The Avalanches stitched a classic album from roughly 3,500 vinyl samples
A Melbourne band built its debut out of crates of second-hand records, then took sixteen years to follow it up. Since I Left You, assembled by the group's own estimate from about 3,500 samples, is widely hailed as the defining plunderphonics record, and its makers joked about their own long silence.
The story starts with a noise punk act called Alarm 115, formed in Melbourne in 1994 by Robbie Chater, Tony Di Blasi and Darren Seltmann. They bought gear and old vinyl by the crate from second-hand shops. When drummer Manabu Etoh was deported and the band broke up, those records became raw material. Chater, a film student at RMIT with studio access, worked with Seltmann to turn them into a 30-song demo called Pan Amateurs, and a live line-up formed in 1997 to perform it. At their fifth gig they settled on the name the Avalanches, taken from an American surf band that cut a single album in 1963.
Support slots for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and Beck raised their profile, and Modular Recordings signed them in May 1998. Work on the debut began that year under the working title Pablo's Cruise. Clearing all those samples delayed its release, but it finally arrived in November 2000 with a launch party on a boat across Port Phillip Bay. One track, Stay Another Season, borrows from Madonna's Holiday.
The payoff was large. In the UK the album entered the chart at No. 8 in April 2001 and soon passed 200,000 sales. The title track's clip won the top video prize at the MTV Europe Music Awards, and the group won four ARIA awards in 2001. Pitchfork gave it 9.5 and later placed it tenth among the albums of the decade.
Then came a long wait. Seltmann drifted away by 2006, having realised before Chater did that the next record would take ages. Wildflower finally appeared on 1 July 2016, after a video mocking the endless hiatus, and went to No. 1 on the ARIA chart. We Will Always Love You followed in December 2020, teased with Morse code billboards. In 2026 multi-instrumentalist Andy Szekeres joined Chater and Di Blasi, and a fourth album, No Bad Memories, was scheduled for 16 October.
Source: The Avalanches
