Sold Out Gotye
SOLD OUT: Gotye
Event on 2012-02-02 20:00:00
Ask Gotye about his new album Making Mirrors and hell speak not of songs, but of sounds. Hell 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.
Listen to Making Mirrors and youll 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, 2006s 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 11th 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.
After Like Drawing Blood, which was constructed almost entirely from samples of old vinyl, Gotye set about making an album 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 its 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.
Gotyes background is as a drummer and often plays his shows solo, setting off samples from behind his drum kit while singing. On Eyes Wide Open, the first song recorded for Making Mirrors, he played live drums for the first time on a Gotye record. There is also live piano and bass guitar, plus some strange field recordings.
I recorded sounds from around my parents block me walking up the path, the frogs in the background and wove them subtly in to several songs. I even included the ambience of the barn in the background of Dont Worry, Well Be Watching You. The most obvious field recording is of the Winton Musical Fence. I played the fence strings one windy night in the outback and recorded it on a portable stereo. That became the bassline for Eyes Wide Open.
The dubby State Of The Art, with its spooky, pitch-shifted, sci-fi vocals, is an ode to the Lowrey Cotillion, with lyrics that mention its keys and functions.
Im 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 dont 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. Its like we inscribe our dreams on these machines sometimes; we can develop these peculiar yet profound personal relationships with them.
In contrast, the joyous, uptempo I Feel Better revisits the Motown sound of Like Drawing Bloods breakthrough single Leanalilgivinanlovin.
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 its 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.
Already Making Mirrors is making waves thanks to stunning, Peter Gabriel-esque, first single Somebody That I Used To Know, a collaboration with New Zealand singer Kimbra which is currently nestled in the Australian Top 10. Within three weeks of its striking, stop-frame, body-painting video being posted on YouTube, the song had received more than two million hits and made it to No.1 on the Hype Machine Twitter chart. Hear it once and youll be haunted by it for weeks.
Gotye launched Making Mirrors in Australia in August with a gig at Sydney Opera House, which is 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. Weve been rehearsing twice a week for the past 3 months, and its exciting because its dangerous. It could go wrong on every song. Ive never been one to make my life easy.
at El Rey Theatre
5515 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, United States
Death Cab for Cutie with The Magik*Magik Orchestra
Event on 2012-04-30 19:00:00
Supporting Acts: Youth Lagoon
Death Cab for Cutie with The Magik*Magik Orchestra
"Death Cab for Cutie's rise from small-time solo project to Grammy-nominated rock band is one of indie rock's greatest success stories. Launched in the bayside college town of Bellingham, Washington, the group was originally a side project for singer/guitarist Ben Gibbard, an engineering student at Western Washington University who split his time between school and music. Taking a break from his local power pop band, Pinwheel, Gibbard began recording an album's worth of solo material during the summer of 1997. Producer Chris Walla lent his help to the sessions, which resulted in an eight-song cassette entitled You Can Play These Songs with Chords. When the tape became a local hit, Gibbard reached into his circle of friends to form a band, hoping to play the new songs live. Bassist Nick Harmer (Gibbard's roommate) and drummer Nathan Good climbed aboard, and Walla enlisted as the band's primary guitarist (he would also go on to produce most of the band's future releases). With a lineup now in place, Gibbard's group rechristened itself Death Cab for Cutie (named after a song by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band) and signed a contract with the Seattle-based Barsuk Records within a year's time.
The quartet made its studio debut with 1998's Something About Airplanes, an album that featured several re-recorded tracks from the You Can Play These Songs with Chords cassette as well as a dreamy, pop-oriented sound reminiscent of Built to Spill. Gibbard and Walla both continued to pursue their own projects (including Gibbard's successful stint with the Postal Service), but that didn't keep Death Cab for Cutie from returning to the studio for a second album, We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes, which appeared in 2000. Nathan Good left the group just prior to the album's completion, and We Have the Facts introduced Michael Schorr as Death Cab's new drummer. The Forbidden Love EP arrived that same year, while a third full-length effort, The Photo Album, was released in 2001. By this time, a sizable audience had gathered around the band's emotional music, and Barsuk re-released You Can Play These Songs with Chords in 2002 with ten additional songs.
The polished, hook-laden Transatlanticism arrived in 2003 and announced the arrival of drummer Jason McGerr, who had previously played in a band with Nick Harmer before Death Cab's formation. The album also proved to be a very important step in the band's career, gathering positive attention from consumers and industry execs (including television producer Josh Schwartz, who prominently featured the band's music throughout several seasons of The O.C.). With their popularity at an all-time high, the bandmates issued a live disc, The John Byrd E.P., and later signed a worldwide major-label deal with Atlantic Records in November 2004.
Plans was released the following summer and debuted at number four, remaining on the Billboard charts for nearly one year and achieving platinum status on the strength of three singles (including the acoustic ballad "I Will Follow You into the Dark"). Death Cab for Cutie graced the cover of Spin magazine, appeared on an episode of Saturday Night Live, and earned a Grammy nomination for their major-label debut. Work on a follow-up album coincided with the release of Chris Walla's solo effort, Field Manual, and Death Cab returned in May 2008 with Narrow Stairs, a darker effort that debuted at the top of the Billboard 200. The band proceeded to tour throughout the remainder of the year, while a deluxe version of Something About Airplanes (which was packaged with a recording of their very first show in Seattle) was released in November to introduce newer fans to Death Cab's early material.
Death Cab for Cutie continued touring throughout the first half of 2009, hitting Japan and Australia as well as an additional slew of American venues. The Open Door EP arrived that spring, featuring several scrapped songs from the Narrow Stairs sessions and a demo version of "Talking Bird." The guys incorporated some of those songs into their live sets, all the while preparing to return to the studio after the tour's completion. After a short hiatus — not to mention a wedding for Ben Gibbard, who married actress/musician Zooey Deschanel — they reconvened for 2011's Codes and Keys, which found the band relying less on the electric guitar and more on moody, Cure-inspired song textures. Later in 2011 (right around the same time Gibbard and Deschanel announced their split) they released an EP of remixes of songs from the album titled Keys and Codes Remix EP." – Andrew Leahey, AllMusicGuide
at Strathmore
5301 Tuckerman Lane
Rockville, United States
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January 29th, 2012 by Jared | Comments Off |
