Chuck Klosterman - But What if We're Wrong?

 Q + A - Chuck Klosterman 

The Guardian, June 7 2016 

Your new book But What If We’re Wrong? is a series of thought experiments that to try to “think about the present as if we were the past”. The concept really speaks to me, as a fan of science fiction, but also someone fascinated by discredited knowledge: things like the late 18^th Century belief that infantile masturbation was a terrible, health-damaging problem that required drastic preventive measures, or the 19^th Century pseudo-science of phrenology, using skull measurements to assess the character of people, their criminal tendencies...  What led you to this subject - the precariousness of human knowledge, the disquieting thought that most of what we feel certain about today will ultimately be disproved and that the future will scorn and deride all our ideas and beliefs?

It happened sort of gradually and yet suddenly.  Over my last few books I’ve been thinking about the history of thought, but it really came from watching Fox TV’s reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series. I particularly enjoyed the animated clips about these hinge points in scientific history, when everybody thought a certain way but then one individual puts forward this new idea and everything shifted after that.  Coincidentally I was reading about how Moby Dick got mixed reviews at the time, Melville ended up leaving the writing profession, and it wasn’t until after World War One that the culture shifted, the book was rediscovered, and it became the Great American Novel.  But What If We’re Wrong? really  took off from those two things.

Those are two different kinds of “knowledge”, science and the arts. With science, there are new discoveries and theories emerge around them, but it’s a much harder kind of knowledge. With changing ideas about what is valuable in literature or music, about who belongs in the canon, that’s soft, in the sense that it’s driven by taste, by fashion, by social shifts. It’s much more up for debate and revision. Given enough time, nearly everything that’s highly regarded will drop down in eminence, while once minor things from the past may get elevated. In one chapter in the book you discuss how it’s impossible to know who will come to be regarded as the defining writer of our time.  And you speculate about “who will be the future’s Kafka?” – a writer virtually unknown in his own epoch but who later becomes retrospectively epochal

My thought process with that started with the idea that “whatever seems like the most obvious answer will probably be wrong”. I build that into my thinking. The obvious example that many people would give for  a contemporary author that will be remembered as defining our era is a figure like Jonathan Franzen.  So I remove that from the equation. So then it came down to one of two possibilities. Someone who is known and successful but not that respected -  a writer who is considered a commercial hack.  The other possibility is that it will be somebody who is completely unknown today - like Kafka.  Someone who will be discovered later on and that discovery process itself will validate that writer. So the challenge I set myself in that chapter was trying to narrow down the possibilities of who that currently unknown writer might be - what aspects of their career, their identity, their writing. An impossible task. But I try, because that’s what I like to do!

There is an industry – in publishing, in music reissuing, in the arts generally – of rediscovery, repackaging, cultural archeology and curation.  There are so many examples of once hopelessly obscure figures who are now deemed far more central and essential than they once were. Other figures who were deemed central and essential, by critics and the intelligent reading (or listening) public drop away – George Bernard Shaw,  Graham Parker.  And then there are whole areas of the culture that were once considered beneath consideration, but now get taken seriously. Your example of that in the book is wrestling.

The pro wrestling thing to me is a weird example of how culture works. All these wrestlers from the Eighties are dying now, like Dusty Rhodes, and they are being lionized by people who have this memory from watching them when they were in high school or junior high. When they write about them now they tend to inject them with some kind of secondary meaning – almost a transgressive meaning – and they overlook the fact that at the time, nobody took wrestling seriously – including themselves.  But somehow they create the feeling that there was always a sense of it being taken seriously. And more generally this seems to be the way that obscure art becomes venerated – by generating a political meaning for these long ago things that matches what is happening in the political present tense.  So if you’re trying - like I am in this book  - to find out what will matter in the future, you have to project a visualization of what the future will be like, what people will care about.

Although you’re hyper-conscious about the fragility of cultural convictions, you do still muster enough certainty to make a few predictions in the book. One is that television, as an entertainment format, will shortly not exist.  Explain the thought process behind that prophecy.

I started with thinking about the relationship between radio and television. It feels like there should be a continuum there, that TV simply adds a visual component. But in fact TV was a huge break – which is why we don’t aesthetically connect what television drama does and what a radio play does. I think that’ll happen again – something will come along technologically that adds another component to the entertainment format that makes it something completely separate.  It could be some kind of virtual immersion, where you’ll be inside whatever show you’re watching, or it’ll relate to the mobility of it, which is already happening to some extent with watching TV on your phone, but it might be even more completely fluid, such that you can slide in and out of the program you’re experiencing. I don’t know what it will be exactly but I think when it comes it will be a cut-off that freezes television as we currently understand it as a period that goes from its inception in the middle of 20^th Century to whenever the new thing takes over.

So it’s not that television is going to go extinct exactly – more that it will evolve into something so drastically different it’ll effectively be something else?

Television is already the most dynamic technological experience when it comes to entertainment. The experience of watching television now is drastically different from what it was 20 years ago. Whereas with music or reading, certain elements and aspects change but the experience of hearing a song is - from a physiological standpoint  - the same as it was 200 years ago. Reading is a static thing fundamentally.  But TV is taken so seriously now, it has really changed the experience completely.  Joyce Carol Oates wrote an essay for TV Guide about Hill Street Blues in about 1980 and it starts with her saying how embarrassed and ashamed she is to admit that she and her smart friends find themselves often talking about this TV show. But now it’s like, Emily Nussbaum just won a Pulitzer Prize for her New Yorker TV criticism. When something becames that meaningful, it changes the experience of watching it. TV used to be relaxing. Now you have to concentrate.

Yes, watching the box used to be almost like an opiate or a tranquilizer – idle skimming through the channels. You’d have the desire, or need, to watch television in the abstract, and then look for the least tedious specific thing that was on. Now you make appointments. You manage your viewing and stockpile it. You binge an entire series. And you have to pay close attention, for fear of missing a key bit of dialogue or a narrative twist.

With TV in the past, there was no expectation you were going to have to concentrate.  And if you missed an episode of a TV show, you just missed it – no big deal.  Nowadays just about the only thing people watch to unwind still is sports.

Another section of the book that struck a chord with me was when you write about dreams – the way they’ve been demoted in the culture.  For most of human history, dreams were considered highly significant – they had oracular meaning, they warranted being interpreted.  In the early twentieth century you had Freud and Jung analyzing  the symbolic language of dreams, and an artistic movement, surrealism, that drew inspiration from dreams. But even as recently as the 1970s, books about the meaning of dreams were popular. As a teenager, I kept a detailed dream diary.  Maybe it’s just our family, but it doesn’t seem like my kids ever talk about their dreams. It’s just not something people pay much attention to anymore. Why is that?

Freud and Jung were the apex of looking at dreams seriously. But more recently you have scientists who map the brain, like these two guys at Harvard who came to the conclusion that dreams are just left-over thoughts from the day. There isn’t a narrative there,  it’s an avalanche of emotions that we reconstruct as a story – because we can only understand things through story-telling. The conclusion of all this neurological research was that the content of dreams is worthless. It’s just an oddity of the mind and how it works when we are sleeping. Those ideas have filtered out to the secular, intelligent public and the general view now is that dreams are a waste of time to think about. The idea that they’re significant is a really fringe, borderline New Age thought at this point.

In the book, though, I wonder if this is something that we could be wrong about. It’s a third of our life almost where we’re having these metaphysical experiences.  Sometimes they’re lucid and we know we’re in a false reality. Sometimes we can’t tell we’re in a different reality.  Part of the problem is that we are so limited in how we can study them, there’s no way to see or hear or feel someone else’s dream.  So maybe we are just going to keep on going down this path of thinking it’s just electrical impulses in the brain, just biomechanic . But I wonder if that’s a huge misstep.  I understand the rational argument against dreams, but something feels important to me about them.

One thing I wondered was if the downgrading of dreams as a cultural interest had some relation to digital technology: video games, the internet, computers generally.  Has the virtual displaced the oneiric? It’s hard to imagine an art movement like surrealism emerging that was invested in dreams and the unconscious as a source of inspiration. Contemporary artists are more stimulated by digital technology and internet culture. Do we no longer pay attention to dreams because we are so involved with digitally-enabled zones of make-believe and magic?  And does that also affect a different kind of dreaming that we do in our waking hours – daydreaming? Overall, it feels like these interior and reflective mental activities have declined in the scheme of things - and that this must have something to do with the rise of the internet and social media.

The amount of time we’re looking at an unreal image on electronic screens is so much greater now.  Just waiting in line for the bank, nowadays I would always look at my phone.  My mind is attached most of the time to something specific. But once, waiting in line, I would have daydreamed - my mind was elsewhere.  Perhaps those five or ten minutes of daydreaming had value.

One thing interesting about your writing style, which is unusual in arts and culture writing – perhaps more common in popular science writing – is the way you reason out an argument. You set out a proposition and then logically follow it through, methodically raising the counter-arguments, the evidence that contradicts it. Mostly in cultural criticism, the writer does that in private and then presents the results to the reader – often bombastically. But you lay out that process in real-time, almost, and bring the reader along with you.

What I I hope is that when someone reads what I’m writing, that they feel like they’re writing the piece with their own mind. The sequencing of the thoughts, the obstacles you encounter intellectually along the way – I want it to be like a real-time transfer of my mind. I want it to look like it’s easy, so that the person reading it almost feels like they could have written that. Which is kind of a trick, because that’s not what is going on! The hardest thing about doing this kind of writing is creating the illusion that anyone can do this. 

The Avalanches, We Will Always You

bio

Taking its title from a sampled slice of ethereal harmony vocal by singing sisters The Roches, We Will Always Love You doubles as “an exploration of the human voice” and a spiritual reckoning with “who are we really? What happens when we die?’”. So says Robbie Chater, who alongside bandmates Tony DiBlasi and Andy Szerkis, has moved beyond the party-up exuberance of the Avalanches’s youthful music to a tender, reflective sound infused with hard-earned life wisdom.  Sparkling with the treble frequencies that made Since I Left You such a dizzy thrill, We Will Always Love You is dedicated to probing “the vibrational relationship between light, sound and spirit.”  But the goal now is elevation rather than intoxication.

Sampling remains at the core of The Avalanches sound. A single note played by Nina Simone, layered and modulated in myriad ways, serves as the source of most the piano on the album; what may or may not be the spectral voice of Karen Carpenter, captured by spiritualists using home-made contraptions, is transformed into the drum sound on “Reflecting Light”.   But alongside all the sample ghosts, We Will Always Love You features an array of living guests who contribute vocals and lyrics: MGMT, Rivers Cuomo, Denzel Curry,  Neneh Cherry, Perry Farrell, Karen O , Mick Jones, Sampa the Great, Tricky, Kurt Vile, Blood Orange, and more. The Avalanches’s music has always dripped with melody, but because of this expanded role for guest singers and writers, We Will Always Love You is their most song-oriented album yet.

Probably the most striking thing about the new album is that it features a lot of slower songs -  ballads and midtempo grooves.  “It’s less buzzed and manic,” says Chater. “For us, to make the same record again, no matter how well executed, wouldn’t have been satisfying. We were looking to do something that would open up possibilities for the future. Take a bit of a left turn that frees us up to do whatever we want to next.”

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Nineties were the golden age for sampling as an art form. As each year of the decade unfolded, a new masterwork arrived that took the state of that art one step further:  De La Soul’s De La Soul Is Dead, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Tricky’s Maxinquaye, Goldie’s Timeless, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, Chemical Brothers’  Dig Your Own Hole, Daft Punk’s Homework…    

Shaped by the sampladelic Nineties but making their own album debut in the first year of the new millennium, The Avalanches took the magic craft of building records out of earlier recordings and making songs speak to other songs to a new peak of dazzling density. Based in Melbourne, the core of the group was sampling wizards Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann, who worked together as the production partnership Bobbydazzler. Starting work in 1999, the pair combed through the city’s “op shops” (short for opportunity shops, the Australian term for thrift store or charity shop) foraging for second-hand vinyl. After 18 months of trawling the bargain bins, they then began the real work: listening to the 600-plus albums and cataloguing every potentially useable sample; identifying affinities that criss-crossed the mass of raw material; working out which scraps of orchestration, curls of melody, tics of rhythm and swatches of sound-texture combined in emotionally evocative patterns.

Although there were recognizable moments on Since I Left You – a snatch of Madonna’s “Holiday,” a sliver of Kid Creole’s “Stool Pigeon” -  the vast bulk of the raw ingredients were “micro-samples” – nobody knows how many exactly, but it’s estimated to be over 3000. These single-notes or isolated chords were then looped, processed, painstakingly harmonized, and stitched together into a tapestry-in-motion. The sample-dense sound was filled out further, to the brink of bursting, with contributions from keyboardist Tony Di Blasi, turntablists James Dela Cruz and Dexter Fabay, and piano / percussion man Gordon McQuilten.  But despite all the brain-breaking work that went into assembling the samplescapes and balancing all the input in the mix, Since I Left You never sounded labored or overworked. It sounded effortless, as carefree and refreshed as an ocean breeze.  

Originally titled Pablo’s Cruise, the album was initially conceived around the idea of “an international search for love from country to country” but soon became a more loosely themed evocation of travel, movement and spiritual renewal.  There was also an overall sonic concept in place too: an orientation towards the treble frequencies, breaking with the Nineties dance culture fetish for block-rockin’ beats and boombastic bass. According to Robbie Chater, the vibe they were aiming for was “light, AM-pop record…  more 60s influence, with less bass, inspired by Phil Spector and the Beach Boys, but using dance music techniques.”  Drawing on exotica, film scores, surf music, and ultra-feminine French pop in the Francoise Hardy style,  the album shimmered and tingled with high-end sounds: swelling strings, rippling harps, flutters of flute,  dulcet dove-like harmonies, tinkling triangles, piano trills.

Like pearls strung on a necklace, there were no gaps between the eighteen songs that made up Since I Left You. The entire album was like a single super-song  celebrating music’s power to uplift the soul, move the feet, massage the heart, clarify the mind and cleanse the spirit.

Released in Australia at very end of 2000, and in the rest of the world in 2001, Since I Left You met with worldwide  critical acclaim. The album made the Top Ten in the UK and seeded two Top 20 hits as well with the title track and “Frontier Psychiatrist”. In Australia, Since I Left You was a platinum smash.

But the group’s new fanbase and its critical champions would have a long wait for the follow-up.  Almost 16 years. The causes were multiple: personal life turbulence in one case (more on this further down), the departure of founder member Seltmann, and an inability to settle on a thematic and sonic concept for the new project (at one point it was trailed as an exploration of “ambient world music”, at another point described as “so fuckin' party you will die” ). There were also interruptions in the form of a film score for King Kong and another for an animated film that was never completed.

Just as everyone had given up hope of ever hearing another squeak from the Avalanches, Wildflower arrived in July 2016 and garnered a reception almost as warm as its predecessor.  Loosely themed around the idea of a “road trip on LSD”, Wildflower built on the dizzy density of their sampledelic approach and continued the love affair with AM radio style Sixties sunshine sounds (sources included Harper’s Bizarre, The Association, Tommy James and the Shondells, Bobby Goldsboro). But the mood shifted from party-hard to a dreamier vibe infused with the group’s love of psychedelia. Wildflower also drew on a profusion of guest vocalists, including Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donohue, Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick, alternative rappers Camp Lo and Danny Brown,  indie-rock icons David Berman and Jennifer Herrema. Instrumental contributions came from musicians like Warren Ellis and Tame Impala and as with Since I Left You, there were plenty of found voices: snippets of dialogue from documentaries and movies like the 1969 satire Putney Swope, children’s voices ranging from the 12-year old postpunk artist Chandra to a Melbourne high school choir singing “Come Together” by the Beatles.

Like Since I Left You, Wildflower’s emotional palette revolved around the sunnier sides of human life:  "new love, childhood playfulness… happy feelings of connection,” as Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson enumerated them,  to which list you could add travel, vacations, summertime, and natural beauty. Both albums broke with the facile adolescent / alternative-rock tendency to equate depth with darkness. For The Avalanches, joy has just as many subtle shades and complexities as misery.

Ironically, the backdrop to Wildflower – or at least a primary reason for its agonizing slow birth -  – was an abyss of misery that swallowed up the life of Robbie Chater. These five lost years weren’t even the first episode in a long-running saga of addiction dating back to adolescence. Although the dark days have long been banished, that personal odyssey of recovery, self-discovery, and spiritual rebirth very much informs  the Avalanches’s latest project,  We Will Always Love You.  Rewind then, back to the late Eighties…

“I started drinking very young,” says Chater. “I grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne, but when I was 13 we moved to the country and that’s where it began. Middle of nowhere, surrounded by this drinking culture.  From the age of fourteen I drank a lot and after high school, when there no longer any structure to life, it got out of hand. From eighteen to 21, I was just very unwell – physically dependent. I wanted to stop, but when I tried, I had a withdrawal seizure and ended up in intensive care.  Woke up after being in there for a month, then went into the psych ward. Gradually my brain cleared and I was able to really start on what I’d always wanted to do – the music.”

After “nearly drinking myself to death” before he’d turned 22, a newly sober Chater was vitalized and spiritualized. “Since I Left You came pouring out very quickly. I was so happy to be alive.  All that positivity flowed into the music.  Feeling free of this nightmare that for years I just couldn’t break out of…  That’s what I hear now in Since I Left You - the joyousness.”

But during the fitful phase of false starts on a second album, Chater - after a dozen years of  sobriety – relapsed. “It was my wife’s birthday, I had a glass of wine… and within a week I was back to drinking how I had been. During those twelve years of being drink and drug free, I’d built a life, a home – and I lost it all.  During my 30s, I was constantly hospitalized and detoxing. Sleeping wherever. My family and everyone around me had accepted that I wouldn’t come through. Nobody knew what to do anymore.”

Then came rescue and redirection in the form of a counsellor, who would become a close friend: a recovered heroin addict who “was just able to get through to me, I guess. Through him I was able to open up to a spiritual path.”  Along with forms of therapy and meditation that instill “a present-moment mindfulness,”  the breakthrough for Chater was realizing how much of what he had believed about himself was really “a construct.  I’d lived in my head, a whole world of thought and stories about my past, an inner dialogue that was really unhelpful. But now I was waking up, realizing that all of that is just mental noise. I have a persona, a construct to do with my job and  my family history, but beyond all that, I’ve come to realise that each of us is much more vast.   I am not what I do, or even this body. There is so much more….  all this space. We really are children of the universe.”

 Thematically and sonically, We Will Always Love You is an exploration of “the vibrational relationship between light, sound and spirit”. Those high frequencies that the Avalanches are drawn to so obsessively – the treble zones of sparkle and glow – are part of this vibrational relationship. Higher tones evoke sunshine, starlight, the heavens above; they elevate the spirit.  “That’s also where vinyl crackle lives, in those frequencies. And when enough layering occurs, there’s this beautiful fuzziness between the vinyl crackle and the sounds of bells and strings – it becomes a shimmering.”

On We Will Always Love You, abiding touchstone figures such as Phil Spector and Brian Wilson are joined by subliminal influence from the neo-psychedelic sounds of My Bloody Valentine and Mercury Rev that Chater loved as a youth and that fed into the pre-Avalanches outfit Alarm 115 he formed with Seltmann and DiBlasi. You could almost use the word “shoegaze” to describe We Will Always Love You, except that instead of tremolo and open-tuned guitars, the Avalanches are reaching that shimmer sound through “vocal sustain samples – just layering and layering until it became fuzzy.” Gospel and soul harmony singing are another subliminal influence on the project. “We started out sampling loads of gospel, although most of it didn’t end up on the record.” But gospel and hot-buttered soul in the 70s style has lent a kind of after-flavour of religious uplift, like when a soup has been strained to leave just a clear but tangy broth. “There’s a similarity between shoegaze and that massed voices effect that you get in choral music,” notes Robbie.

As the project developed, it became “an exploration of the human voice,” Chater says, and specifically “forever voices”, his term for the sound of long-dead singers whose presence can be reanimated when the stylus enters the groove. “When we sample the music of musicians who’ve passed, it’s like summoning spirits.” This eerie way of thinking about records led Chater to contemplate the possibility that radio transmissions of terrestrial performers are radiating into the far depths of outer space. “John Lennon, Elvis, Tammy Wynette, whoever – every voice ever played on the radio over the last 100 years…  they are floating around out there in space, endlessly travelling. Like spirits, ghosts... and they will be there long after this planet is no more. That is such a beautiful thought to me. And then I wonder, what is the difference between these floating voice broadcasts and other energy and vibrations that make up the cosmos?  I'm also imagining if somewhere out there in the cosmos, someone is listening…”

If there’s a single spark for We Will Always Love You it’s the story of the love affair between Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan:  “science communicators” whose writings and TV programs brought the ever-deepening mysteries of astronomy and astrophysics to the mass audience. Chater was profoundly moved by the fact that the couple’s romance was captured and carried into space, thanks to the Voyager Interstellar Message Project.  Druyan served as Creative Director in charge of curating the Golden Record: earthling music and assorted terrestrial sounds gathered for the contemplation of any alien civilizations that might be out there and be advanced enough to construct a playback system.  An hour’s worth of Druyan’s brainwaves were recorded only a few days after Sagan proposed marriage to her, conceivably preserving her head-over-heels mind-state. These lovesick frequencies were then propelled into interstellar space alongside the sounds of Chuck Berry, Beethoven, humpback whale-song, etc. Originally, Druyan was set to be a presence on We Will Always Love You: a studio was booked to record her telling her own story. That never transpired, but Druyan “gave us permission to use her photo on the album cover,” says Chater. “We photographed it off a static-y television set and ran it through a spectogram to make the cover image. So that was a beautiful way that Ann could still be part of the record.”

Another pivotal moment came when a friend played Chater a song by the kooky female harmony group The Roches. “It was one of those lightbulb moments”.  The lyric fragment “we will always love you” from the singing sisters’s “Hammond Song” was sampled and became first the title of the song, and then the title of the entire album, crystalizing the theme of everlasting love as an undying vibration.

Also central to the project is a single note of piano playing by Nina Simone. “It’s a note she played at the start of a concert – it rung out in the hall for ages.” Although Los Angeles based keyboard player John Carroll Kirby also contributes to the record,“ pretty much anytime you hear a piano, that’s Nina. Most of the writing of the songs started with her piano sound – she was the backbone for the whole thing.”

One of the things that attracted Chater to the Simone sample was its “badly recorded quality”, in which he heard a peculiar beauty. The fading of analogue media forms like vinyl and tape, and the wear-and-tear of life upon sonic artifacts like records and cassettes is something that fascinates him. “When I find a second-hand record and start looking for samples on it, everyone who ever played it has contributed to the crackles. It’s  been played by different owners who dropped it or spilled wine on it – and that’s all embedded in the disc. Then there’s all the emotion of the people who made the music, what they were going through when they were recording. And when we make a song, all of that passes through us and out onto the radio and into the world – into the lives of other people. And so it continues.

“And what part do I really play in the process?,” muses Chater. “I’m just another part of the cycle, in the same way that my energy and cells will break down and flow back out there….fertilize a tree or something. Energy just moves around.”

The Avalanches’s interest in the spectral quality of voices captured for all time on recordings,  in the hiss and crackle of well-played vinyl, puts The Avalanches in alignment both with chillwave musicians like Ariel “Worn Copy” Pink and hauntology artists like The Caretaker, Burial, and the Ghost Box label.  Talking of ghosts, one recurrent presence on the album, concealed deep in the mix, is Demi Moore in her role as Molly in Ghost, calling out to Patrick Swayze’s phantom boyfriend Sam.

But as much as it’s about communing with the spectral voices of singers long passed,  We Will Always Love You is also direct collaboration with new musical friends who are very much alive. Most of these collaborations were done remotely, but some involved face-to-face encounters in Melbourne or in Los Angeles, where Chater spent an extended period of studio work and hanging out.

The Avalanches’s albums have always teemed with melody and harmony, but the expanded  role for guest vocalists has made We Will Always Love You their most songful record so far. “It’s more  writing chords around samples, rather than matching two or three samples like we’ve done previously. But sampling remains at the core: I think every track began with a sample, and with the Nina Simone piano, and then it would  became a song, which we’d use bits of other songs to complete.”

Two other characteristics of We Will Always Love You mark it out from their previous albums. There’s the use of interstitials – brief swatches of eerie texture, sometimes with a found fragment of speech added – to weave together the whole album into a story. “The ghostliness was important, to help set the mood for the songs – little transmission bursts,  messages broadcast from somewhere.” The other striking thing about this new album is that it features a lot of slow and midtempo songs. Indeed it takes until the fifteenth track, “Music Makes Me High”, before we hear anything that really resembles the archetypal Avalanches party-up mode.

“Early on, we realized this was how the record was going - and it was liberating to let the album be what it wanted to be. When we were sequencing, the record company were like, ‘you should put some of the faster songs up the front,’ but ultimately the feeling was – it is what it is.”  Rather than a wild party, We Will Always Love You feels more like a reunion of old friends, mellow, warm, all hugs and nostalgic stories pulled out of the alcoves of mutual memory for another shared airing.

Unlike its precursor Wildflower, We Will Always Love You came together “like a single thought, that was followed through in one process, quite quickly,” says Robbie.  “It took only a couple of years from start to finish.

“The conceptual side of things is really important to me,’ he continues. “I can’t just be blindly creative, I need to find a feeling or a place that gives me the energy to start making a record.  Wildflower changed so much over fifteen years, whereas with this album, we knew what it was about right at the beginning, and then we did it, and it’s done.”

 

WE WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU - TRACK BY TRACK

 

1/ Ghost Story (feat. Orono)

The album starts with an interstitial: wavering vocal tones and a trembly-voiced phone message about the difficulties of staying connected over long distances, contributed by Orono Noghuchi of Superorganism, a British-Australian-American group who themselves came together through online forums. “Orono sent us an amazing phone recording from when she was about 14 – a really embarrassing message she left on her boyfriend’s answering machine asking him not to break up with her – and said we could use it if we wanted. It didn’t really fit but that gave us the idea of doing a similar kind of recording. I love the idea of calling someone who’s passed but there’s still a message left on the answer machine before they left this world.”

 

2/ Song for Barbara Payton

Hovering somewhere between song and interstitial, this short piece is woven out of gospel  vocals and tingling electronics. The title pays tribute to the American actress, whose promising film career was brought down by her turbulent life and struggles with alcohol. “Her story really resonated with me – it’s heartbreaking really. The lyrics in the sample we found seemed to sum up her life. I’d been  looking at images of Payton for a possible album cover, but when we didn’t go down that path, it just seemed like a nice way to acknowledge her.”

 

3/ We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)

The title track, pivoting around the wonderfully ethereal harmony vocals of singing sisters The Roches (from “Hammond Song” on their 1979 self-titled debut album).  Featured artist is Dev Hynes, a/k/a Blood Orange, the British rapper-singer who sings in the chorus and raps lines like “draped in monotony/ what’s my life gotten me?” in a low-key, daydreamy style redolent of  Massive Attack’s 1991 foundational trip hop masterpiece Blue Lines.  “We did something with Tricky for this album and it sounded similar – I really love that British style.”

 

4/ The Divine Chords (feat. MGMT and Johnny Marr)

Marr brings the kind of glistening guitar chimes first heard on early Smiths songs like “Suffer Little Children” and “Well I Wonder”. MGMT, are “just beautiful songwriters.  I was lucky enough to hang out in Los Angeles, where Andrew VanWyngarden is, for quite a while over the last couple of years and do some recording. I think he was going through a heartbreak so that sense of loss, it’s captured in the song.”

 

5/ Solitary Ceremonies

After-images of VanWyngarden’s vocal waver through this interstitial, alongside the well-spoken tones of Rosemary Brown, a spiritualist who became famous in 1960s Britain when she claimed that the ghosts of classical composers like Liszt and Beethoven were contacting her to be the medium for their unfinished works. “Brown made an album and that’s where we got her voice from. There’s also TV footage of her, where they have these British musicologists analysing what’s she’s playing on the piano – an instrument she claimed she could never play until the ghost composers got in touch.”

 

6/ Interstellar Love (feat. Leon Bridges)

“Leon is an incredible soul singer, with just the most beautiful voice. He’s from Texas but we both happened to be in LA at the same time, which was lucky as he was on my wish list. When we were in the studio, I told him the story about Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan and how her love-struck brain waves were sent out into space on the Voyager’s Golden Record. And this song came out of that.”

 

7/ Ghost Story Pt 2 (feat. Leon Bridges and Orono)

Another interstitial: a patchwork of crinkly tones and blissed vocal ooze, with fragments of Leon and Orono woven in. “I liked the idea of a left-over bit of a phone call.”

 

8/ Reflecting Light (feat. Sananda Maitreya and Vashti Bunyman)

Eighties pop star reincarnated as a cult-figure enigma with a Sanskrit name, Sananda Maitreya here shares insights like “life itself is habit forming” on a dreamy glide of psychedelic soul.  “We have had a beautiful two-year friendship, he still writes to me nearly every day – the most wonderful long rambling emails about life and the  music industry.  I sense he is still very angry about everything that happened.” Although credited as a “feature”, Brit-folk free-spirit Vashti Bunyan appears as a sample from the song “Glow Worms” off her 1970 cult classic Just Another Diamond Day. “We had the sample first and then worked with Sananda writing around it. But we gave the appearance credit because we wanted to acknowledge Vashti’s role more.” Another intriguing element in this track are the drum sounds, which were derived from YouTube recordings of mediums summoning Karen Carpenter’s voice using home-made devices. “You hear these static-y sounds that are like haunted screams, which they claim are Karen Carpenter – or other dead stars - responding to their questions. We used these muffled blasts to make up the drums on ‘Reflecting Light’”.

 

9/ Carrier Waves

Another glinting interlude of spacy electronics and wordless vocal.

 

10/ Oh The Sunn! (feat. Perry Farrell)

Starring the former Jane’s Addiction singer, a kindred spirit who similarly graduated from chemical elevation to spiritual modes of transcendence, and who sings here in praise of the “divine designer”.  “Perry’s full of positivity and light. That was another wonderful LA experience - recording at his home, where he lives with his wife and kids and all their dogs. We sat around watching YouTube videos. That’s where we found the sample” -  a live recording of the gospel choir / R&B group Ernest Fowler and the Voices of Conquest – “so we started writing around that.” Although still a gentle glide of a groove, this is the first really danceable tune on the album, finding that zone where The Avalanches  and Daft Punk have much in common. “Oh yes, we listened to Homework a lot while we were making Since I Left You. And then then their very sample heavy album Discovery came out the same year as Since.”

 

11/ We Go On (feat. Cola Boyy and Mick Jones)

Cola Boyy, a/k/a Matthew Urango, is a nu-disco artist from Oxnard, California. “He’s very passionate about his local community, an activist, outspoken and political – so I loved having him on the same record as Mick Jones.” But the latter is here not so much for his Clash rebel rocker history as Big Audio Dynamite, the first time that the young Chater encountered sampling. “One or two of their songs were big pop records on Australian radio – and it was that feeling, as a kid, of ‘how did they do that?  What is that?’”

 

12/ Star Song

10-second miniature bleepscape redolent of early Sixties electronic pioneers Kid Baltan and BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

 

13/ Until Daylight Comes (feat. Tricky)

Starting as a dub-flavored skank, this slips into a languid disco-boogie  groove and features the inimitable croaky mumble of Bristol trip hop legend Tricky. Who here sounds unusually mushmouthed: is that “I want your brain”  or “I want to pray”? “We worked on about six or seven songs together, corresponding on Instagram at first, and then started recording. Tricky would just ask for more and more music. It was a runaway couple of weeks in which we did about six songs and then I got an email from my manager saying ‘are you working with Tricky? I’ve got a very concerned email from his manager saying you guys have recorded half the album already!’. Nobody knew anything about it. These particular vocals of Tricky’s were recorded for a different song, but then I brought them into this other context.”

 

14/ Wherever You Go (feat. Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry and CLYPSO)

Sonic mainstay of The xx and solo producer Jamie xx did a lot of the beat-work on this plaintive tune, which goes through several rhythmic phases, including a tech-house stretch with a pinging, tight-rubber-band bassline and a Latin groove with a galloping, giddy-up feel based around a Brazilian sample. “Jamie pushed it to that higher tempo in the second half. I was sending Jamie lots of music but for some reason he just loved that song and felt it needed to go faster at the end. It almost felt like a remix and that it shouldn’t be on the album. But then I reworked his reworking and it fit fine.” Vocal features include a “too much war” lament from Neneh Cherry, fellow traveler with the same Bristol scene that produced Tricky, and a sing-song chorus from CLYPSO, a Sydney-based producer-vocalist.

15/ Music Makes Me High

The first truly uptempo number, this disco-funk tune has a golden glow that simultaneously casts back to tunes like The Whispers’s “And The Beat Goes On” and to the filter-house echoes of that era such as Stardust “Music Feels Better With You” and Gusto’s “Disco’s Revenge”. “There’s a gospel choir on there, but very softly in the mix, singing over the ‘music makes me high’ sample.”

 

16/ Pink Champagne

A very brief interstitial, in which a husky male voice informs us that “the sky was pink champagne”  as thunder crackles distantly on the horizon.

 

17/ Take Care In Your Dreaming (feat. Denzel Curry, Tricky, and Sampa the Great)

Alt-rapper Denzel Curry “happened to be in Sydney and things lined up perfectly. It all happened in a single day. We had that sample ‘take care in your dreaming and love when you can’ already and we spoke with Denzel about unrealized dreams and journeys through life. So that’s what he wrote about. It’s been quite harrowing for him at times, I understand. The song is a ‘careful what you wish for’ kind of thing.” Also featured: Tricky, again, still mumbling (what sounds like “love can’t breathe” at one point); Sampa the Great, the Zambian rapper-singer now based in Melbourne; and dramatic piano from LA-based keyboardist  John Carroll Kirby, who has played on Solange’s records, but here is layered over the Nina Simone ghost-piano.

 

18/ Overcome

Another brisk tune, with a house feel,  draped with hot-buttered-soul vibes. Look out for the  sample - “this is for the champagne crew - we do not need anybody, we are independent” – taken from the artist Mark Leckey’s acclaimed video piece Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. A video version of sampledelia, Fiorucci is woven out of found footage from British dance subcultures like Northern Soul and rave. It transmits a potently poignant hauntological charge, evoking the ephemeral excess of youth escaping their problems through drugs and music. “I guess it’s those parallel lines – rave music and gospel music are both a collective reaching for something higher, an attempt to transcend. It’s not there musically, on We Will Always Love You, but there was a fair bit of listening to early rave and watching things like that Mark Leckey piece.”

 

19/ Gold Sky (feat. Kurt Vile)

The alternative rock guitarist, songwriter, and producer contributes a spoken-not-sung lyric about feeling both “shattered by life” and “reborn” – states of heart that clearly resonate with Chater’s own experiences. “We spoke a bit and then he just came up with the overall concept. That’s why I’m so grateful for the whole experience of making this record - people were so open to talking about where we were headed and diving in in such an open-hearted way.”

 

20/ Always Black (feat. Pink Siifu)

Los Angeles-based Pink Siifu appears elsewhere on the record in fragmentary form, says Chater, but on this main feature provides an ethereal yet intimate rap in similar vein to his “lysergic, daydreamy, otherworldly hip hop records.” The skittering drums are among the most inventive beat-work on the album. “It was that thing where it’s a sketch beat – we were like, ‘we’ll write this properly later’ – but it ends up staying.” 

 

21/ Dial D For Devotion (feat. Karen O)

A brief, bittersweet interstitial featuring the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’s singer intoning lyric shards from the late David Berman of Silver Jews: “The light of my life is going out tonight / without a flicker of regret.”

 

22/ Running Red Lights (feat. Rivers Cuomo and Pink Siifu)

The album’s catchiest tune combines a bouncy beat, a gently yearning melody, and emotionally raw lyrics about “crying in the car” and feeling like “a thunderbolt” about to explode.  “Rivers gets to that Brian Wilson sweet spot between happy and sad.”  Describing their collaborative process, Chater adds, “Rivers is so funny -  he heard the music, he has a spreadsheet of all his best phrases that he’s kicking around at that moment, so his assistant sent it to us and said ‘you can choose one’. We thought we’d get greedy and chose three – and he said ‘okay,’ and  sent us the lyrics back.” Pink Siifu pops up repeating the same David Berman lyric intoned by Karen O on the previous track.

 

 23/ Born to Lose

Riding a fluid, jazzy bassline sampled from Leon Bridges, this gorgeous golden groove is a bit like the ‘mature’ version of the classic Avalanches style circa Since I Left You. Jodie Foster makes an uncredited cameo, in the form of dialogue from Foxes, the cult movie about teenage tearaways running wild in late ’70s LA: “actually he died of a broken heart”, “fucking assholes!”.

 

24/ Music Is The Light (feat. Cornelius and Kelly Moran

Probably the biggest departure from previous Avalanches music, the detuned drones, gaseous textures, and intricate clicky drum patterns wander near the more melodic and blissful edge of Nineties genres like IDM and post-rock, artists like Mouse on Mars and Seefeel.  “He’s one of those Nineties sample geniuses,” Chater says of guest contributor Keigo Oyamada, better known as Cornelius, and his celebrated 1997 debut album Fantasma. In the studio, Cornelius layered guitar stuff, which the Avalanches then sent to New York avant-garde piano player Kelly Moran, who sent back a lot of material. But the spark for the whole piece came from the vocal sample “music is the light and I have what it is to shine”, which Tony DiBlasi  found, slowed down, and pitched up again, resulting in its spooky glowing timbre. “We wanted to start the record with that sentiment, ‘music is the light’, but then it got to be too many slow songs at the front of the album, so it got shuffled to near the end.”

 

25/ Weightless

Somewhere between Morse Code and the bleeps of an EKG monitor strapped to a patient with a highly irregular heart rhythm, this agitated electronic pitter-patter might make you think of signals received from an alien civilization. Actually, that’s exactly what it is – except in the case, it’s us humans who are the alien race beaming the message out into the cosmos.  Broadcast in 1974 from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and aimed at the star cluster M13, the  message was written by the astronomer Frank Drake with assistance from Carl Sagan among others. It includes encoded information about human DNA, graphic representations of the human form and the solar system, and other clues indicating that intelligent life was responsible and whereabouts they might be found.

“Frank Drake is famous for the Drake Equation, which calculated the number of possible habitable planets in galaxies that we know about and from that estimates the likelihood of there being intelligent civilizations. We did a performance with the International Space Orchestra, which is a bunch of a scientists from NASA and the SETI Institute who are amateur musicians. They put us in touch with Frank, who’s 90 now, and he sent us the original file for the Arecibo Message.  We got that converted into MIDI notes, keeping the same rate of broadcast but deciding what the notes actually were and the sound in which they were played.  And that’s what you hear on ‘Weightless’ - that original actual message to the aliens that  might be out there, converted into sound for the first time.” 

The Durutti Column - Vini Reillly (1989)