Chapter 1

Before I Left You

Much like their music, The Avalanches lineup has chopped and changed over the years.

Robbie Chater, Tony Di Blasi and Darren Seltmann formed what would become The Avalanches following the demise of their short-lived noise punk band Alarm 115.

The band bought old records from op shops and used them as the basis for a new, inventive style of music. They would cut bits and pieces from these records and use them as the foundation for their songs.

But, due to an ambitious and rather silly idea, they weren't The Avalanches yet. The band played as the Swinging Monkey Cocks, The Squid Hats, Quentin's Brittle Bones, and Whoops Downs Syndrome before settling as The Avalanches after their fifth gig. They remained true to their idea, no matter how left-of-centre it may have been.

"In the beginning we decided we would change our name every show until we got signed by a record label," Darren Seltmann told ABC TV in 1999. "I know it's pretty ambitious, but it happened to work"

"Whatever name we had at the time they had to keep," adds Robbie Chater.

Their headstrong nature was clearly reflected in their music and the way it changed in those early years as well. When they were signed, the band were largely playing hip hop. Their El Producto EP from 1997 owes a lot to legendary acts like the Beastie Boys, De La Soul and Run DMC.

"We originally wanted to be like The Fall, where it was spazzy sort of music with sort of yelped, screeched vocals, kind of incessant," Seltmann said in '99. "But when you start play a funk beat or a hip hop beat you just wanna go 'yo!' and doing hip hop mannerisms. So we started rapping over stuff."

Chapter 2

Plundering The Depths

By 1999 each member of the band owned a sampler and would spend hours raiding op shop record bins. They'd make tapes of prospective samples to play to each other.

"Everybody would make stuff individually and then we'd play each other stuff," Robbie Chater told triple j in 2011. "We'd make tapes of our favourite samples that we'd found at the time."

Eleven years earlier, he told ABC TV about an inventive, lo-fi way of experimenting with tracks.

"Before we had a sampler we used to drop wax on records so they'd loop and stuff and play along."

The band's justification for using samples was simple: they couldn't afford the real thing.

"None of us had much money so it was just a very cheap sampler, a cheap computer and lots of time going through Melbourne's op shops," Chater told triple j. "Trying to find weird and wonderful sounds to make a record that sounded kinda fancy without actually having access to orchestras or amazing sound."

"If we want an original '60s pipe organ sound, we can't afford to go and hire a studio," Seltmann said in 1999. "We can just get one off a record. You can create the kind of sounds that sound authentic and beautiful to us."

It's an exceedingly smart idea, but one that looked as if it might backfire when it came time to release Since I Left You. With something in the vicinity of 3,500 samples to clear – many of which the band couldn't identify – the record hit a serious snag before its release.

"Yeah it was a big problem," Chater said. "We had lots of floppy disks that were unlabelled and we honestly had no idea where a lot of the stuff had come from. It had been collected over many years, a lot of the samples. We just had to do our best to go back and try and find where everything came from."

Chapter 3

Two Highlights in 4/4 Time

Since I Left You is best enjoyed in its entirety. As a singular, genius piece of work. But some songs seem to have resonated with people more than others.

Robbie Chater said that, if pressed, he'd pick the album's title track as one of the highlights of the album. Though he admitted that he was fairly unsure about whether the song would be received well by his band mates at first.

"Initially I played it to the other guys and kinda thought no one would dig it that much, I thought it sounded like a shampoo commercial or something like that," he laughed when speaking with triple j in 2011.

"Because of the way the vocal was sped up it had a young Michael Jackson sort of feel. I guess that's what everyone liked about it. It was that light disco, summery groove."

Like so many of The Avalanches' great songs, there was a time where it seemed as if it might not ever be completed.

"That piece of music was actually finished for quite a long time without a vocal and it was just luck that one day you happen to pick up this record and the vocal fits with the music," Chater said. "If that hadn't have happened, that song wouldn't have been what it was, the album would have had a different name, nothing might have been the same if those records didn't fit together."

The same can be said for the huge breakout hit 'Frontier Psychiatrist', which cracked the top 20 of the UK singles chart and came in at number six on triple j's Hottest 100 in 2000.

"I'd had the music for a long, long time. That big Spaghetti Western kind of sample. I could never figure out what to do with it," Chater said. "It sounded so dramatic and over the top. I always thought 'this is like a Dr Dre sample, this needs to be a really heavy song' and that wasn't really me or where we come from."

Inspiration can strike from the most unlikely of places. For The Avalanches, their most inspired moment came thanks to Canadian comedy duo Wayne & Shuster.

"That sample just sat there for a couple of years and just by luck I found this Wayne & Shuster record. It was a comedy song about a cowboy that needed therapy because he'd been abusing his horse and all of a sudden it seemed like 'that's how we can finish that song. Instead of making it this really heavy hip hop song it can be a comedy song'."

Chapter 4

A Different Feeling

In the lead up to Since I Left You, The Avalanches didn't really feel like they belonged in any particular musical clique.

"It's hard to be successful in Australia with the kind of music that we're doing at the moment," Seltmann told ABC TV. "Australia's a very creative place, especially Melbourne where we're from. There's heaps and heaps of bands. But there's not really much that we get excited about. I don't know if that's too fussy..."

Electronic music was booming in the late 1990s, but Since I Left You proved that The Avalanches were completely unique even among that scene.

It's hard to be successful in Australia with the kind of music that we're doing at the moment. Darren Seltmann

"[Since I Left You] was more an attempt to try and find our own little corner of the musical universe and find a little spot where we could just do our own thing rather than be in competition with anyone else," Chater later told triple j.

"A lot of dance music at that time was about big drums, big production...If you think of a record like [Chemical Brothers' 1997 single] 'Block Rockin' Beats', with those amazing drums and how huge those records sounded. We just thought 'we're never gonna win a battle of the beats with a record like that. So instead, why don't we try and make a record that's more '60s influenced, with less bass, inspired by Phil Spector and The Beach Boys, using dance music techniques'. We were trying to make a light, FM radio, pop record."

Their influences largely came from the often weird and wonderful records that they would dig up in Melbourne's op shops, though their love of both hip hop and indie rock is also evident.

"Noisy indie rock'n'roll like Royal Trux and Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev," Chater reflected in 2011. "Combined with a little bit of Daisy Age hip hop, some disco music, lots of comedy records and that weird era in the '70s when The Beach Boys kinda lost the plot and were making songs about vegetables and stuff like that, we loved the sense of humour in that music as well."

The Beach Boys are not the first act you'd think of when listening to Since I Left You, but their impact was apparently significant.

"Beach Boys are probably my all time favourite," Seltmann told ABC TV back in 1999. "Sunflower and Surf's Up I still listen to nearly every day. You can hear them kind of breaking up in the songs, it's so fragile, the songwriting. And obviously he was quite brilliant at orchestrating. It's just beautiful music."

In the 15 years since their debut album's release, The Avalanches have been awfully quiet. While a second record has been mooted for years now, there has been little concrete evidence of its completion. Thankfully their sole album remains a masterpiece and hasn't aged since it blew our minds all those years ago.