Why The Avalanches ditched their record collection

When The Avalanches finished their last album in 2016, founding member Robbie Chater gave away almost every record he owned.

Built up over decades, the collection contained about 7,000 records - many of which had been excavated, recycled and re-contextualised on the band's sampladelic debut Since I Left You and follow-up Wildflower.

Despite the obvious sentimental value, Chater decided he needed "a fresh start", and divided the records equally between a charity shop and his Melbourne shop Licorice Pie Records.

"It was time to let stuff go and to allow new music to come in," he says. "It was really liberating, actually. Scary but great."

The only records Chater refused to part with were the ones his father had left him when he died - a small collection of folk music has that ended up being plundered on The Avalanches' new album We Will Always Love You.

One of his favourite discoveries was Just Another Diamond Day, an obscure LP by English singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan.

Released in 1970, its delicate, pastoral songs were overlooked at the time. One critic called it "nursery rhymes for children", prompting Bunyan to quit music for the next 30 years.

But Chater was transported by her voice, and spliced together three separate lines from her song Glow Worms to create the hook for The Avalanches' dreamy, psychedelic Reflecting Light.

One of the first songs written for their new album, its patchwork lyrics - "Dreamers moving slowly through reflecting light" - unlocked the album's grand concept, described in a press release as "the vibrational relationship between light, sound and spirit".

In plain English, the idea is a wistfully romantic exploration of how music outlasts its creators.

"When we're sampling very, very old recorded music, the singer may have long passed so it's almost like summoning spirits," explains Chater.

"If we sample a record from the 40s, someone else has owned that record for maybe 50 years and played it a million times, and so they've added to the crackles on the vinyl. Then that record has come into my life and we've sampled it and made a song out of it.

"It's just a beautiful flow of energy, that we're only a small part of - and so the album was reflecting on all those sorts of processes."

There's a cosmic element to the music too, Chater says.

"We were thinking a lot about signal transmission and how every radio broadcast from the last hundred years is still floating out there in space. Elvis's voice is still floating out there, and John Lennon's and Tammy Wynette's.

"It's a beautiful thought to me that all these broadcasts are still out there, surrounding us."

All of those ideas are brought to life in the new video for Reflecting Lights - which premieres exclusively below.

A collaboration with London's Rambert Dance Company, it uses cutting-edge filming techniques to capture dancers in full 3D, meaning they can be seen from any angle when viewed in virtual reality.

In a forthcoming augmented reality version, you will even be able to make the dancers perform in your own house or your local park.

"From the very beginning of lockdown, we realised that live performance was at extreme risk and felt drawn to produce a piece about expression, connection and joy," says Chater.

When the video was presented to him, he was overwhelmed. "I couldn't believe it," he recalls. "It captured those themes we'd been exploring, of light and sound and the human spirit, so it was quite an emotional moment."

By The Avalanches' standards, We Will Always Love You has arrived comparatively quickly - a mere four years in the making.

Their last album notoriously took 16 years to complete. The band, feeling the pressure of following up an instant classic, pursued dozens of dead ends, collecting and discarding samples, shedding members and, in Chater's case, dealing with two separate auto-immune diseases that put him out of action for three years.

Releasing Wildflower in 2016 was "a great achievement, regardless of how it was received," Di Blasi recently told the New York Times. "Just actually getting it done was the victory."

The ensuing world tour should have been a celebration. Instead, Chater checked into in rehab, tackling an addiction to alcohol that had plagued him "since I was 15 or 16".

His drinking peaked in his early 20s, leaving him in intensive care and "lucky to be alive". It was only after getting sober that he could concentrate on The Avalanches' first record - it's breezy, carefree vibes inspired by his joy at having survived.

"I've only ever been able to make music when I'm sober and well," he says. "If I'm ever been in a period of addiction, I can barely function. It's like my career is kind of over, basically."

The new album doesn't shy away from those dark times. "If I struggle with affliction, it's because I caught up with my contradictions," sings Sananda Maitreya (formerly known as Terence Trent D'Arby) on Reflecting Light. "Life herself is habit-forming."

While Maitreya wrote the words, they came after a long email exchange with Chater about his journey through addiction and disease, and the ideas the album would be exploring.

"I was just blown away by his generosity," says Chater. "It would be easy for someone to dial it in and stick a guest vocal on top of the music - but he was vulnerable and opened up and and explored what we were talking about. I'm very grateful."

The album's other guests - including Tricky, Neneh Cherry, Jamie xx, Karen O and Mick Jones of The Clash - also received similar emails before they were allowed to contribute a single note. If a collaborator wasn't on the same wavelength, they were politely shown the (virtual) door.

The result is a remarkably coherent record, despite its vast cast list and hundreds of samples. Thanks to the unique way The Avalanches make music, guest vocalists aren't confined to single tracks, with fragments of lyrics seeping into other songs and interstitial tracks.

While it retains the warmth and positivity of the group's first two records, it's more contemplative and mellow - drawing on gospel and socially-conscious soul as much as dance music.

The songs are stitched together by interludes of spacey electronics and snatches of dialogue - inspired by the Golden Records that Nasa sent into space in 1970.

The copper discs, designed to last a billion years, were intended as a message from Earth to alien civilisations, with speech, music, sounds and even pictures encoded in the grooves.

Chater was particularly moved to learn that author and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who led the project, included a recording of his wife Ann Druyan's heartbeat and brain waves on the discs.

The day before Druyan was due to have the scans, Sagan proposed, and she decided to capture her euphoria for posterity.

"She realised that a billion years from now, the sound of a young woman's heart in love would still be floating out there in the cosmos," says Chater.

"I thought that was the most beautiful thing I've ever heard."

The arrival of We Will Always Love You, four short years after Wildflower, has given fans hope that The Avalanches have broken the creative block that hampered them in the 2000s.

The band are optimistic too. Not least because Chater has finally made his peace with Since I Left You.

"I was a little embarrassed when I was younger," he says. "I'm such a perfectionist that all I could hear was what I would have done better.

"But now I can hear it and it's like a different person made it - and I'm very fond of it."

We Will Always Love You will be released on Friday, 11 December.

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