It’s the track for which they’re perhaps best known, but the delirious pillar of plunderphonics, Frontier Psychiatrist, remains still the oddest thing in The Avalanches' eclectic repertoire.
Released ahead of the Melbourne sampling-obsessives' debut album, (the magnificent Since I Left You), this quirky, yet oddly haunting track was a carousel of the weird. An aural trip into a deranged landscape, Frontier Psychiatrist sounded like a playful celebration of the joy of crate-digging, in fact, it was painstakingly assembled from elements that had been carefully hand-picked for their peculiarity.
Founded in Melbourne in the mid 1990s, first as a noise punk outfit, the Avalanches soon became wholly fixated on sampling as their raison d'être.
Powered mainly by the experimentalism of young film student Robbie Chater and the dependable abilities of multi-instrumentalist Tony Di Blasi, the version of the Avalanches who brought Since I Left You to life were originally a much larger crew.
