The Avalanches Essentials

“We didn’t have any goals when we started, which was really nice,” The Avalanches’ keyboardist Tony Di Blasi tells Apple Music. “It was just four very good mates wanting to create this crazy music and have fun.” Still, a huge amount of work went into making something so joyous: The Melbourne crate-digging obsessives assembled their 2000 debut, Since I Left You, using thousands of unusual, eclectic and lovingly (if painstakingly) collected samples from sources as far-reaching as Canadian comedy duo Wayne and Shuster (“Frontier Psychiatrist”) and ’60s doo-wop outfit The Duprees (whose “The Sky’s the Limit” features in the title track). The album’s acclaim was so overwhelming, and the pressure for a follow-up so crippling, that it was 16 years before their second album—Wildflower—arrived. “It was enormous,” sighs Di Blasi. “It did our heads in from the start.” The time away didn’t dim their creativity, though, as proven on “Frankie Sinatra”, which blended rap, oompah music and calypso rhythms, featured both MF DOOM and Danny Brown, and sampled The Sound of Music’s “My Favorite Things”. The wait before their third album was much shorter, with its first singles—“Running Red Lights”, with Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo and Pink Siifu, and “We Will Always Love You”, featuring Blood Orange—released just four years later. Here, Di Blasi provides insight into some of the band’s most enduring songs. “Frontier Psychiatrist” “Robbie [Chater, keys] and [DJ] Dexter [Fabay] put that together. I remember hearing it for the first time and was completely blown away. It was one of those tracks that just sounded completely new and different. Robbie told me he had all these records that told a story, 50 different records or something, and he just got Dexter to scratch them in. He’d have a little phrase singled out and that would be scratched in, so it was all done one at a time. It made this amazingly unique track that’s stood the test of time.” “We Will Always Love You” (feat. Blood Orange) “We got in contact with Dev [Hynes, aka Blood Orange] and he was like, ‘Cool, send me some stuff.’ So we sent him two or three songs and he was really vibing off ‘We Will Always Love You’. This song just represents hope for me. It doesn’t matter how down you get, there’s always that light and hope at the end of the journey.” “Frankie Sinatra” “Looking back on it now, we kind of think maybe we should have [released a different song as the first single from Wildflower]. When I listen to it now, it’s quite bonkers! But we wanted to explode and do something that was going to make people go, ‘What the fuck is this?’ So I guess it worked in that way. It was a little bit polarising in that people were used to ‘Since I Left You’ and that was beautiful, and ‘Frankie’ is very different to that. We didn’t want to just keep doing the same thing.” “Subways” “We found this amazing Chandra [Oppenheim] vocal that really completed the song. And then we got to know Chandra ’cause we got in contact and ended up doing some live shows with her, so it was really beautiful coming full circle and actually performing with the person we sampled. The fact that I think she was 14 at the time [she recorded] and now she’s in her fifties, it was really amazing to cherry-pick something that old but still be able to bring it into the new world with the actual artist.” “Since I Left You” “We were having his huge basketball game just down the road from Robbie’s house, and he was like, ‘Come over, I’ve got a song I want to play to you guys.’ He was really embarrassed ’cause he thought it sounded like a shampoo commercial. We heard it and were like, ‘Oh my god, that’s amazing!’ And he was surprised we actually liked it! He was like, ‘Maybe we can hide it at the back of the record,’ and we were like, ‘No way, man, it’s going to be the first, this is so cool!’ From shampoo commercial to our flagship song.” “Electricity” “We had a great loop, like the main funky loop, and we were just playing around with some little keyboard lines which ended up being the operatic opening. We ended up getting [opera singer Antoinette Halloran] into [multi-instrumentalist] Darren Seltmann’s little homemade studio in Collingwood—it was quite crazy, the juxtaposition of the opera world meets this ’90s Collingwood world. At the start we were like, ‘Can you try singing it a little less operatic?’ But she’s so well-trained it’s really hard for her to sing badly! She couldn’t do it, so in the end we were like, ‘Just do it the way you’re gonna do it,’ and it turned out amazingly.” “Running Red Lights” (feat. Rivers Cuomo and Pink Siifu) “We sent the basic structure of it to Rivers and he sent back three different melodies and was like, ‘Which one do you want?’ We said, ‘We’ll take them all!’ All three were so strong that we were like, let’s incorporate all the aspects into the song. I’m a massive Weezer fan, and it’s amazing working with someone that just has that knack for a catchy chorus.” “Flight Tonight” “From what I remember, this was one that Robbie had done in a day. From start to finish it was this beautiful, amazing song. There are just freak songs like that that happen in a day start to finish, and that’s what I remember of that one—such a beautiful kind of expression. Just pure creativity.”