FEATURE:
Sheer Electricity
The Avalanches’ Since I Left You at Twenty-Five
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EVEN though it got its…
worldwide release in early-2001, The Avalanches’ debut album, Since I Left You, was released in the group’s native Australia on 27th November, 2000. Produced by group members Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann (In 2000, the Avalanches had at least three core members, with the debut album being produced by Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann, with Tony Di Blasi also a founding member), it would be sixteen years since they followed Since I Left You with Wildflowers. Since then, they have been more productive. The Avalanches now consists of Tony Di Blasi, as Darren Seltmann parted company. We Will Always Love you came out in 2020, and there are plans for a fourth studio album. However, I still think that their debut is their most startling and best. Songs rich with samples, you can hear the precision and passion that went into this album. Collages of sounds and samples that make these incredible songs. The album was recorded and produced at two separate, near-identical studios by Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann, exchanging audio mixes of records they sampled. After the success of Since I Left You in Australia, there was this wider release. It is a tragedy to think that this amazing album might never have reached the U.K. if it did not fare well in Australia. I think its title track is one of the most joyous things ever released! Other highlights include Electricity and Frontier Psychiatrist. There are some reviews and features that I want to get to. As we are approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of this masterpiece, it is important to bring in some context and exploration. Stereogum marked twenty years of Since I Left You in their feature from 2020. One of the biggest takeaways is how an album like Since I Left You could not exist today. Plunderphonics is a music genre characterised by the use of recognisable musical samples that are manipulated, recontextualised, and layered to create new works. This is what Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann did with abandon for Since I Left You. Not that concerned by copyright laws, today, they would be sued and prevented from using many of the samples. It is a shame that there are such restrictions for those who want to use samples in their work:
“The Avalanches don’t make albums like Since I Left You anymore. Nobody does, really. For one thing, they legally can’t. The Melbourne production crew’s chosen genre was known as plunderphonics for a reason: Practitioners gleefully plucked samples from record after record without regard for copyright law, overlaying them into vibrant collages. The rise of this movement in the late ’80s and early ’90s was a beautiful wild-frontier moment in music, one documented insightfully in Philip Sherburne’s review of plunderphonics provocateurs the KLF’s ambient techno lodestar Chill Out. But such blatant flaunting of intellectual property could never last forever. Once the lawsuits started flying, rappers and ravers alike had to pivot to expensive cleared samples and alternate techniques.
At that point plunderphonics mostly disappeared into the realm of memory and dream, which is where Since I Left You already existed. The Avalanches’ debut floats through the liminal space between the crate-pillaging hip-hop visionaries like the Dust Brothers and Prince Paul were spearheading around the turn of the ’90s and the MP3 orgy overseen by festival-slaying mashup king Girl Talk in the second half of the aughts. Conventional wisdom suggests it’s great party music but even better for the pre-dawn comedown after a night out, when the endorphin rush is over and sleep is setting in but you’re still too abuzz to fully shut down yet. This is all true, but as good as Since I Left You sounds in the earliest hours of Sunday morning, I can testify from recent experience that it’s a fine soundtrack for making Thanksgiving crafts with your kids on a Sunday afternoon. It’s remarkable music regardless of context.
Mostly, though, Since I Left You is about mood and texture. It’s less an album than a feeling you get lost in for an hour at a time. Though many of the samples have burrowed their way into my brain as thoroughly as any original hook — from “We can book a flight tonight!” to “That boy needs therapy!” — there are no lead vocals, just an endless parade of sounds stitched together seamlessly: clattering beats, sliced-up rap verses and disco choruses, keyboards that squelch and swirl, flickers of melody looped until they achieve some kind of zen state. It’s endlessly busy, yet a wistful calm hangs over everything, a warm, woozy nostalgia for a moment you’re not sure ever really existed”.
I am going to end with a review from Pitchfork that, oddly, seems to have been published at the end of 1999 – a year before it came out in Australia! I am not sure how they managed that, though I will bypass that anomaly and focus on a rare positive review from them. Before that, I want to come to DJ Mag and their retrospective. One of the all-time classics of Electronic music, The Avalanches’ debut album still sounds so wild and overflowing with ideas. Nothing like it has come since. Maybe an album like Donuts by J Dilla (2006), but even that does not pack in as many samples as Since I Left You. The album plays with your mind and senses! It isn’t rapid like many Hip-Hop albums where there are a lot of samples. Since I Left You is quite mellow and laid back, though it crams in so much: “But there’s a mind-boggling amount going on at all times. Anywhere between 900 and 3,500 individual samples employed during the making of the album ping off one another constantly, rising and fusing and fizzing away like bubbles in a champagne glass, or molecular chemistry writ large”:
“The Avalanches’ creative isolation in the wake of ‘Since I Left You’ was mildly ironic, given that the album itself was fixated with the allure of tasting all the world’s cultural fruits. Originally entitled ‘Pablo’s Cruise’, with an overt concept about chasing love from port to port, today ‘Since I Left You’ stands as the last foghorn of a faded age.
Word-of-mouth phenomena like ‘Since I Left You’ still take place in the digital era, but they aren’t passed around on burned CD-Rs, and you’d be hard pressed to find any album with a month’s gap between release in different markets, let alone a year. As Mark Richardson elegantly wrote when Pitchfork anointed ‘Since I Left You’ as the 10th best LP of the 2000s, “The Avalanches started in Australia in late 2000 and took the slow boat west, moving from one 56k modem to the next.”
“It’s hard to describe just how different the world was back then,” Chater reflects. “My favourite music magazines from the UK took, like, two months to arrive in Melbourne on the boat. You had to be passionate to discover new music when we were geographically very distant. Our album came out here and drew a good reception, but it was nothing crazy — maybe 1,000 or so sold. Then you find out there’s a buzz brewing half the world away. I remember we were in a shared house on the dole, and one of my flatmates shouted down the hall, ‘There’s someone from England on the phone! Your album’s debuted at number 8...’ It just doesn’t compute.”
By the time ‘Since I Left You’ arrived in America, fully 12 months after the album’s Australian release, the world had profoundly changed. The after-effects of the 9/11 terror attacks caused a schism in the role of aviation. Prior to the album’s release some of the group, including Di Blasi, had never ventured outside their national borders, so regarded jet-setting as a classy, romantic folly. As a love letter to carefree travel, ‘Since I Left You’ inadvertently wound up as a time capsule itself, tying a bow atop an era that had lasted for over a half-century, yet conclusively ended in a matter of seconds.
A completely unrepeatable feat of anarcho-surrealism, ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ was 2001’s least-likely crossover hit, etched into impressionable brains like fingers into putty. If the notion of ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ gatecrashing the upper regions of the charts seems strange on reflection, it appears even more bizarre under a microscope. Look at the UK top 20 on 21st July ‘01 and you’ll find The Avalanches nestled next to Robbie Williams, Roger Sanchez, Ian Van Dahl, D12, Aaliyah, Shaggy and Usher. One of these things, politely, is not like the other.
Meshing rented Western movies and a recording of Canadian comedians Wayne and Shuster, ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’’s musical motifs manage to be as lucid as each of its 37 spoken word snippets. Some might vouch for the lilting calypso that guides us onto the cruise liner deck as the “record-ecord-ecord” winds to a close. Others prefer “the violin!” — Laurie Anderson’s voice again — which bursts from the rubble of crunching breakbeats and garbled nonsense, then glides through the track like scissors through wrapping paper. And though wildly scribbling turntables were commonplace at the time, who would ever think to scratch over a parrot?
Horses bray, grandfather clocks spin backward and some unnamed craftsman is making a set of false teeth in perpetuity. God bless whoever sold The Avalanches the weed when they made this one.
“The promos for ‘Frontier’ and ‘Since I Left You’ really took us to strange places,” marvels Chater. “We were flown to Germany to collect an MTV Award for Best Video — just a bunch of shy, jetlagged kids wandering around backstage, not really knowing what to do. This dude comes over to me and he’s like, ‘Jay likes your record’. I look across the room and JAY-Z is standing there, nodding at me. All you can do is laugh, like, ‘Honestly, what the fuck is going on?’”.
I am ending with a review from Pitchfork. The one that someone came out in 1999. Regardless, is this wonder of an album that was unlike anything around it. It could have failed and confounded people. Instead, it built this reputation and popularity. I remember when it came out and being struck by how bold and imaginative it was. How much work and passion goes into every track! It is such a shame that we will never hear an album like this ever again:
“Given the fact that Since I Left You, the debut album from Aussie party animals the Avalanches, contains over 900 individual samples, it's pretty incredible that this thing got released in the first place. The fact that they sample everything from long-forgotten R&B; records to golf instructionals to Madonna's "Holiday" makes it even more impressive. But what really makes this album brilliant is not as much the volume or quality of the samples used as the way that they're employed. The Avalanches have managed to build a totally unique context for all these sounds, while still allowing each to retain its own distinct flavor. As a result, Since I Left You sounds like nothing else.
Much of the beauty of the opening title song and its accompanying track, "Stay Another Season," lies in the way that the Avalanches turn obvious sonic mismatches into something all their own. It's not too common that you'll hear a sample of a horse, a rastafarian singer, and an invitation to a Club Med disco all in the same song, but somehow it makes perfect sense under the masterful direction of the Avalanches.
Indeed, many of the most interesting moments on Since I Left You come with these mismatches. "A Different Feeling" sets horn blasts from 1974 against video game sounds from 1988-- the kind of bizarre pairing of classic soul with futuristic sounds that constitutes a substantial part of Avalanches magic. "Radio," which is slated for release as the band's next Australian single, centers around a mantra-like vocal sample, a thick disco bassline, and bits and pieces of filtered guitars and synthesizers.
Throughout Since I Left You, sampled vocals are used almost like percussion. But rather than utilizing the frenetic, intricate rhythms seen in most contemporary rap, the Avalanches repeat small vocal samples over and over again, melding them into their rump-rocking grooves. And while many of these songs rely heavily on the repetition of beats and samples, no single part of the record is allowed to stagnate. Something is always being mixed up-- a sample transposed up or down a few steps, a beat chopped up into little pieces and seamlessly restructured, an unexpected vocal sample popping up out of nowhere before being swallowed up by the massive sound the Avalanches have concocted.
Another key element of Since I Left You is the keen sense of humor the Avalanches display throughout. And "Frontier Psychiatrist," one of two singles already released from the album, is simply one of the funniest songs I've heard in ages. Relying on a heavy, Ninja Tune-style beat for backing, "Frontier Psychiatrist" busts out samples from 37 spoken word recordings, resulting in an oddball, hilarious pastiche of phrases like, "You're a nut! You're crazy in the coconut!" And some brilliant scratching on a sample of a parrot.
Though it contains many distinct songs and moods, Since I Left You is a remarkably coherent record on all fronts. Aside from the fact that the Avalanches achieve a certain uniform "sound" on this album, subtler elements come into play as well. Songs blend seamlessly into one another. Samples reappear from song to song. And the album's final cut, "Extra Kings," with its breezy flute and psychedelic swells of sound, puts a brilliant twist on the album's title track, fading out with that same chipmunky voice lamenting, "I've tried but I just can't get you/ Ever since the day I left you."
In releasing Since I Left You, the Avalanches have essentially brought hundreds of slabs of inanimate vinyl to life. Though it was no doubt meticulously constructed, this is an album brimming with spontaneity, joy, sadness, humor, reflection, and general human-ness. With its high fun factor and subtle traces of deeper emotion, Since I Left You is the perfect record for the party, and for the period of regret and recovery after the party”.
On 27th November, the genius Since I Left You turns twenty-five. Released in Australia in 2000 and the following year internationally, I do hope that there are podcasts or a reissue of Since I Left You for the anniversary (though there was a Deluxe release in 2021). This dizzying and enormously accomplished album some would say should not exist because it plunders samples and modifies them. However, I think the fact that there is such strictness around copyright makes Since I Left You an example of why that should be relaxed. A quarter-century after its release and The Avalanches’ debut album still…
UTTERLY exhilarating and unforgettable!