Since I Left You - Production

Production

Since I Left You is the debut studio album by Australian electronic dance music group, The Avalanches, which was issued on 27 November 2000. They started recording in 1999 and had used the working title of Pablo's Cruise. The duo primarily worked with a Yamaha Promix 01 and Akai S2000 samplers. The band's members, Darren Seltmann and Robbie Chater, spent hours sampling music from vinyl records to create the songs on the album: Chater estimates that there are over 3,500 samples. After sampling and arranging, the pair would swap their tapes, listen to each other's ideas and expand on whatever they had heard. Despite working separately, both Chater and Seltmann had nearly duplicate studio set-ups.

Initially, Seltmann and Chater did not keep a list of which tracks were being sampled, according to Chater they "were really unorganised and were just sampling on the fly as tracks progressed ... We had no idea the record would get such a wide-scale release so we saw no need to keep track of what we were using – we were definitely guilty of harbouring a 'No-one's going to listen to it anyway' sort of attitude." The sources spanned many different styles of music and sampled artists include: Françoise Hardy, Blowfly, Sérgio Mendes, Raekwon, Wayne and Shuster and Madonna. Seltmann felt that "he more rejected and unwanted the record that a sample comes from, the more appealing it is, I guess it's almost a reaction to rare record finding, but occasionally things like 'Holiday' come up". He described how making sample tapes for each other created some samples which were intended as "funny samples" that they had no original intention to get clearance for. In particular, Madonna's song "'Holiday' was one of those where we put something together, ended it with 'Holiday' and all had a big laugh. It ended up where we couldn't live without it so I guess we just had to make that one work". Later, Seltmann and Chater had a few problems when trying to clear all the samples. One sample that had to be removed was from Rodgers and Hammerstein in the intro that featured harps and girls singing. After checking clearances, "he album is slightly different to its original form in that it had a whole new introduction, which apparently was really recognisable, so we had to take that off straight away". The group played their songs to flatmates to get input on which tracks were worth including on the album. "Electricity" was the first song the group felt that worked; it was a last-minute addition to the album as The Avalanches felt the song "still sounds good". In early 2000, Seltmann (as Dazzler) and Chater (as Bobby C) finished production on the album, using the pseudonym Bobbydazzler. It had received the official title, Since I Left You in March 2000.