AES New York 2017 Presenter or Author
Wally De Backer (Gotye)
Primary Affiliation: Forgotten Futures - New York, NY, USA
Wally De Backer, better known by his stage name Gotye, has wandered many and varied paths in over 20 years making music.
From playing drums and singing in Australian rock’n’rollin’ three-piece The Basics in places as far flung as Pannawonica, Western Australia and Shibuya, Japan, to writing, recording and releasing his first Gotye albums entirely independently (including hand-making the packaging for hundreds of individual records), he’s happy to be described as “hands on” with his projects.
In 2006 his self-released second album Like Drawing Blood was voted by influential Australian radio station Triple J’s listenership as its favorite longplayer of that year. In 2012 his album Making Mirrors won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album and the single from it, Somebody That I Used To Know, was awarded Record of the Year. The song’s film clip has amassed almost 1 billion plays on YouTube.
Wally’s deep interest in unusual instruments and electronic music history has recently seen him establish Forgotten Futures, a record label and publishing imprint dedicated to excavating lost works by pioneering composers, recording artists and musical instrument inventors. This work has so far encompassed curating the first release of electronic pop pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey’s rare and unreleased recordings with the French proto-synthesizer the Ondioline, recreating early Ondioline technical documents and publishing them in English for the first time, as well as leading the Ondioline Orchestra, a new ensemble dedicated to reviving the vanguard work of the instrument’s inventor, Georges Jenny.
Session List
Oct 21:
AR12: Is There Life on MARS? Preservation Techniques for the 21st Century (Panelist)