A dizzying, joyful collage of thousands of samples stitched into the warmest, most melancholic dance record of the early 2000s. It sounds like a crate-digger’s fever dream where Jimmy Webb, the Bee Gees, and old Hollywood cinema share a single golden afternoon. Essential for anyone who believes sampling is an art form.
The first time you hear Since I Left You, it’s easy to feel lost. That’s intentional. The Avalanches didn’t build this record to be navigated like a map. They built it like a city block that keeps folding in on itself—storefronts you recognise, voices from a radio you left on in another room, the sound of someone walking down a staircase that leads to a beach.
Seven Australians, a mountain of records, and no clear path. That was the starting point.
Robbie Chater and his loose collective began around 1998, pulling from a shared collection estimated at over 3,500 vinyl records. They worked in a Melbourne studio affectionately called the Powder Room, a small space that had previously been a bathroom. The engineer, Graeme (who prefers to be known only as Graeme), later told a magazine that the floors were sticky and the air smelled like toast. It matters. You can hear that cramped, domestic warmth in every transition—the way a sample from a forgotten library record bleeds into a string arrangement meant for a soap opera.
The album’s title track is the key that unlocks the whole thing. It opens with a guitar loop lifted from Everyday by the Main Street Electrical Parade, a Disneyland attraction. Then comes the vocal: “Since I left you, I lost the sound of a happy song.” That’s a sample from Every Day by Willie Nelson, pitched up and stretched until it sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a well filled with honey.
From there, the record does not stop. It flows like a DJ mix that never repeats a trick.
Structurally, Since I Left You is closer to a mixtape than a traditional album, but it resists chaos through sheer sequencing discipline. “Frontier Psychiatrist” is the most famous example—a ten-second loop of a 1940s radio play about a psychiatrist who thinks he’s a ghost, buried under scratching and a beat that shouldn’t hold together but does. “Electricity” lifts its vocal from a 1960s Brazilian psych-pop single by Os Mutantes, but then adds a drum break from the Winstons’ “Amen, Brother” just to keep dancers honest. Every sample is a relic, but nothing sounds archival. It all sounds like it was recorded this morning.
The production was entirely digital, built on a Macintosh G4 running Cubase and a Roland VS-1680 hard disk recorder. No tape. No outboard gear beyond a single Lexicon reverb unit for ambience. The band later admitted they couldn’t afford proper monitoring—they mixed on a pair of old Sony headphones that had foam deteriorating inside the ear cups. That fragility got baked into the record. The surface noise, the crackle, the slight compression artifacts—they’re not nostalgia. They’re necessity.
It took two years because clearing samples was impossible. The Avalanches gave up trying. They just made the record and let the lawyers sort it out later. Remarkably, it came and went without major lawsuits. Maybe because the music is so clearly a love letter, not a theft.
What sticks longest is the melancholy. For all its kaleidoscopic energy, Since I Left You is a record about losing someone. Every sample is a fragment of something that ended. The party you left early. The song you used to dance to with someone who’s gone. The feeling that you’ll never hear anything that perfect again—and then you do, because it’s the next track, and it’s sampled from a dusty symphonic version of “The Windmills of Your Mind.”
Put it on late, with good headphones, and let it loop twice. The second pass will sound like a different album.
🎵 Key Takeaways
- Built like a city block that keeps folding in on itself.
- Seven Australians, a mountain of records, no clear path.
- Sticky floors, toast smell heard in every transition.
- Title track uses Disneyland guitar loop and Willie Nelson sample.
- Record flows like a DJ mix that never repeats a trick.
Is *Since I Left You* entirely made of samples?
Almost entirely. The only live instrumentation is a few drum fills by Dexter Fabay and some keyboards by Gordon McQuilten. Everything else—vocals, strings, horns, even ambient room noise—is lifted from existing records and reassembled.
Why did it take seven years for The Avalanches to release a follow-up?
Sample clearance became a nightmare. Between 2000 and 2016, the music industry shifted, and the band struggled to get permission for the dense sampling they preferred. The second album, *Wildflower*, still used hundreds of samples but cleared them legally—a process that took years and millions of dollars.
What is the best way to listen to *Since I Left You*?
With headphones that have good soundstage—the record is a layered collage, and cheap earbuds will smear the details. The album was mixed to be a continuous, seamless listen, so start with track one and let it ride all the way through. No shuffle.