Following their long-awaited second album, The Avalanches’ debut Since I Left You gets a vinyl reissue. Since the Melbourne group released their plunderphonics album in 2000, it has come to appear in many best-of-the-decade lists, and rightly so.
On the break of the new Millennium the shiny, binary future of MP3 was beginning to seem like the path down which recorded music would inevitably roll. What chance then, that a group comprised of eight Australians armed with 3500 samples would put together an hour long, plunderphonic document in love with vinyl, an album that would stand as one of the most inventive of its decade, leaving us (still) thirsty for more and more.
Naturally Since I Left You fits perfectly into the short and tumultuous history of sampling, copyright and ethics, giddily predating the hyperactive age of digital twitch, of rip, mix, burn, swap, chop and create which we are witness now in the 2.0. Theoretical hyperbole aside, the sonics are where its at. ‘Avalanches about...business continues below’
Under the production guidance of Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann, abetted by –amongst others- DJ Dexter, a stack of Akai samplers and more records than is healthy, from the exotic glide of the title track onwards your ears are treated to an almost hallucinatory flight in sound. A non-stop-mix-whirl through lush strings, disco licks, technicolour jazz, psych-rock, fried hip-hop, frenetic funk, M.O.R smooth pop, filtered house, sunshine soul... all this is effortlessly spun together from a glorious tapestry of our own pop histories... a sampledelic game of join the dots... even Madonna is in their somewhere.
