The Avalanches have conquered health issues, lawsuits, lost funds and Empire Of the Sun to bloom again with Wildflower

THE Avalanches have conquered health issues, lawsuits, lost funds and Empire Of the Sun to bloom again with new album Wildflower.

The Avalanches are releaseing their long-awaited second album Wildflower.

“HOW do I answer that honestly?” says Robbie Chater of The Avalanches.

The query is of course, what took so long between the sampledelic Melbourne outfit’s debut album Since I Left You (2000) and their follow-up Wildflower, released this week with maximum fanfare, Reddit sub-threads and a fanbase twitching in anticipation.

Before we let him answer — honestly — a quick update on ins and outs. In: Chater, Tony Di Blasi, the core members who have always done the heavy lifting in the studio; also in: James De La Cruz, a permanent, loose-unit fixture of the live show.

Out: Darren Seltmann (“he was like a big brother to me” Chater says), who got fed up waiting for album number two to hatch, DJ Dexter Fabay (“Baaaad breakup man,” Dexter told me in 2008) and multi-instrumentalist Gordon McQuilten.

The Avalanches say they “went through seven shades of s--- to make this record”.

“We went through seven shades of s--- to make this record,” Di Blasi said last week.

Chater wants us to know one thing. “We basically we’re always making music. Since I Left You had such a staggered release, it was pre-internet, we were still touring that album across the US in 2003, by the time we got back we were pretty worn out, nothing happened for a while after that,” he understates. He sounds relaxed, happy to answer the same question he’s been asked for over a decade knowing now he has product to turn to, Wildflower, an album he and Di Blasi can be proud of, even if it inevitably falls short of the giant, unmatchable expectations their debut set.

“We worked on an animation project for two years, it doesn’t have a name, that was supposed to be the second record, a psychedelic hip hop record,” he says. “It was gonna be accompanied by a traditional hand-drawn cell animated film, like a hip hop Yellow Submarine. That was a tonne of work and storyboarding and it was written and ready to go … then funding fell through at the last minute,” Chater says.

“Noisy Eater was from those sessions. That was heartbreaking. We’ll still finish it eventually.”

Noisy Eater made the cut on Wildflower and it features Biz Markie and samples of a satirical advertising voiceover spruiking “ethereal cereal”.

UPDATE: To sate you, here’s The Was, Soda Jerk vs The Avalanches,a 13 minute video that you’ll absolutely love.

What else? “We made a whole bunch of stuff with Luke Steele from Sleepy Jackson, singer songwriter, stuff, droney, full-on psychedelic stuff. He was coming over from Perth a lot, it was really beautiful…”, Chater reflects. “Then he made Empire Of the Sun and that (took off). All that music is still hanging around. Time flew by. It wasn’t that different a process to making Since I Left You, like I said we’re always making stuff.

The hip-hop act have had a turbulent year due to a royalties dispute.

“We did other things along the way like music for(musical)King Kong and that remix of Hunters and Collector’s Talking To a Stranger,” Chater adds. The King Kong work was distilled down to *cough* 25 seconds. It is called Get Happy and samples a Harold Arlen composition with lyricist Ted Koehler, as well as recording of Dies Irae, the Day Of the Dead theme rerubbed by 19th Century Roman composer Giuseppe Verdi.

Another shade of excrement that held up Wildflower was when “I was diagnosed with a couple of different auto-immune diseases. That laid me low for a couple of years. It’s not something I really wanna go into, it’s part of … Moi ownnn life ya knowww,” Chater says in a silly, outsider tone that could be woven into either album.

Just as The Avalanches were rounding the home straight in 2015 with Wildflower, one more thing conspired to stop momentum, the last of the seven shades if you will, a bitter dispute between Steve Pavlovic who runs Modular and BMG over unpaid royalties to Tame Impala.

Let me remind you, “Pav” signed Quentin’s Brittle Bones (later renamed The Avalanches) on the strength of their demo tape in 1998 and put out Since I Left You.

“Yeah, the court case affected Wildflower a little bit. We finally got into Sing Sing studio to mix the record ... then there was a dispute with Tame Impala and nobody was sure what was going on with Modular. They’re still sorting that out,” he says.

The Avalanches have battled illnesses and legal issues.

You may think The Avalanches are minted. It’s mos def not the case.

“There’s not much money to be made in sample based music from album sales. When you’re not a kid any more, you gotta work out how viable it is, this career, How do ya pay the rent? It’s all been part of the journey.”

As the pressure built to make a sequel to a masterpiece, an unlikely healing past-time became the norm for the band: quilt making.

“(laughs) That came from the cover of There’s a Riot Going On by Sly and the Family Stone. The photo of the flag and that beautiful Don Cherry album, handmade psychedelic quilts. We wanted to have that link with Since I Left You’s cover, how it was handpainted. We’re inspired by ‘60s counter culture left field rebels like Frank Zappa, wild and loose recordings.

“We approached this as a rock’n’roll record more than a club record. We had great designs with our art director Chris, we wanted to hand-make it. Chris went on a mad research trail and tracked down Chris in Nebraska who made a lot of the quilts. We’re gonna have an exhibition in Melbourne at some point of all the quilts,” he says. Watch this space.

When quilting, much like washing the dishes or mowing the lawn, the subconscious takes over.

“Completely. As an artist you try and get to that zone every day, you’re intellectual mind is turned off and you’re tapping into something more intuitive.

The Avalanches’ original line-up.

“Before we knew it, years and years had passed, people were asking ‘Are you gonna follow up Since I Left You?’ We’re just not that career-minded. It took so long to edit it down to a cohesive record,” Chater reasons. The story goes that Chater was out DJing one night in Melbourne and a fresh-faced punter came up to him, a little starstruck and informed Robbie that his mum was a big fan of the band. That put a rocket up them and helped extinguish any performance anxiety. And now, after an exclusive one week stream on Apple Music, Wildflower will come out tomorrow.

It’s a remarkable record, capturing the wide-eyed, mucking-about-on-school-holidays-and-eating-icypoles-in-a-strange-coastal-town mood of the first record, the sweet and sour seesaw of the human condition and uses alluring voices from sleeptalker somniloquist Dion McGregor to contemporary guests like Ariel Pink, David Berman, Jean-Michel Bernard, Biz Markie, Danny Brown, Camp Lo, Jonathan Donahue, Warren Ellis, Jennifer Herrema, Father John Misty, MF Doom, Paris Pershun and Toro y Moi.

As ever, the voice is the most important instrument to The Avalanches.

“Yeah, I think so. There’s something about the human voice. I often think about every radio station playing all at once and every singer from every era, all these radio transmissions floating into outer space. From John Lennon to Elvis, they’re all floating around up there in the ether,” he says, cosmically.

Since I Left You contained 900 samples, all cleared by a woman known as The Detective. Pat Shanahan lives in L.A. and was given the task of clearing samples on Wildflower too. Another nickname could be The Terrier, she took the assignment on again and slowly ticked each task off one by one. The toughest sample to get approved was a kids choir singing the Fab Four’s Come Together, used on Noisy Eater, and that fell to the core duo. Without clearance, Noisy Eater would have been dropped.

“It’s usually a flat no to The Beatles requests,” Chater says. “We tried once and got rejected,’ he says. The Avalanches had form though, they’d convinced the equally difficult Madonna to let them use a sample of Holiday on Stay Another Season.

“Then our management said ‘We think we can get a letter through’. Tony ended up writing a letter to Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, explaining who we were, where we were coming from and that it wasn’t a gratuitous sample. It was explaining the spirit in which we were making our music. And they both said yes,” he says. So they came together. “Hey yeah,” he laughs, relieved. You could describe Chater’s general demeanour as relieved right now.

Like the cover of Wildflower, the second track on the album Because I’m Me, pays homage to Since I Left You too, using Bronx rap crew Camp Lo.

“Their record Uptown Saturday Night we played at every show we’ve ever DJed. That’s a part of our DNA, then we sampled them on Since I Left You, now they appear in person on this record. We reached out and they responded really well,’ Chater says.

Rapper du jour and walking time bomb Danny Brown came around too. After some convincing.

“His manager was a huge fan of the band, then Danny spent some time with that record and said ‘Yep, I’d love to do it’. He didn’t know who we were at first. He did Frankie Sinatra remotely from Detroit, then he came out here and did The Wozard of Iz. It was a wild and laaate night with him. There’s a much longer version of what he recorded that night we still have. That’s a tiny fragment of all this stuff we recorded that night.”

Toro Y Moi appears on If I Was a Folkstar. “He said that song he wrote about having LSD on the beach with his wife. Chaz (Bundick) is lovely. He never even asked for payment. People sensed that this was something we put our hearts into. He was getting married at the time but still found time to make it,” he says.

What about the modern day bushranger with a bow of gold, Ballarat violinist Warren Ellis?

“He does violin on Stepkids with Ariel Pink and Kathleen from Royal Trux. We shared stories about being kids from regional Victoria and going out and realising we could hold our own in a broader context. He’s incredible.”

And, pray tell, where is the irreverent Father John Misty? “The last track, Saturday Night Inside Out, doing beautiful Beach Boys harmonies. That was one of the last pieces we added to the record.”

Now they just have to put it all together live at Splendour In the Grass in Byron Bay. Thus far on the European tour circuit they’ve been playing DJ sets, very very good DJ sets. Their 3am Prima Vera Sound show had the Spanish hordes jumping about wildly and the group later posted the mix on Soundcloud (it’s now been taken down) with a refreshing message

“We put this show together an hour before showtime after visa f----ups nixed our live band plans. Thank f--- we had our vinyl with us. Special thanks and much love to Jamie xx who came through for us with the classic Good Times a cappella at the last moment! Mixing is ruff as f--- but that’s the way we roll. None of this Ableton bulls---, this is punk rock kids!” Hear hear.

Di Blasi joined Chater at the eleventh hour after said passport issues. “It was fate that Tony had to come over (to Barcelona) at the last minute to play that show. We had CDJs and turntables set up in the hotel room, we were working non-stop on the plane on the way over. The London show (Oval Space) was lovely, there was so much love in the room, especially (with us) being able to play new music. We resisted the offer of playing shows until we had new music,” Chater says.

The live show “is going well, we’re in rehearsals today, we have live vocals. We can’t wait for Splendour. James (De La Cruz) has always been part of the live show, he was never part of the recording band. He works in a bank now. He’s got a year off his work to tour. He was really vocal about the song Sunshine and he said ‘You guys should have that on the album.’ He made us look at that song in a new light when he popped into Sing Sing.”

As for who is behind the mystery person Mutual Attraction, named on their Facebook page as a fourth member of the outfit, Chater says “I have no idea. Truly. Maybe that’s the universal love that the music brings.”

When pressed, Chater isn’t afraid to pick which of his new children he is most proud of. “Kaleidoscopic Lovers, I love Jonathan’s (Donahue, Mercury Rev) vocal in that and Colours, it’s sublime, even if the track is fragmented. Stepkids as well, it sums up the heart of the record.”

Stepkids makes you feel like a whippernspaper again. “That first Mercury Rev album was such a big part of our DNA when we were beginning, he’s a hero to us.

“We ended up taking songs away, at times we were a bit unsure if it was too long, some of the tracks near the end meant a lot to us so we thought, f--- it, we kept them on. An hour feels like

a good length,” Chater says.

Most agree. Q Music gives Wildflower 8/10, after 60 spins I give it 4/5, Pitchfork Music thought similarly with an 8.5/10 while serial bitches NME feel it deserved 2/5, criticising Frankie Sinatra for it’s “oompah-calypso lurch and brain-glitch hook that are not quite as punchable as Frontier Psychiatrist — the whinny of horses is still annoying 16 years on.” File under: disgruntled critic smarting from Brexit.

As for the Luke Steele project, the King Kong outtakes and the “hip hop Yellow Submarine” projects, “First, we’re taking a breath and we’re gonna enjoy travelling the world and doing shows and playing new music to people,” he says.

“We just feel like a conduit. We’re not really The Avalanches, The Avalanches is the music.”

Hear: Wildflower (EMI) out now.

Tour: Rumoured to play Falls Festival nationally and sideshows.

Originally published as The Avalanches have conquered health issues, lawsuits, lost funds and Empire Of the Sun to bloom again with Wildflower