A timeless and seamless ode to joy

As gently gliding flourishes of Spanish guitar give way to 50s-era Hollywood silver screen strings and windswept harmonies, a friendly steward welcomes you to 'Get a drink. Have a good time now. Welcome to paradise'

Within 60 seconds, The Avalanches opener 'Since I Left You', effortlessly whisks you out of your daily life, and into its sumptuously constructed holiday soundscape.

With its twinkling chimes, whimsical flute and easy, loungy beat, it feels as though you’ve been magically transported aboard the deck of The Love Boat, where Captain Stubing and his crew are setting course for the trip of a lifetime.

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The party continues in the ship’s glitter balled dance hall with the Madonna-sampling 'Stay Another Season', where things start to get a little weird.

Is there a horse in the ballroom? Yes, there is a horse in the ballroom.

Things aren’t quite what you’d expected on this cruise, as 'Radio''s pitchy, whistling siren, collides with static tuning in and out of an unspecified frequency, but the insistent beat keeps you reeling forward as though you haven’t control of your limbs.

A troubled and bewildered Kubrickian character repeats incredulously, 'Can’t you hear it, oh can’t hear it?'

Just three songs in, and you get a measure of the epic adventure before you, seamlessly constructed by the op shopping music obsessives of the Melbourne group comprised at the time of Darren Seltmann, Gordon McQuilten, Tony Di Blasi and Robbie Chater along with the turntable wizardry of Dexter Fabay and James De La Cruz.

Its uniqueness as a piece of sound art is in its expression of a childlike joy, a sense of the fleeting, fragile beauty of life. As much as it’s a well worn cliché, Since I Left You is a tribute to the magical pull of music.

It all owes something to Chater's emergence from a dark and debilitating time in his life.

"I started having a problem with alcohol when I was about 14 or 15. It's been a lifelong thing, way pre the band," he told The Guardian.

"By the time I was 21, I’d been a heavy drinker for a long, long time and my body was in a really bad way. I had a severe withdrawal issue, and ended up in intensive care for a number of weeks. I nearly didn’t make it, basically.

"Since I Left You came maybe two years after that, when I was sober and just glad to be alive. That’s a lot of the feeling and the joyousness behind that album – me at 23, making music and just happy to be alive, you know?"

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Since I Left You is an album of its time and yet out of time, standing on its own in the realm of sample based music. Needless to say, it will long endure as a work of great influence for years to come.

Jamie xx, Jonti and Gotye are amongst those who draw inspiration from the album, whilst for Remi Kolawole, who covered the title track for a Like A Version, the record is a revelation as he told The Guardian.

"They combined everything from breaks, to Latin, to electro, to Wu-Tang vocal samples, to a motherfucking horse neighing! On top of that it's an incredible musical feat. Everybody from the harshest critic to the oldest old lady you know can enjoy it."

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Since I Left You’s great legacy is that it finally put to rest the perception that the craft of sampling could only ever amount to plagiarism.

"The Avalanches use so many samples to create something so indisputably their own that to accuse them of plagiarism is pointless," author Nick Hornby wrote in his 2003 Songbook.

"You may as well make the same case against a writer whose books contain words that other writers have used before."

On the eve of its 20th anniversary, there is still so much to marvel at and revel in, to laugh out loud to, and get lost within on this remarkable record.

"That entire album was about taking a journey," Chater explained. "The spirit we were chasing was that beautiful moment between happy and sad. That feeling of melancholy.

"For me creating music is expressing myself from the heart and trying to get how I feel out there. A sample is just the instrument that I use."