became a pop fan by listening to video and radio shows, harassing my parents to get a drum kit, and then obsessively starting to play drums. I was coming home from school and playing along with Stewart Copeland on the drums, loving The Police. I loved The Beatles since I was a kid. I remember trying to reverse-engineer Beatles songs. I was going to local studios with my first band in high school. That was the next recording experience.
What was your first studio experience like?
My band was called Downstares. There's a studio in Collingwood, Victoria, Australia, outside of Melbourne; an inner-city suburb. I recorded four songs. One of them I'd recorded at home using MIDI instruments on a Creative Labs Sound Blaster sound card. That's the first time I thought, "Oh, you can get string sounds and bongos in the computer!" I had a little keyboard, so I made do with that. The tracks we recorded with the band were like a metal thing, maybe a bit like Tool, or at least what I thought Tool sounded like. I was probably drawn to metal because of the technical, mathematical side to it as a drummer, starting to work out limb independence and being fascinated by interlocking rhythms and polyrhythms. Local studios around Melbourne had cheap rates that would come with an engineer, so we did a lot of things on ADAT at the time. The first programming I ever did was on a Roland Groovebox. I'd take that down to the studio with Downstares, and we'd put it down as a backing; like percussive parts, or synth things that we'd play along with.
Even for a high school band, doing a number of studio sessions is unusual to some degree, right?
I guess so. I definitely could tell that I was doing something a bit different from what a lot of high school bands were doing, which was, "Let's go in and record all ten of our songs," just punk style. We'd come in and say, "I want to do this one song. I don't know if we have enough money, but we've got to get it right today." The engineer would be like, "You've got sequencers here, and synths here. Do you want to treat this snare drum sound and use this flanger I've got?" We'd get to the end of the day and barely have tracked or be ready to mix. I was a bit ambitious. I was listening to a lot of Depeche Mode records, which I guess was my blueprint of what a record could sound like.
Which weren't easy for them to make, as you might know now!
They weren't doing it in a day! As a teenager, I was a bit oblivious that you couldn't make a reasonably elaborate, half-sequenced synth band production in a day, with an engineer who didn't know what you were aiming to do when you walked in there in the morning. I tried that a number of times with Downstares, to varying levels of success.
We all learn somewhere. Did you start putting something together to record at home?
Finishing high school, the four of us guys in the band were going different directions. That naturally made me go towards, "Should I try to record things myself?" I put a PC-based system together. I started with what was going to be Downstares tracks, thinking that I should produce these myself at home. That was before I was starting to sample records, with what became the first Gotye record after a few years. I was still trying to track live instruments at home on a pretty simple setup with two channels of preamps on an interface. But I was listening to bands like Portishead, Massive Attack, DJ Shadow [Tape Op #11], and Cut Chemist a lot. My friend, Andy Hutchinson, said, "Dude, you should sample records!" We'd go to the thrift shop and bring back records, and a neighbor had also given me this whole stack of records. My aspirations to make records that sounded like Depeche Mode or Massive Attack, that process had got me very deeply into like, "What else can I find in thrift shops to chop into bits to make whole tracks?" Trying to turn those Downstares tracks into full productions myself, I was feeling the lack of ability and knowledge – these weren't better than what I was able to do in studios with engineers and local assistants. But I had a few early successes cobbling samples together. Pragmatically it felt like a bridge towards, "Okay, I could make finished tracks that sound really good." Better records than I could do when I was tracking instruments. I thought, "Maybe I should stop tracking instruments and just use my voice, because that can work with the level of gear that I can afford." Sampling, apart from being a creative inspiration, also got me over the hump of making a record that I thought sounded good.
You don't get many people admitting that sampling can be a path forward.
I quickly realized that it's a different set of rules and limitations with sampling. Maybe it circumvents some things that feel like barriers to entry: the cost of recording in a studio, or the engineering expertise required to make drums sound really good. I don't think that means it's cheap. It might make those things easier, but it offers different possibilities. Obviously there are records you can't make without sampling, and there are records that you can't make without really having humans play in a room.
There are a million ways to make a record.
The first thing I thought was, "How far can I pitch-shift things and still have a musical end result that I find interesting?" I was doing a lot of pitch-shifting, shifting things down an octave or more, probably because of the trip-hop that I was listening to.
Listening to a DJ Shadow record, some sources you might be able to identify, but others he's picking a tiny little sound and manipulating it. You'd never know where it came from.
He might not know, either! I know that's certainly the case for me, especially if I was looking into little snippets. I don't know where that snare drum came from, but I manipulated it enough that if I don't recognize it, that's fine.
Did the music become your own project, at that point? Were you working with others?
I conceived Gotye as a project. I was working by myself in my bedroom for years, cobbling together about 20 tracks from which I selected the 12 that are on Boardface, the first album. I was making homemade demos. I'd do a lot of the artwork myself, burn the CDs myself, and then send the CDs in to radio stations – thinking that I could do things independently rather than looking for a manager.
You seemed to have a real tenacity.
It might have been a reaction to Downstares. We did a few Battle of the Bands, and even won one. We entered a radio-based Battle of the Bands with a very pop-based radio station in Melbourne. Listeners voted on a 20-second snippet of three songs, and our song got the listener's vote. They were like, "We'll be in touch with Downstares soon about their prize!" Then I never heard from them. What a bogus thing! A friend of mine, Marty Williams, said to me, "You don't need a label. If you can make your own records, you can distribute them. Maybe you need a distributor, but you can do your own promotion." I wanted people to hear what I was working on. I liked the aspect of being hands-on with everything. I love the physical object of records. I love the experience of entering portals to other worlds. I felt very connected to the fact that if you made music, you were also making the portal in a way that you might give it to someone else. That can be very direct.
The first Gotye record, Boardface, eventually attracted more attention in Australia?
Releasing it commercially was the result of having a bit of interest from a distributor named Creative Vibes. They wanted to put one of those homemade collection tracks ["The Only Thing I Know"] on their compilations of new Australian music called Evolutionary Vibes [Volume 5 - The Winter Of Our Discotheque]. They suggested that I could get a better mix of the song. I was interested, but also resistant. I went to Sydney and they paired me with an in-house engineer, Jimbo [Jim Sherringham], they worked with. Jimbo and I did a remix of the song. I thought there were good things about it, but there were also things that I didn't like. My more lo-fi version of the mix felt truer to what I was trying to do. That was my first experience of, "I do want to try to articulate the music I'm making to the best possibility." I don't want to say I'm only going to make it myself, or make it willfully lo-fi. No, I want to make records that sound great. I was exploring the possibility that I maybe could meet people to help me. That experience on the compilation was with good people, and we tried, but I don't think that it made my sound better. I thought, "Maybe I should stick with my own mixes and release the record myself." Creative Vibes said they were happy to be the distributor. I collected selections from those 20-odd tracks; in 2003 I pressed up the CDs myself, sent 500 of them to Creative Vibes, and they got them into stores. I had a bit of airplay, as well as some great responses from Australian community radio stations and Triple J early on. A year or so after that I'd put together a 12-piece band to play songs off Boardface at about three different locations around Melbourne. Obviously I couldn't pay anybody – it was pure favors.
Those are good friends.
Yeah. We did a few shows, but I felt like I got to a natural endpoint of what you might call an album cycle. I wouldn't have called it that. But I made an album over a number of years; I put it out myself, it got a little bit of radio airplay. I'd done a few shows and not lost a crazy amount of money, but still I hadn't made any money. I didn't even make enough money to buy a new computer to get a better sound card. I guess I was questioning, "What is success?" I was enjoying all the independent aspects of being very hands-on in every facet of putting the music out, but I had a point where I asked whether I wanted to keep doing it. It was a huge amount of work, energy, and effort. But I borrowed some money off my parents to buy a new Mac, and started using Ableton Live for the first time. That was part of the process of making my second record [Like Drawing Blood]. I was thinking, "Maybe I'll sell a few hundred copies, or even get a bit of radio airplay." But then that's the point at which things seemed to flip, where things went beyond my expectations. Since then, that's what I've experienced; and I've felt very, very lucky.
It seems crazy, right? The amount of success from one song?
Yeah, for better or worse. I don't know! I think I see the good things about it. I know I wouldn't be able to do these projects if it wasn't for the success of that song ["Somebody That I Used to Know"].
Sure. I mean it's crazy, right?
The tracks from Like Drawing Blood, I'd mixed to a level that Boardface was mixed to. Me doing the best I could, bouncing out my tracks with Sonic Foundry ACID. That was the best I could make it sound. I don't have a separate software option, or a separate hat to put on. This was the best I could do, automating all the effects I'd chosen and the arrangements I'd decided. That's my mix. I did try to work with some other mix engineers on Like Drawing Blood, but I realized it wasn't resulting in a process that I enjoyed. I found a few people where there was an aspect of ego and seniority, where it felt as though we weren't talking about the music. It was, "Let me make this decision. You don't know how much reverb this sound is meant to have." I was trying to meet someone who I wanted to work with, who was going to help my tracks become more clearly articulated, but also would be prepared to let me – in the end – call the shots. Then I met Fran'ois T'taz, on the suggestion of some of the people around the Creative Vibes label. They said, "We think you guys are coming from a similar place. You'll enjoy the way he works, because he's such an open guy, and he has an incredibly broad perspective on music history and modes of producing records."
That's really important to know a lot of different styles, and how they were created.
Yeah. We did a few tracks, and I loved the experience. It was everything I'd hoped for in working with a mixer. Making things sound better and clearer, yet still finding the soul of what may have been a demo-level production I'd put together, and managing to take those tracks further. I went to him saying, "Do you think you can make this better?" He listened to it and said he remembers playing it to a number of people at labels, saying, "There's something in this." He had a lot of responses from people that suggested, "Oh, this is cool, but this will never work. This doesn't have any place. Who's going to play this in Australia?" He wanted to work on my tracks, but I could only afford to do one mix with him. I saved up by working at the cafe or the library for three months to mix one more song. For me, $1,000, was a super cut rate at the time, but $1,000 was a huge amount of money to spend on one mix. I was doing it in dribs and drabs with Franc.
Do you feel that having his perspective, as well as helping you mix it, gave Making Mirrors a commercial leg up?
I think so. If you listen to my rough mixes, it's not like you'd say, "This is a completely different song." But it's a lot about articulation in a context. The challenge of how do you tell the story of this piece of music, this collection of frequencies, this collection of sonic ideas, in the most engaging way so that it invites people to that moment – which you always hope for – which is, "What's this? I want to hear this person sing." Or, "I want to hear the story that's in here." There might be a bunch of music I've made over the years that wouldn't engage as many people. It might be in there somewhere, but they'd have to listen into it, and really look for it, whereas Franc is great at bringing that articulation aspect in.
Were any parts re-tracked or manipulated massively?
Not on Like Drawing Blood. I would bounce tracks down to Sonic Foundry ACID; dry and wet, every channel, bringing in stems. Then we'd look at whether it made sense to recreate a reverb or, "Is there a better way to distort this?" Mostly he'd say, "No, I like what you've done on this fuzz here. Absolutely use this. I'm going to EQ it." Like Drawing Blood was purely him straight up mixing what I brought to him. There's a track, "The Only Way," that has a 30 Hz tone in it. I said, "I really want this low-sub "whoomp" with a long tail, like a Beyonc' track." His studio in Melbourne had these massive Duntech Audio speakers; he mixed that track and helped create this bass tone that underpins part of the song. Hearing him do it on those Duntechs was amazing, just this standing wave in the room! I guess there was the tiniest bit of additional production. But I feel like what Franc brings to my project is an additional production ear for mixing. I'm cobbling these things together from really disparate sources. A collection of textures and frequencies that gives the record a certain eclecticism, even frequency-wise, because it's coming from all these different places. He's great at enhancing those things. I feel like he's the only other person I've worked with who can understand it to the point where he's spent enough time with it. He'll ask what I'm trying to say. He's guessing a little bit, but he's also getting to know me better as a person. He has a feeling for where I'm reaching towards but haven't gotten to yet, sonically. He'll take these things like putty and tease it out, but without breaking it. That's what he's always trying to do. "How far can we explode this without breaking it?"
Changing the presentation or perspective can really ruin or enhance a mix.
It can, yeah. I've been amazed at hearing quite passable mixes, that are objectively better than my rough mixes, but that I felt were absolutely not better pieces of music. They didn't tell the story in an engaging way, or in a way that's even as engaging as how lo-fi my rough mix might be. That really fascinates me; the one step forward, two steps back thing when you get the perspective on a piece of music wrong.
