Could The Avalanches have made Since I Left You in 2016?

The Avalanches redefined Australian music with 2000's Since I Left You. Would they have been able to do it in 2016?

None

In late 2000, The Avalanches dropped their debut (and only) album Since I Left You, a gauzy serotonin hit assembled from crates upon crates of samples.

15 years on there are no firm details for a followup release. But just say the words 'The Avalanches' and you're still guaranteed brand recognition.

In fact, the album's legacy is so robust that 2014 saw music management and events outfit Astral People assemble a squad of contemporary musicians to pay homage to it. Locals Jonti, Rainbow Chan and more took on the task of reverse-engineering the sample-collage of Since I Left You into a live performance.

According to Avalanches producer and multi-instrumentalist Robbie Chater, the project started as a reaction to the arms race that they felt electronic music had become. On the album's genesis: "Why don't we try to make a record that was more '60s influence, with less bass," Chater explained to Triple J. "Inspired by Phil Spector and the Beach Boys—but using dance music techniques? A light, FM-pop record?"

The album is maybe best known for single 'Frontier Psychiatrist', an earworm constructed out of everything from comedy sketches to the orchestral score from Lawrence of Arabia. In the context of the album, it's a distillation of the group's crate-digging virtuosity.

When sequenced between other artists on the radio, though, the track runs the risk of scanning like a novelty song. While interviews with The Avalanches are rare, Chater is on the record clarifying the earnestness of the group's intent. "Most people are surprised how serious we are about what we do. We just wanted to make a great pop record," he told Pitchfork when they released their album.

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

But The Avalanches aren't the only people to take sampling seriously. Writing in The Wu-Tang Manual, the Wu's live-in producer RZA cements the idea that the sampler is an unsung musical instrument.

"A lot of rap hits over the years used the sampler more like a Xerox machine," he says. "If you take four whole bars that are identifiable, you're just biting that shit. But I've always been into using the sampler more like a painter's palette than a Xerox."

But possibly no one approaches the practice with more intent than sampling OG John Oswald. He's the Canadian composer, musician, media artist and dancer who coined the term 'plunderphonics'. That is, the practice of making a piece of music from (often uncleared) samples.

Oswald has also written a manifesto, 1985's Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. In it, he slams the idea that sampling is the lazy cousin of 'proper' songwriting:


Am I underestimating the value of melody writing? Well, I expect that before long we'll have marketable expert tune writing software which will be able to generate the banalities of catchy permutations of the diatonic scale in endless arrays of tuneable tunes, from which a not necessarily affluent songwriter can choose; with perhaps a built-in checking lexicon of used-up tunes which would advise Beatle George not to make the same blunder again.

Instead, Oswald's manifesto says that what music culture needs is something "equivalent to literature's quotation marks." That quoting someone else's work isn't fraud as much as it is the kind of appropriation and recontextualisation that's existed in the art world for a long time.

When I reached out to Oswald for comment, he said that he'd listened to Since I Left You when it was released, but had forgotten his impressions.

"But, independent of my musical tastes," he wrote. "I applaud your correctly identifying it as being in the plunderphonic genre."

It's a feat that the Avalanches pulled off the grand theft audio of Since I Left You. The album contains an estimated 3,500 samples, including one totally flagrant grab from Madonna's 'Holiday'.

Legally speaking, getting away with a sample can be tricky. Even more so if it's in your track totally undisguised. Getting clearance is even less likely when you're sampling the Queen of Pop. But, somehow, The Avalanches did it.

As Chater told Triple J:


Everyone would make music individually and then share it with each other; we'd make tapes of our favourite samples we'd found at the time and often put something stupid, like 'Holiday', on there as well just for a laugh. That Madonna sample was just something on one of those tapes, and after a while we just got so used to it on there we thought we may as well try to clear it.

But, since then, the world of sample clearance has changed. Some suggest that the battlelines were first drawn in 1991 when a landmark case saw Biz Markie's record label face an injunction for the Gilbert O'Sullivan sample in the track 'I Need a Haircut'.

Flash forward to 2008, and El-P's talking to Spin about the decline of sampling in hip-hop: "The people that do sample [are the ones who] can afford to."

According to RZA, "In the old days, samples were $2,500 or $1,500. I paid $2,000 for a Gladys Knight sample for 'Can It Be All So Simple' off Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). That was a big intro, and the hook was repetitious. Something like that nowadays would cost $10,000.”

And, when you couple the rising prices of sample clearance with the decline in music industry revenue over the last 10 years, sample clearance starts to seem like a losing battle. By 2008, if you were in the business of getting samples cleared, then it seems like the best advice was to find another business.

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

Of course, this legal climate didn't deter artists from sampling—it just drove it underground. Producer Danger Mouse dropped The Grey Album in 2004. It was a mashup album that blended the Beatles' White Album with Jay Z's Black Album that quickly blew up and had its modest physical release pulled from shelves.

(For their part, Hova and Paul McCartney were actually into the album. Their lawyers—not so much.)

Similarly, mashup icon Girl Talk took the fight to independent label Illegal Art, armed with nothing but hundreds of uncleared samples and a 'fair use' defence against copyright infringement cases.

While the rug may have been pulled out from under the legit world of sampling, the spirit of plunderphonics lives on in your timeline on YouTube and SoundCloud.

For example, take Neil Cicierega. His description on Wikipedia is as long as your arm: "Internet artist, comedian, actor, filmmaker, puppeteer, singer, musician, and animator." He's a guy who takes the carefully crafted crate-digging experience of Since I Left You and flips it on its head. Last year saw him drop two companion albums on SoundCloud with no sample clearance, Mouth Sounds and Mouth Silence.

Flying in the face of the tasteful curation of Since I Left You's largely obscure sample-base, Cicierega aims to make music snobs' blood boil with pure, gleeful irreverence. Mashing up Michael Jackson and Nirvana? Check. Modest Mouse paired with Smash Mouth? You bet.

In another lane, you have Daniel Kim, a producer who's created his own manifesto that explains the motivations behind his own brand of meticulous, euphoric and totally on-point mashup tracks. Every year he distills the hit singles of the past 12 months into a few minutes of pop ecstasy. Why? His manifesto explains that he is a 'highly sensitive person', who feels chronically understimulated, even by the 'boring' bits of pop songs.

So, while these contemporary sample artists are building on the blueprint laid out by albums like DJ Shadow's Endtroducing and The Avalanches' Since I Left You, they're also very much subverting it.

Why this sea change in the approach to sampling? Did the move away from the structure of established record labels foster a more irreverent, punk rock attitude? That one's for time to tell.

But what's next for sampling? While poptimist Daniel Kim and audio troll Neil Cicierega are standouts in the current gang of sample-based artists, are there bigger changes on the horizon?

In his book Free Culture, lawyer and long-time copyright activist Lawrence Lessig argues that current music piracy and sampling laws only serve to needlessly criminalise listeners and sample-based artists alike. In it, he co-signs a few different models that he believes could salvage legal sampling culture—going so far as to legalise free filesharing and creating new tax systems to make sure that artists get paid.

(In case you were wondering, yes, you can grab Lessig's book as a free PDF.)

So, given all of this, could Since I Left You have been made in 2016? Well, probably. But it would be born into a different world where the internet has changed the way we listen to, distribute and, ultimately, make music. (That said, Madonna still hasn't abdicated the Queen of Pop throne. Some things don't change.)

15 years on, Since I Left You is still an album you could talk about endlessly. Or you could say nothing, pour up a drink, and just listen to some timeless, hand-crafted summer jams.

Latest in Music