Melbourne's Avalanches have come a long way from scouring second-hand record shops around Brunswick and Fitzroy and buying albums through the Trading Post.

A huge buzz surrounded the band from the moment they released their debut single, Rock City, in 1997, but that was merely a rumble compared to the excitement in London since a limited-edition party tape compilation and a bootleg of their debut album, Since I Left You, started circulating.

A test pressing that had been rejected by the band was reviewed favorably by NME, the mix-tape was played on radio BBC1, and the bootleg has been getting a solid workout on jukeboxes in hip clubs. Many samples hadn't been cleared at the time, so their new management, MBL, which also looks after the Chemical Brothers, had to tell people to stop playing the songs until clearance was received. That's some vibe - when your manager starts restricting publicity.

After hearing the band's remix of his song Shining, Badly Drawn Boy, who has been described as "the new Dylan" and recently won the Mercury Prize for best new talent, declared to the band: "You've just reaffirmed my belief in music."

Introducing the songs at his shows, the Boy has been heaping the band with praise such as: "The Avalanches are the only people who understand music."

When they asked Madonna's permission to use a bassline from her '80s hit Holiday, the Material Girl, who has apparently never cleared her songs for sampling, said she was a fan and gave them the green light. Rumor has it she offered it to them free of charge in return for signing with her Maverick label.

Noted composer Van Dyke Parks is another fan, and he's agreed to re-sing the song Since I Left You for an Avalanches B-side.

Mario C, the DJ from the Beastie Boys, a band the Avalanches used to sound a lot like, advises them on equipment and was a big fan of their debut EP, El Producto.

And, to top it all off, the band's DJ, Dexter, was runner-up in this year's DMC world DJ championships.

But their producer, programmer and drummer, Darren Seltmann, who used to play guitar with indie-rock band Ripe, isn't letting any of it go to his head. The band's label boss, Steve Pavlovic, is on good terms with the Beastie Boys, but when pressed about a possible connection with the Avalanches, Seltmann replies dryly, "The last thing we want to do is hang around with people who think they are cool."

But just when it all looked as if the Avalanches were taking off, Seltmann broke a leg when the band's keyboardist, Tony di Blasi, fell on it while the two were jumping around on stage at a Brisbane bar.

It couldn't have come at a worse time, as he was about to fly to London to meet his management company, MBL, as well as prospective European label XL. But Seltmann reckons he saw it coming.

"Earlier that day, Tony and I spent a really wonderful afternoon in the hotel pool, which we don't really get a chance to do very often. We were just talking about life, and I said to him: 'Imagine if you broke your leg on stage, you could probably sue the venue.' And we were in the hospital later and the doctor said it was broken. I asked if I could sue the venue, and he said, 'No, but you could probably sue Tony'."

The injury has put the band out of business until the Falls 2000 festival on December 30, and then they tour with the Big Day Out before their own national tour in March, followed by the album's overseas release. Seltmann says the shows will be revue-style, in an army tent with a swing band, dance troupe and child-prodigy pianist.

"The idea is to take this army tent around and make everything camouflage to make it feel like we're performing to the troops. It'll be like M*A*S*H or a Jerry Lewis movie. You'll need tags to get in or something."

Since I Left You is being hailed for its originality - despite being completely comprised of samples of other people's work - and for its timelessness and defiance of genres. The influences aren't obvious - there's everything from horses to harps - but it's all about the feel. The lush atmosphere on albums from '70s groovers such as Marvin Gaye and John Barry have made a big impact.

Seltmann attributes much of the album's atmosphere and originality to the band's isolation from musical scenes, fads and contact with the outside world while recording it.

"The bulk of the record was done at a beach house in Sorrento in the middle of winter in the middle of a forest of tea trees and vines. It was like we were at sea the whole time."

The band members - Seltmann, programmer-bassist Robbie Chater, keyboardists di Blasi and Gordie McQuilten, and DJs Dexter and James - had considered moving to London a few years ago, but decided to stay for the superior lifestyle. Seltmann is glad they did, because now they're "a mystery from both ends".

"Australia is very good at imitating what's going on - I think everyone knows that," Seltmann says. "Which is weird, because technology's so affordable, anyone could make records every week. I really wonder why worldwide things haven't changed a lot in recent years.

"The world is getting smaller, but, I think, being in Australia, you're a little on the outside looking at what's going on, and you're not in any kind of scene, especially in Melbourne, where we're definitely not part of any movement. We don't really go out much."

Which is just fine for the Avalanches, who made the album in a lounge-room studio with just their massive record collection and $3000 worth of sampling and computer equipment.

Their song-making process is miles from the typical Oz-rock method of a bunch of guys jamming on guitars. Each member of the group builds a library of samples, made of sound fragments rather than loops, and makes tapes of one-minute songs for each other. Then they make the songs. That's the fun part - they then have the painstaking task of mixing and fine-tuning the dynamics and clearing samples.

"We like to think that, with this record, we're utilising sampling in a slightly different way where it's not so much dependent on loops to create the songs. We consciously tried to add our own atmosphere.

"It's like a normal songwriter; you feel something and you want to make that, and the way that we know how is to combine a load of different samples and sounds," Seltmann says.

One of the main aims of the album was to not rely on technical programming, and the result is a warm, old, psychedelic atmosphere found on very few albums these days (the Make-Up's Save Yourself being one other). To get the feel, they edited out lots of programming tricks so it sounded as if it could have been made on equipment available in the '70s.

Making a record such as Since I Left You requires a thorough understanding of the process of creating music.

"You always start with 'I love these sounds, I really want this to be a song'," Seltmann says. "Some are a combinations of samples or just a really small loop that you've loved for years. And from there you head down into the string records and peel off little bits at a time to make it all fit. Some pieces fit together more easily, but you find that the less luck involved, the more lifespan the song has."

Meanwhile, the band save on instruments and studio time, but the biggest cost has been trying to clear the samples.

"A couple of years ago when we were making the album, we thought the record would only come out in Australia, and back then sampling issues weren't as crucial in Australia," Seltmann says. "But things have really changed. I'm pretty naive, though - I thought that the Internet was going to be a fad that would piss off, and I thought everyone was getting all worked-up over samples and it would get easier."

In fact, the band were having so much fun when they started making the album that they didn't even bother cataloguing the samples, so they had to sift through them with a fine-tooth comb, trying to remember which songs they had used. It ended up being more difficult than they thought.

"We played the songs to lots of historian types, and they would say shit like, 'You're never going to get away with Fleetwood Mac', and we'd be like, 'There's no Fleetwood Mac on it'."

Because the album has a continuous flow, much depends on the first 10 minutes, where the bassline sample from Madonna's Holiday sits.

Seltmann says the structure of the album hinged on the clearance of the Holiday sample, so it was a huge relief when it came through.

"Sometimes I feel like we've lived a bit of a charmed life, and I've never really worried about stuff like that too much. And then, of course, you break your leg. But her approving that was a fantastic sign for us that things were working OK. The legalities haven't quite been finalised, but we're urgently addressing that at the moment."

And what about the rumor that the Material Girl wanted to sign them in exchange for clearing the sample?

"A few people told us that, but I don't think Maverick are incredibly interested," Seltmann says. "If there was ever a chance we could work with her, we'd love to, and maybe we'll be asked to do some remixes."

So why Holiday? Was it to mess with people's minds? To throw them back to something so familiar, just when they thought they were in foreign waters?

"Yeah, I guess age-wise it's appropriate for us. I guess we didn't want to be limited by anything. Sometimes I think making a record like that, or having a lot of genres or style changes, it's kind of easy, but for us, we want the next record to have a continuous tone for the whole record, like My Bloody Valentine's (ethereal)Loveless."

The Avalanches spent a year writing the album and then a year finishing it, but they never intended it to be a definitive record.

"Halfway through making it we were already thinking of the next record," Seltmann says. "We've always been pretty unconventional, like, we didn't want to even have singles. Our label (Modular) have been really flexible. There's no way we would have been allowed to make this record anywhere else."

Since I Left You is impossible to pigeonhole. It's a surreal, multi-layered melting pot of dance, soul, hiphop and psychedelia.

Seltmann's not sure who'll buy it, but he doesn't really care; the band have already achieved their goals with it.

"I know some people won't get it - that's fine, and maybe it mightn't satisfy the hiphop community, and it's weird for us to think that it's been put into the dance category; I don't necessarily agree with that, either," he says. "The album, for us, has been as successful as we wanted it to be before it's even come out. The people we think were important to hear it have heard it, like friends and the press, so whatever happens now is all a bonus."

Since I Left You is out now through Modular/EMI.

Review: Since I Left You, The Avalanches, (Modular/EMI)

The Avalanches' debut album has been years in the making. And it sounds like it. Since I Left You finds Melbourne's most-likely delivering a series of astonishingly complex grooves, painstakingly assembled from a surfeit of samples. Light-years removed from the joint-jumping party-hop of their 1997 debut EP, El Producto, it's a sophisticated set that exists in a strange realm between pop, hiphop and studio boffinism. The Avalanches' influences are obviously hiphop-oriented, but instead of being inspired by swaggering MCs, it's producers such as Prince Paul and Dan "The Automator" Nakamura that have stoked their creative fires. The band take the thought one step further, claiming they draw much from opulent pop composers of yore, ranging from Van Dyke Parks to Raymond Scott. Since I Left You pulls together countless samples culled from countless old records. The 18 songs roll out of the speakers without breaks, spun together like a mellow DJ set. The sounds have been heard before - flirtatious French pop, discounted disco, Bollywood funk, proto-electro signals, florid orchestral breaks, syrupy soul sisters, droll spoken-word - but they've never sounded quite like this. The Avalanches' six pairs of hands arrange sounds with a congregational attention to detail, but the record never seems like anything less than a lark. The band's obvious joy in their craft carries the record a long way, their record-shopper's delight in the dusty grooves they're working with somehow coming across in their music. Since I Left You's redeployment of old recordings into a cut-up, contemporary context never seems anything but caring. And, through this absence of exploitation, it's almost as if the Avalanches have managed to appropriate the original emotions from the sounds they've stolen. And precious few sample-based albums can boast that.

- Anthony Carew