Since I Left You

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“It felt beautiful; it felt like something different,” keyboardist Tony Di Blasi tells Apple Music about The Avalanches’ 2000 debut album. Even at the time, they knew they’d made something special. “I felt like it was very unique for the time,” he say. "And we could tell by the reactions we were getting from other people—we played Darren [Cross] from Gerling the album and he said, ‘We may as well give up.’” The Avalanches’ roots stretch back to the early-’90s punk scene, where Di Blasi was a member of the band Alarm 115 alongside keyboardist Robbie Chater and then-vocalist Darren Seltmann. By the time it disbanded, the pair had already started experimenting with sampling vintage record. In 1997, they recruited Di Blasi and keyboardist Gordon McQuilten to officially form The Avalanche. Those early days were characterized by complete freedom of expression. “You’d just get together and do stuff and it was not stressful,” Di Blasi say. “There was no expectation; it was freeing and extremely liberating. It changed our live.” That freewheeling sense of adventure without consequence may explain why The Avalanches employed a rumoured 3500 individual samples on <i>Since I Left You</i>—a copyright approval nightmare. Had the band known these songs would go further than the Collingwood home studios in which they were constructed, they may have taken a more conservative approach. As it stand, though, <i>Since I Left You</i> is a sonic rollercoaster that samples everything from Madonna’s “Holiday” (“Stay Another Season”) to forgotten ’60s R&B (The Main Attraction’s “Everyday” on the title track), farmyard animal, and Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster (“Frontier Psychiatrist”). “Robbie had all these records that told a different story, and he got [DJ] Dexter [Fabay] to scratch them all in,” recalls Di Blasi of “Frontier Psychiatrist.” “He’d have a little phrase singled out and that would be scratched in, one at a time.” .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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