THE AVALANCHES are Australia’s ultimate band of magpies, creating music entirely from scraps of other records. So how are they going to cut it live?
Words: Doug Johnstone
f you were to put money on the
coolest dance act of 2001 at the
beginning of the year. you probably wouldn‘t have been sticking your sweetie money on The Avalanches. Six vaguely nerdy fellas from Melbourne. they don‘t exactly cut a fine and swanky swathe through a dance world filled with pumped tip tiberDJs and ballistic divas.
lnstead. The Avalanches let their music do the talking. That is. they let someone else‘s music do the talking. because their debut album. Since I Left You. is made up entirely of samples. Don‘t let that put you off though (if that‘s the sort of thing likely to put you off). because it‘s a glorious. kaleidoscopic rampage through the weirdest and cookiest record collections in the world. all seen through the pie-eyed filter of founding members Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann and their four trusty fellow Avalanchees.
‘Yeah. I guess Darren and 1 both have pretty massive record libraries at home.‘ says Chater. ‘They‘re categorised by instruments. so we‘ll have big sections of strings and percussion and stuff. and then when we‘re working on a track we can go. “Oh maybe a flute line would be great there“. and we‘ll know where to look.‘
C hater shrugs off accusations of music buffery. though. and the band apparently trawled every charity shop in Melbourne buying up every record in sight. ‘We don‘t collect rare funk seven inches or anything like that.‘ he says. ‘Most of the records that we get sounds from are just junk that people have thrown away: they‘re really cheap records. you know‘."
14 THE LIST FESTIVAL GUIDE 9—15 Aug 2001
‘Most of the records that we get sounds from are just Cheap the album we spent records’
Of course. making a record out of other folks‘ records can be a fraught legal affair. With often over 100 samples on an Avalanches track. getting clearance from the artists involved was a nightmare. ‘lt was a full-time job for more than six months fora lady in LA called Patty.‘ says (‘hater. ‘And we went about it the wrong way in that we‘d finished the album before we started clearing any of the samples. Any time a request was denied we had to go back and edit the master so it was pretty costly and time consuming.‘
Now. we know what you‘re thinking. these guys are playing live aren‘t they'.’ How‘s that going to work'.’ Six blokes standing around a DAT machine. right'.’ Ha. think again. dafties. The Avalanches have been straddling the worlds of studio and stage in ()7. for umpteen years now. and are just as comfortable cutting and pasting Madonna as bashing out Beasties- style garage hip hop themselves.
‘We think of them as two totally different worlds.‘ says Chater. ‘The studio is where my heart is and where I‘m happiest. whereas live is just fucking chaos.‘ What sort of fucking chaos. exactly? ‘lt‘s a bit of a mess.‘ he continues. ‘it‘s nothing like the album. It‘s kind of a garage rock band with tumtables: it‘s pretty loose and pretty fun. When we finished
about a month trying to
reproduce it but we just
couldn‘t. so we‘ve given
up and we‘re doing something completely different.‘
The Avalanches are one of those irritating bunches who seem to successfully turn their hands to anything. having already handled re-mixing. artwork design and video making with aplomb. and C hater reckons growing up in the relative artistic vacuum of Melbourne has shaped their DIY attitude. ‘Yeah. we didn‘t know how any of this was supposed to be done. so we had to figure out our own way of doing things.‘ he says. ‘And it‘s given us a bit of our own spark.‘
The Avalanches, Liquid Room, Edinburgh, 15 Aug; Arches, Glasgow, 16 Aug.