The Avalanches
Success is taking its toll-"We are just wanting to take a little time off, to rewrite the set, and write new songs. We were just starting to, the whole thing(the initial reaction to a good new live band) was just a first attempt at trying to write the samples, so we are really keen to do new stuff."
Sampling-"I think we go through phases of different kinds of samples and now we have kind of moved into this thing were we are kind of sampling ourselves, like we all carry around little tape recorders and tape ourselves playing organs, or going to a music store and trying every synthesizer and then sampling it!"
Scratching-"We just get these old violin records - You know, we're the shittest scratchers in the world so we don't try to scratch, if you scratch a violin records you get this really disjointed wavering tone from the violin, and there's no way anyone could pick where that came from. So we are trying to steer away from anything that's at all recognisable, or has a groove like a four bar fill, we're just trying to avoid anything derivative and all that now."
Are drums electric-"Yes. No we dont really use much live drumming. It was all pretty much loops and drum machines, on the 7" there is, Thankyou Caroline is just straight drums, and Rock City has pretty much got chorus drums live. We've all got S900's (samplers) because they are really cheap, around $500. Its good because we can all swap disks and the sampling quality is OK and thats about everything we've ever recorded has been through a S900. The problem at first was loading the disks for every song live, I don't know if people saw that happening but we've had to stop for about 30 seconds in between songs and load each song up independetly because the sample memory was so small. (I remember a gig at The Tote in which the 'lanches lost valuable time with their sample loading, which took away from the energy and momentum they were building with each song.)We just has a need to have a pretty continuous set, so we got a S2000 sampler.(far superior)."
Keepin' It Real"You sample stuff that sits together, and then you lay it down and maybe even put vocals over the
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