State Of The Art

This dub-vibed song finds Gotye paying tribute to his favorite studio gear. "When the Cotillion arrived," he sings. "We threw out the television/Model D 575/Has custom flute presets/And Harmony-Plus in addition."

Gotye told American Songwriter magazine this is one of his favorite tracks on Making Mirrors though he admits that it confounds some people. He explained: "I think it's quite catchy and it's written like a pop song for me, but in that way that I'd like to see more pop music be - very idiosyncratic, kind of strange, and requiring a little bit of understanding about what the hell the concept behind it is. Those are the things I think are the strongest about it. But they're also the things that turn a lot of people off about it, apart from maybe the vocoder talk box voice on it."

The break of horns was sampled from an obscure record that Gotye found in an Australian thrift store. He told Spinner: "It was a promotional record for Cathay Pacific airlines in the '70s and it featured a fairly commercially successful pop star from Korea at the time, Francis Yip. It's a great song. It's a traditional recording called 'Green Is the Mountains,' which was a Taiwanese folk song. So that was kind of vaguely perverse to weave that into a sort of pseudo-dub, weird tech production extravaganza tune."