The Avalanches’ Since I Left You is my CD Club pick this month. This is a record that I have been completely infatuated with since I first heard it three years ago. Released initially in Australia in 2000, it is probably the finest example I’ve ever heard of sampling being used to create something else, not just to borrow or build on the underlying talent.
This is the sum total of my knowledge about The Avalanches: they are six Australian DJs, Madonna let them clear a sample, it took them two years to get Since I Left You released outside their homeland, they have not released a lick of their own music since then and don’t seem to be close now. Until I image-googled for this entry and went through to Page 5 of the images, I’d never seen a picture of them.
Usually the source of a sample is so obvious that the song just becomes a varation on the theme established by the originating artists. The Avalanches, who allegedly cleared over 900 samples to get this album done, take the process and the product a step further. The original source material is for the most part unrecognizable, even when Madonna’s “Holiday,” a song seared into our collective imagination, kicks in early in the album. As a pretty careful and knowledgable listener, it’s impressive that there is so little here that I recognize.
Like the best fiction or movies, Since I Left You defines a self-contained alternate universe with its own rules, logic and celebrities. Individual sounds and samples return again and again without being redundant, instead raising the entire album to the status of “Themes and Variations” rather than the simple drama-building repetition of most DJ projects. It’s a world where the radio plays every station at once, an amalgam of hip-hop, house and soul without ever committing to being any one or the other.
All the more remarkable that six DJs, each presumably with his own tastes and biases, were able to collaborate on something so seamless. Not to knock the estimable DJ Shadow, but this makes Endtroducing seem easy by comparison. It’s that good.
[Audio-visual]
The Avalanches – A Different Feeling.mp3
The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist (video)
The Avalanches – Since I Left You (Best Video – MTV Europe Awards 2001)
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Great CD, by the way…and thanks for the inclusion on the club…very cool.