The Avalanches "Since I Left You" (2000)
Cut n paste album par excellence. I first came to this album via the gloriously weird single "Frontier Psychiatry"
and I honestly can't remember how got to hear it. I feel like I
downloaded it during the Kazaa or Limewire days, but how would I have
known to do that in the first place? Dark magic indeed.
The group had spent hours amassing thousands of samples from a large
collection of vinyl and spent a year or two putting this album
together. Trading tapes to build on each others ideas.
The sound is a mix of modern dance pop with a sort of technicolour
kitschy 50s vibe, where sections of dialogue mix with catchy beats, mix
with random sound effects, mix with dramatic strings. It's not
dissimilar in approach to DJ Shadow's "Entroducing" but with much more
of a pop bent (the title track) and a good dose of quirkiness ("Two hearts in 3/4").
As I mentioned before "Frontier Psychiatry" is the one that turned me
onto them. It's a gloriously dreamlike whirl of dialogue and musical
samples melded into one of the weirder tracks to grace the
airwaves.
