The Avalanches

The Arc of The Avalanches

The pivots — what forced The Avalanches to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Akai S2000 Bin-Raid

   They started as a noisy indie-punk band called Alarm 115 before realizing their cheap samplers were more interesting than their guitars. Chater, Seltmann, and Tony Di Blasi holed up in a Melbourne studio with an Akai S2000 and thousands of dollar-bin records. They spent years meticulously layering obscure flute loops, horse whinny sound effects, and French pop vocals. The result was Since I Left You, a record that transformed discarded plastic into a cohesive, celebratory pop symphony.

2. 02

   The Sixteen-Year Hangover

   The success of the debut became a creative prison. Seltmann left the group, leaving Chater and Di Blasi to spend over a decade chasing a sequel while dealing with severe health issues and massive sample-clearance anxiety. They recorded hundreds of hours of psychedelic rock, hip-hop, and folk, but couldn't find the thread. The project almost dissolved entirely under the weight of its own mythology before they finally salvaged the sessions.

3. 03

   The Collaborative Rolodex

   With 2016's Wildflower and 2020's We Will Always Love You, the group abandoned the pure plunderphonics model out of legal necessity. They brought in external vocalists like Danny Brown, Perry Farrell, and Blood Orange to sing over their sample collages. The dust-crusted bedroom feel was replaced by a polished, star-studded studio sound. You can hear the shift on tracks like 'Frankie Sinatra,' where the old-school calypso samples are forced to share space with modern rap verses.

Influences

• The Beach Boys — Chater has repeatedly cited Brian Wilson's late-sixties vocal arrangements as the primary blueprint for their dense, melancholic harmonies. You can hear this direct influence in the pitched-up vocal layering of 'Since I Left You' and their cover of 'After the Goldrush.' They even managed to get Wilson's collaborator Van Dyke Parks to arrange strings on Wildflower.
• De La Soul — The sample-heavy collage style of Prince Paul's production on Three Feet High and Rising showed the band how to use skits and disparate genres to build a self-contained world. The Avalanches used this exact pacing on their debut, weaving spoken-word instructional tapes and comedy records between the musical tracks. It is the direct DNA of their humor and structure.
• My Bloody Valentine — Before they were a sample group, the members were obsessed with Kevin Shields's wall-of-sound guitar techniques. Chater stated they tried to replicate the dizzying, pitch-bent wash of Loveless using samples instead of feedback. That hazy, drifting feeling on 'Radio' is just shoegaze played on a sampler.
• The Roxy — The legendary 1984 live hip-hop mix by Double Dee and Steinski, 'Lessons 1-3,' proved that a cohesive musical statement could be made entirely out of other people's records. The Avalanches took this cut-and-paste turntablism and expanded it to album length. The rapid-fire sample switching on 'Frontier Psychiatrist' is a direct descendant of those early megamixes.
• John Oswald — Oswald coined the term 'plunderphonics' in the mid-eighties, establishing the creative philosophy of altering existing audio recordings to make new art. The Avalanches took this academic concept and injected it with pop hooks and dancefloor energy. Without Oswald's legal and artistic battles, the band's entire methodology wouldn't exist.