OOOOH! WHITEOUT

Once upon a time, in a world much kinder than ours, a beet-faced, moustachioed miner accidentally tunnels his way into a dance audition. After a few moments of blinking, disbelieving shyness, he bursts ecstatically into movement himself – dancing with a surprisingly light-footed, tubby grace. And he gets the girl. Of course, it’s all a dream in the end – but does that really matter?

You’ve seen the video: now meet The Avalanches, an Australian collective of DJs and sundry drop-in collaborators, and creators of the tune danced to by the soulful miner. It’s ‘Since I Left You,’ from their debut album of the same name, an unbelievably massive, ecstatic, 18-track mod-disco collage of hundreds of samples from everywhere under the sun. There’s yearning vocal lines or string-laden grooves nicked from charity-shop records here, breathless bits of Hollywood musicals there, a Madonna bassline, a neighing horse, some lilting flutes, some wistful Spanish guitar, each snatch of sound blurring dreamily into the next, underlaid with a constant, irresistibly thumpy disco beat, and/or whipsmart Paul’s Boutique-ish hip-hop scuffling. The overall effect is of a hallucinated, lunatic, ecstatic, bittersweet round-the-world journey: a travel fantasy as over-imagined by someone who has never travelled.

“That’s exactly what it is,” says Robbie Chater, head Avalanche, speaking to us from his home-studio in Melbourne. “For us, that’s why it’s a really Australian record, because growing up here, the rest of the world’s so far away. And you just sort of imagine what all these faraway places must be like, and how magical they must be.

“Originally, there was a sort of story to the album – a love story that went round the world, from country to country,” Robbie murmurs. “And it was about a guy, following his long-lost love, and he was always one step behind her – whenever he got to a place, she had just left. In the end, we didn’t want to do anything that literal, but I’m glad we had that original plan. I think that feeling still sort of lingers.”

The Avalanches clearly have real affection for even the naffest of records they sample: they’re never used in a smirkily ironic or kitsch way, but, it seems, out of genuine affection – as if they are able to see the beauty inside each one.

“Definitely, there’s nothing ironic there at all,” assents Robbie. “We love finding those beautiful moments, on those records that society has considered junk, and sort of thrown out. Finding the great little bits… and then sort of sharing them again.”

And as befits such ambassadors of irony-free neo-cool, the Avalanches will soon be collaborating with legendary Beach Boys lyricist Van Dyke Parks – soon to be singing new words over a reworked ‘Since I Left You’ – and they have already waved their magic remixing wands over records by Badly Drawn Boy and the Manics. The latter track, a version of ‘So Why So Sad,’ is curiously entitled ‘The Sean Penn Remix’, after their most super-favourite of filmmakers. So why so smitten?

“It’s his crazy attitude, I guess,” Robbie says. “It’s like he should be in the Wu-Tang Clan or something. We’d love to get him to direct a video for us. And we’d love to maybe do a song or something for the soundtrack of the film he’s making at the moment. Basically, we’re sucking up.” (Quiet giggles ensue.) “Insaneness is kind of a common thread with people that we love.”

Which makes all the more sense, apparently, once you have experienced The Avalanches live and in person, a show variously described as ‘kinda loose’ (Robbie) and ‘completely spastic’ (the UK press). As you might expect from a band who cite the Muppets and Andy Kaufman as influences, live dates tend to involve broken limbs and equipment, people and objects falling from a height and, eh, spontaneous onstage urination.

“If the mood’s right, it can be the greatest,”enthuses Robbie. “Especially here [in Oz], where people know what to expect. When people haven’t seen us before, they expect to hear the album, or to see a normal, professional show, and eh, people are disappointed,” he titters.

The Avalanches’ sweet, anti-irony, gorgeously happy-sad mod-disco, not to mention their flying equipment and flailing body parts, will be careening to this hemisphere sometime around August. So here’s hoping we can Witnness them for ourselves. And that it will be something like Robbie’s fave live date. Which was…

“The one in Brisbane in December, when Darren [fellow Avalanche] broke his leg,” Robbie remembers fondly. “I mean, it wasn’t great when that happened, but… The venue was so full, way more people wanted to get in than could fit. And there were people being passed over the crowd. And people halfway up the wall. And there was a fire, and broken legs, and broken equipment, and nudity. And I remember thinking: this is the best show we’ve ever done.”

Sort out your health cover now.

Since I Left You is now available on XL Records