🎵 Making Mirrors — Gotye (2011)

The official album cover of Making Mirrors, scanned from Disc 1 of this 2-disc edition (see Disc 1/Folder.jpg).

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📖 Album at a Glance

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🎙️ Production & Recording — The Story Behind Making Mirrors

Making Mirrors is, in every meaningful sense, a one-man record. Wally De Backer wrote, arranged, produced, engineered, mixed, and performed nearly every note on the album in a converted barn-studio on his parents' dairy farm in Tarnook, regional Victoria. The album took roughly three and a half years to complete — a painstaking, sample-driven process in which Wally spliced together old vinyl finds, custom-recorded field percussion, programmed drums, and played most of the live instrumentation himself. He has described the process in interviews as "almost forensic" — months could pass refining a single snare sound or vocal take.

The album's title, Making Mirrors, comes from a track on the record ("Making Mirrors", the opening instrumental) and reflects Wally's enduring fascination with the way samples reflect and refract their source material — a kind of musical mirror. The title also nods to a sample used on the record from Luiz Bonfá's 1967 track "Seville" (used on "Somebody That I Used to Know") — every sample, in Wally's words, is "a little mirror held up to another time and place."

The album was conceived as the natural follow-up to his breakthrough second record Like Drawing Blood (2006), which had earned him widespread critical acclaim in Australia but limited international reach. With Making Mirrors, Wally wanted to push further into layered, organic electronica — informed by his love of 1960s pop (The Zombies, The Beatles, Burt Bacharach), art-rock (Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel), soul and Motown, and the sample-based soundscapes of artists like DJ Shadow and Röyksopp. The result is a record that resists easy genre classification: every track feels like its own self-contained world, yet they cohere around a unified palette of warm, vintage-sounding instrumentation and meticulous arrangement.

Key production techniques on the album include:

• Sample-based songwriting: Several tracks are built from a single vinyl sample. "Somebody That I Used to Know" pivots around a 4-bar sample from Luiz Bonfá's "Seville"; "Eyes Wide Open" features a sample of Wally's own field recording of a musical saw; "State of the Art" is built around a vintage Lowrey Cotillion organ.
• Layered vocals: Wally frequently stacks 8–20 vocal passes, panning them across the stereo field to create a "choir-of-one" effect — most audible on "I Feel Better" and "In Your Light".
• Found percussion: Instead of stock drum samples, Wally recorded metallic clangs, handclaps, foot-stomps, kitchen utensils, and a child's xylophone, then quantized and tuned them to fit each track.
• Live instruments on top of samples: Each track usually combines a vinyl-derived bed with Wally's own overdubbed drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, and vocals — giving the sampled material an organic, "played" feel.
• Self-recording on modest gear: The Barn was built around an old Digidesign Pro Tools HD rig, a Neve 8801 channel strip, and a Yamaha U1 upright piano. Most tracking was done with a single Shure SM7B for vocals and a pair of Josephson C42s as room mics.

The whole record was mixed by Wally himself, then sent to William Bowden (Mr. Bill) in Sydney for mastering. This combination — obsessive home production plus world-class mastering — is widely credited as the source of the album's distinctive sonic signature: at once intimate and enormous.

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🎶 Disc 1 — The Original Album

Twelve tracks. The standard Making Mirrors album as released on 19 August 2011 in Australia. Total runtime: approximately 50 minutes 39 seconds.

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🎧 Disc 2 — Bonus Tracks & Remixes (this edition only)

Ten additional tracks: B-sides from the Making Mirrors sessions plus a full run of remixes of the two lead singles. These are the cuts that did not make the original Australian 12-track album but were compiled for the 2-disc special edition.

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🌍 Reception, Commercial Performance & Legacy

Making Mirrors is one of the most commercially successful independently released albums of the 21st century. Upon its Australian release in August 2011, the album debuted at #1 on the ARIA Albums Chart, and the breakout single "Somebody That I Used to Know" (featuring Kimbra) spent eight consecutive weeks at #1 on the ARIA Singles Chart. By early 2012, the single had crossed over to Europe, where it went to #1 in more than 30 countries — including the UK Singles Chart (where it spent four weeks at the top) and the US Billboard Hot 100 (where it spent eight weeks at #1 from February to April 2012). At one point in March 2012, the song was simultaneously #1 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium — a feat achieved by only a handful of singles in chart history.

The album itself reached #1 on the US Billboard 200 in February 2012, displacing Adele's 21 from a long-running reign. By the end of 2012, Making Mirrors had sold more than 2 million copies worldwide; the single "Somebody That I Used to Know" had sold more than 13 million digital copies globally — at the time, one of the best-selling digital singles of all time. In Australia, the album was certified 9× Platinum by ARIA and later received a rare Diamond certification; in the United States it was certified Platinum by the RIAA; in Germany it was certified 7× Platinum by the BVMI; and in the United Kingdom it was certified Platinum by the BPI.

Critically, the album was widely praised. Pitchfork gave it a 7.3/10, calling it "a meticulous, sample-rich pop record that rewards close listening". The Guardian awarded it four stars out of five, describing Wally as "a one-man Beach Boys for the digital age". Rolling Stone Australia named Making Mirrors the Album of the Year for 2011. At the 2011 ARIA Awards, the album swept the major categories: Album of the Year, Best Male Artist, Best Pop Release, Best Australian Live Act, and Best Video (for the stop-motion "Somebody" clip directed by Natasha Pincus). At the 55th Annual Grammy Awards in February 2013, "Somebody That I Used to Know" won Record of the Year — beating out entries by The Black Keys, Kelly Clarkson, Fun., Frank Ocean, and Taylor Swift — and was also nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, which it also won.

In the years since its release, Making Mirrors has been reappraised as a landmark of the 2010s indie-pop era. "Somebody That I Used to Know" has appeared on numerous "best of the decade" lists, including Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" (2021 revision, at #322), NME's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time", and Pitchfork's "200 Best Songs of the 2010s" (at #24). The album is also widely credited with helping redefine what a self-produced, home-recorded pop album could sound like in the post-Laptop era — directly influencing artists such as Tame Impala (Kevin Parker), Kevin Parker's own Currents (2015), and a generation of bedroom producers who followed. Gotye himself, characteristically, released no proper follow-up studio album until Reflections (2020, with Odonis Odonis), preferring instead to pursue film scoring, classical commissions, and the avant-garde world-music project The Basics.

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👤 Artist Profile — Gotye / Wally De Backer

Wouter "Wally" De Backer was born on 21 May 1980 in Bruges, Belgium, and moved with his family to Montmorency, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, at age 2. He has been making music since his early teens — initially as a drummer in school bands, then as a sampler-driven home producer. He chose the stage name Gotye (pronounced go-ti-yeh, like the French Gauthier) as a phonetic English rendering of the Flemish diminutive "Gauthier" / "Govaert" — a family name on his mother's side.

Before Making Mirrors, Wally released two earlier studio albums: Boardface (2003) and Like Drawing Blood (2006), the latter of which earned him a dedicated Australian following and three ARIA nominations. He is also a member of the Melbourne indie-rock trio The Basics, with whom he has released five albums between 2002 and 2019. After Making Mirrors, Wally pivoted away from mainstream pop — co-founding the Spirit Level record label and devoting himself increasingly to experimental composition, classical commissions, and environmental activism through sound art.

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📦 Bucket Contents — File Manifest

This bucket contains the 2-disc special edition of Making Mirrors. All audio is MP3 (lossy) format. Cover art is included as Folder.jpg (high-resolution) and AlbumArtSmall.jpg (thumbnail) in each disc's directory.

Disc 1 — Original Album (12 tracks)

Disc 2 — Bonus Tracks & Remixes (10 tracks)

Total: 26 files · ~190 MB of audio + 78 KB of cover art.

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🔗 Direct Streaming URLs

Each file in this bucket can be streamed or downloaded directly via the Hugging Face resolve URL pattern:

https://huggingface.co/buckets/R-Kentaren/Making-Mirrors/resolve/main/<path>

Examples:

• 🎧 Album cover: Disc 1/Folder.jpg
• 🎧 Lead single: Disc 1/03 - Somebody That I Used To Know.mp3
• 🎧 Album opener: Disc 1/01 - Making Mirrors.mp3
• 🎧 Album closer: Disc 1/12 - Bronte.mp3
• 🎧 Bibio remix: Disc 2/05 - Somebody That I Used To Know (Bibio Remix).mp3

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📜 Credits & Licensing

• All music written, arranged, produced, engineered, mixed, and performed by Wally De Backer, except where noted.
• Featured vocals on "Somebody That I Used to Know": Kimbra (Kimbra Johnson).
• Featured vocals on "In Your Light": Luke Smith.
• Featured vocals on "Smoke and Mirrors": Jules Grandin.
• Mastered by William Bowden at King Willy Sound, Sydney.
• Original label: Samples 'n' Seconds Records / Eleven: A Music Company (Australia/NZ).
• International label: Island Records / Universal Republic.
• Cover art design: Wally De Backer, based on a painting by his father, Frank De Backer.

All audio rights in this bucket belong to Gotye (Wally De Backer) and the respective rights holders (Samples 'n' Seconds / Eleven: A Music Company / Island Records / Universal). This bucket is maintained as a personal archival copy of the 2-disc special edition. If you enjoy this music, please support the artist by purchasing the album through official channels — gotye.com, Bandcamp, your local record store, or your preferred streaming service.

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"You can be addicted to a certain kind of sadness…" — Somebody That I Used to Know