Electronic music makers Avalanches return for Illuminate Adelaide Festival

After a 16-year hiatus, cut-and-paste-alchemists The Avalanches are once again pushing the boundaries of artistic performance. They perform with the ASO this month for Illuminate Adelaide.

The Avalanches, artistic directors at this month’s Illuminate festival. Picture: Grant Spanier

Twenty-one years ago a collective of punk rockers, DJs and hip-hop kids calling themselves The Avalanches made what has been widely hailed as one of the great electronic albums of all time.

Since I Left You wove together more than 3500 samples into a masterpiece of mash-up, somehow perfectly bridging the gap between the digital and the human.

Notoriously grumpy British tastemakers NME hailed it as “a joyous, kaleidoscopic masterpiece of sun-kissed disco-pop”. On the other side of the Atlantic, the equally grumpy Pitchfork said it “sounded like nothing else”.

Then … nothing. For 16 years the band that came out of Melbourne and changed the face of modern music maintained something close to radio silence.

“The running joke in the band was: ‘Well, Guns N’ Roses still haven’t released Chinese Democracy,’” Tony Di Blasi laughs, referring to perhaps the most famous recording hiatus in musical history.

“But the reality is it (the wait) was the combination of a lot of things. Obviously Robbie (Chater)’s alcoholism has been well documented, and I think we just tried to reinvent the wheel in a way.

The Avalanches, artistic directors at this month’s Illuminate festival. Picture: Grant Spanier

“We had this really successful album and we just thought we should do something completely different, and decided to have keyboards and guitars and singing. At some point we stopped and said: ‘What are we doing? We can’t sing and we can’t play.’ It took us a while to get back on track.”

Di Blasi, one of two remaining Avalanches with Chater, said the fact that Since I Left You took on a legendary – almost mythical – status quite quickly after its release only made their job harder.

How do you follow up a perfect record? And should you even try?

Someone was obviously trying when the band’s label put out a press release in 2006 declaring album number two was close to release. They were only a decade out.

“It did change all of our lives,” Di Blasi says.

“At the time we were so young and not really looking ahead, we just wanted to make music. We got a record deal and thought, ‘I guess we’d better put a record out’. It came out in Australia and did pretty well, went to 27 or something, but then it came out in April in England and it blew up.

“The record started growing in stature and took on a mysticism, and people were saying, ‘oh, that’s a classic record now’ and that brought an internal pressure. Comparing one record to another and saying, ‘this has to be better than that’ is a really dangerous way of thinking.”

So dangerous it might lead to a 16-year gap between albums.

The Avalanches – Robbie, James, Det, Darren, Gordy, and Tony – in one of the group’s early incarnations.

Wildflower finally came out in 2016, a psychedelic journey through space and history that received widespread acclaim. Album three took a comparatively speedy four years, with We Will Always Love You dropping last year. While still built around samples, it features much more live instrumentation than its two predecessors. It is a deep and haunting record and arguably their best yet.

Which brings us to today, with Chater and Di Blasi in a good place, respected elders of the scene, and set to appear as artists in residence at Adelaide’s inaugural Illuminate festival, running from July 16 to August 1.

The Avalanches will play Since I Left You live with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, sit down with Triple J’s Zan Rowe to unpack their history, present light show Messages of Hope and Messages of Love, stage an exhibition with designer and artist Jonathan Zawada, and close the festival with a huge outdoor street party.

It’s a lot to take on, but Di Blasi says he couldn’t be more excited.

“It’s a real honour,” he says. “I mean, because it’s the first one I guess we could totally destroy it! We could set the bar so low for years to come.

“No, it’s going to be amazing, incredible. I really feel like it could be a Dark Mofo or a White Night for Adelaide, something that will become an institution.”

To play a record made entirely of thousands of snippets of other records with a full symphony orchestra is no mean feat, but it’s a challenge Di Blasi has embraced.

“We’ve been working with conductor Nick Buc and sending him bits and pieces so he can get his head around how they will work as orchestral parts and he’s been sending us back demos of how that’s going to sound and it’s just going to be awesome,” he says.

“I honestly think it’s going to make me cry. I feel it will be quite overwhelming. If we get this balance right I think it will be huge.”

Messages of Hope and Messages of Love will see Sydney-based artists Michaela Gleave and Fausto Brusamolino beaming morse code into Adelaide’s night sky.

“They did it last year during lockdown and it was a way to really connect people,” Di Blasi says.

“You could look up to the sky and – if you could read morse code – you could read a message that someone had sent. But it was more about the sentiment, knowing that this light was shining out these messages of hope for people.”

Di Blasi says South Australians will be able to propose their own messages on the Illuminate website, with the artists choosing their favourites to embed into an encoded poem to be shot on to the clouds.

“It’s just a nice sentiment, a really beautiful thing,” he says.

When it comes to explaining Zawada’s Ghost Stories exhibition, Di Blasi struggles to find the right words.

“I wish Jonathan was here to explain it to you, he’d do a much better job than me,” he laughs. “It’s sonification art, and it goes over my head a little bit, but what happens is that through a program you can turn images into sound, then turn that sound back into an image that can be layered over the original image.

“It’s how the cover of We Will Always Love You was made. It’s a very technical thing but I know that in the end it just looks so cool.”

The closing West End street party will see The Avalanches elevated above the crowd on a giant podium, playing an epic DJ set in the round.

“It will be a wonderful thing to be amongst the crowd,” Di Blasi says. “It will be such a great way to end the festival.”

illuminateadelaide.com