Sunday 30 November 2008

The Avalanches


News from Triple J this week on a new album from lost-in-action sample-maestros The Avalanches (pictured above before they reverted to just a 3 piece).

Modular's label chief Steve Pav told Triple J:

"After many, many moons and several years that have passed by and several promises of getting a new album I've been assured that on Christmas Day they're going to deliver their new album to my little grotty hands." link

If it does surface (and this scribe isn't hedging any bets) it will be The Avalanche's first release since their incredible album of 2000 - Since I Left You. Pitchfork were reporting on the existence of its mythical follow-up way back in January 2007, quoting the band as saying of the new album, which never surfaced:

"much of last year was spent cutting up the spoken word/instructional records we need to tell the albums musical story, and we have some 40 odd songs we're narrowing down and finishing. so its real, it exists, and you know we wouldn't be serving anything up unless it was gonna give you that same special feeling that since has. funnily enough its ended up sounding like the next logical step to since, we just had to go around in a big circle to get back to where we belong." link

Oh, yeah? So the last two years have been spent doing what exactly? Going around in more circles? Some new Avalanches sounds (about 52 seconds anyway) has popped up on this teaser for the upcoming Nevereverland festival. It will be interesting to see if this represents their future aesthetic (more orchetral, pastoral, lush). But even if Santa does give Pav the album for Xmas, its likely to be a while before we get to hear it. No doubt the sample clearing is gonna be another monumental effort.

In the meantime (which could be a long time) check out details on their epic Since I Left You (a must own record) on Wikipedia, more of their tunes (including remixes) are on myspace and below is the lovely little video of that album's title cut...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

around June 2007 Modular sent out an email (which I wish I still had) which said that they'd submitted the album but that it was shit and the Avalanches had been sent back into the studio.

This was followed 24 hours later by another round of emails saying that they were obviously joking and that the album is great but the guys were still working on it...

The rational side of me says this was just a bad joke, the cynical side of me says the album was completed and rejected for being too conceptual.

Need to get more info out of the insiders...