Gotye’s success is mainly due to his single 'Somebody That I Used to Know', a brilliant two-sided breakup song that’s received more than 50 million hits on YouTube.

The shaggy-haired guy behind the hit is Walter De Backer, whose stage name is pronounced like the French translation of his first name: 'Gauthier' ('GO-tee-yay'). After he made his reputation at home in 2006 with his second album, 'Like Drawing Blood', things took off with the release of his third disc, Making Mirrors. Issued here in late January, it came out last fall in Australia, where the keen songsmith has resided at the top of the charts and recently dominated the ARIAs, the Aussie answer to the Grammys.

Gotye’s ascendance to sensation status has been a long time coming. It all began after the demise of a high-school band: 'I’d just bought a computer and was painstakingly making music, just tinkering on my own', he says by phone from his home near Melbourne. 'I really enjoy playing with lots of electronic toys'. Indeed, the 31-year-old fashions much of his meticulously crafted pop using gadgets that only music geeks have heard of. He also writes the songs and plays most of the instruments, making him something of a one-man show. 'I’ve never had any formal music training besides the drums', he says. 'Producing the music I make has been more following my own intuition'.

That intuition has led to some eccentric techniques, such as the unconventional field recordings Gotye has incorporated into his sound. Some years ago, he discovered Winton’s Musical Fence during a road trip through the Outback. 'I’d never heard of this thing before, and someone suggested I check it out', he says of the gigantic art installation. 'It’s got five middle strings, kind of like a huge bass guitar, 50 meters in each direction in an L shape, attached by a sort of wooden shack, which amplifies the vibrations of the strings'. The discovery led to an impromptu recording session as he plucked and struck it with various objects, including rocks—which yielded the bassline for 'Eyes Wide Open', one of the album’s most compelling tracks.

Archaic instruments also loom large in Gotye’s arsenal, reflecting his nostalgia. 'I have a soft spot for this particular organ my parents got me in a secondhand shop', he says. 'It’s called a Lowrey Cotillion and it was made in the early ’80s. I’m really into the sound of this particular model'. So enamored, in fact, that he wrote an ode to the retro instrument, a woozy reggae-esque tune titled 'State of the Art'. The song came about 'as I have a peculiar fascination with the time, seems like eons ago, when organs and technology like that was pushing the boundaries; that was state-of-the-art technology', he explains.

Take these diverse elements, throw in some samples from vintage records, add Gotye’s muscular drumming, reedy voice (which draws constant Sting comparisons) and arranging skills, and you’ve got a masterpiece that mixes the clear sounds of the ’80s with futuristic experimentation.

Making Mirrors took more than two and a half years to complete; to reproduce it live, Gotye is bringing a five-piece band and multitudes of instruments. Indeed, a visit to his tour van would reveal such oddities as a MalletKAT—'it’s like a large electronic xylophone', he clarifies. As for reconstructing the sounds of the Musical Fence? 'I’m talking to an instrument-maker about creating a smaller one, but it’s proving to be a bit too challenging and not quite feasible to carry around', he says with disappointment. Inventors, there’s your cue.

Buy Making Mirrors on iTunes

From Time Out New York