The Avalanches, Since I left you
You go back over enough history, and there are things in there to dismay and alarm. I know certainly that I feel a physical pain when I remember earlier incarnations of myself. I am pleased (roughly) with what I am becoming, but oh Christ, the years and years where I remained hating and hated, ridiculous and ridiculed. Debated or not, certain syndromes have been put on my lips, and I can see perhaps how I’ve woven them into myself (anyone want to know the mortality difference per British mile of a ground-burst vs. an airburst?) and done well with them, it’s still a sticky time in my head with too many dusty and gloop-y pages in-between.

Anyway, the point of that was a cringing at an earlier musical incarnation of myself who declared “If you can’t play it on a cello and an acoustic guitar, it’s not music”, which speaks acres I think of the person I was. OK, the only dance music I’d encountered so far at the time was Fat Boy Slim, Prodigy and Faithless (or anyone else who entertained sweating Boltonian types in Ikon where I collected glasses before going to University) so perhaps my aesthetic was ahead of the race (har-har)…Fat Boy Slim resonates particularly in my head as one of the York/Edinburgh people (a dance teacher/History graduate from Rossendale) chirped in the pub one night “As a dansurr, I feel I understand Fat Boy Slim on a much different level from most other people”…which kind of says all you need to know…

Something must have happened to my music taste at University…I arrived knowing precious little outside of the 60s and the Oasis/Blur/Pulp corridor everyone in Bolton I knew listened to…there were forays into Sultans of Ping FC, Elastica, Bjork, and of course, coming from the house I came from, a fair amount of classical-lite stuff, and (I see now) vaguely progg-y stuff my Dad listened to…and I left loving the Divine Comedy, Chemical Brothers, Elvis Costello, Portishead, Talvin Singh and Nina Simone. Or maybe music history changed with me. Music tastes anyway.

So I went through a phase (would still like to if I could afford it…) of buying random CDs for an interesting cover. I liked the cover on this, but I don’t know why. Looking at it now it reminds me of Monet, and I’ve never really liked him (too many reproductions on umbrellas and souvenir trays). I bought this in…May? June? 2001 anyway. I was going out with a blonde barman called Mike. I’d been hearing what I soon realised was the track “Frontier Psychiatrist” all over Channel4. I bought this, put it on, quite liked it, and then some amazing monumental “click” in my head of realising I was with a wave of something, that the CD I’d bought randomly had the zeitgeist-y tune that was everywhere on it. I liked the cardboard fold-over of the CD. I will admit to being a CD fetishist and loving seeing them lined up like books, to touch and uncover. Maybe the cardboard case looked like an innovation at the time, I can’t rightly imagine if they’re passé or not now…

And during the summer, where I started unravelling and not noticing things so much, pavements looking too bright and people talking too loud, I kind of forgot the CD. I lived in Bolton, in my grandmothers empty rooms, all oriental blue. I smoked freely in my bedroom. I worked as a cook at the Varsity in town. Irma took me out for lunch and told me I look depressed and I needed to eat. I forgot this album, I listened to other things (did I write Riverwild around this time and listen to it constantly?)

And we moved to Edinburgh, and early in the first couple of weeks we went to Henry’s Jazz Cellar, looking for some live jazz, or more likely, looking for this good time we’d imagined when we were alls cared and lonely and dark and cold. Or was it just me? Anyway, we all went. Live jazz a no-no; we drank wine and some-one played this album on a loop, again and again and again, offering apologies and yet no apologies for this lack of live DJ-ing, the live DJ-ing already done on the pre-done album (there’s an MA in there I want to do one day) and there was wax peeling down the neck of dark green wine bottles and everyone sat and listened. There was a hum around the room, and track ten (with the distorted and bending piano) staying particularly fresh in my head.


They were the big thing, the huge thing – there were articles in The List (which I would now refer to as the Edinburgh equivalent of The Venue, where it used to be vice versa) saying they were playing in Glasgow on 10th November (I remember that because I’m sure me and some-one else talked about going…or did we just miss them?) Anyway, I remember wondering how they could recreate all that live…they use the samples as instruments, as lines and contrapuntal arguments. As I’ve heard more and more music I recognise fragments of each song (they seemed to use Cabaret) quite a lot, and for myself, I sampled part of them for the opening of “Waverley”, my song about arriving in, and then leaving Edinburgh.

This is dance music as velvet, honey and sawdust, rather than plastic, burgers and lager, which I associate with the late 90s stuff I used to turn my nose up at. OK, I’ll hear things I like in them now…I used to get annoyed saying that “Selecting isn’t creating”, but reading and seeing and being and breathing postmodernism now, I suppose I can see it. Selective selecting, curating rather than consuming.