3,500 fragments, one journey: The Avalanches make the case for sampling as composition

Sampling is usually defended like a crime that deserves leniency. It deserves a better defence than that, and The Avalanches have been supplying one since 2000.

My view is simple. Sampling is composition. It builds new music out of the world's recordings, and the group's forthcoming album, No Bad Memories, is the latest proof that a sample can be chosen, bent and placed with as much judgement as a chord or a melody.

The background, for anyone who has not followed them. Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi, who describe themselves as the core of the group, formed The Avalanches in 1997 with Darren Seltmann. Their 2000 debut, Since I Left You, is a record built almost entirely from other records and other sounds. In an interview published by the Guardian on October 8, 2026, Chater and Di Blasi describe No Bad Memories as their new album, with a 35-minute companion film to go with it ^[1]. Both were still forthcoming at the time of the interview. This column judges the method as the band describes it, and the finished work will have its own verdict.

The best case against, and why it falls short

Let me give the sceptics their due. Plenty of sampling is lazy. A recognisable hook is lifted, a drum loop is laid under it, and the borrowed fame does the work. Nostalgia is cheap to manufacture, and a sample can be a way of getting a reaction without earning one. That complaint is fair about a lot of records.

There is also a practical question the sceptics are right to raise. Permission matters. The Guardian reports that the band's 2016 album Wildflower involved extensive sample-clearance hurdles ^[1]. Nothing in the sources I have read says how the samples on the new album were cleared, and I will not guess. Whether a given use is lawful or fair is a separate argument from whether it is art, and this column makes only the second.

On that second argument, the lazy-sampling charge describes a habit and not the technique. A technique is judged by its best work. Nobody condemns the guitar because of bar bands.

Thousands of fragments, one journey

Since I Left You is the best work. The Guardian describes it as a cohesive patchwork of upwards of 3,500 samples, among them horses, Madonna's Holiday, comedy sketches and a recording of Arnold Palmer giving golf instruction ^[1]. A 2025 Rolling Stone Australia retrospective independently gives about the same count ^[2].

I would not make a fetish of the number. Anyone can pile up 3,500 scraps, and the result would be a landfill. What matters is that the record plays as one piece. It has the sense of a journey from start to finish, and the retrospective explains where that came from. The original concept followed a man chasing a woman from port to port. The band dropped that story, but the feeling of travel stayed in the finished record ^[2].

That is how a composer works. A premise gets abandoned, and its shape lingers in the material, in the order and the pacing.

The tools make the achievement plainer. Chater began with tape loops on a Tascam cassette Portastudio, and he has named David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and early De La Soul as influences ^[1]. The retrospective notes that the group worked with limited sampling technology, trading work saved on floppy disks and zip drives ^[2]. Fragments had to be found, cut, stored and fitted by hand and by ear. Horses and Madonna and a golf lesson do not belong together. Someone made them belong.

Here is the question a sceptic might mutter at this point. If the parts are all borrowed, what did the band actually make? The answer is the order, the transitions and the mood, the things that make a hundred borrowed seconds feel like one. A film editor cuts footage somebody else shot, and nobody calls the film unoriginal for that reason.

A science show, a synthesizer and a footwork producer

No Bad Memories widens the palette. According to the Guardian, the album draws on jingles, audio logos, the tones of old devices, computer sounds and video-game bleeps, the small noises of commerce and technology that most of us have heard thousands of times without listening ^[1].

The detail I like best is the track Our Love Is Alive. It samples a 1980 episode of the PBS Kids science show 3-2-1 Contact, in which the electronic composer Suzanne Ciani explains her Buchla synthesizer ^[1]. A woman is teaching children how a machine makes sound, and decades later her explanation becomes raw material for a song. The lesson survives, and so does the instrument, in a new setting.

That is the strongest answer I know to the theft charge. Taking something and making it vanish is theft. A sample does the opposite. It carries a voice from 1980 into a room where it can be heard again, doing a job its original speaker never planned.

The guest list points the same way. The album features the Tunisian footwork producer Khadija Al Hanafi, alongside John Glacier, Panda Bear, Haruomi Hosono, Karen O, Rivers Cuomo and Jamie xx ^[1]. Sampling is often described as the opposite of collaboration, one artist plundering another. Here it sits beside invitations to living musicians from several places and scenes, which suggests a band thinking of the whole record shelf, past and present, as a single working room.

Joy as a decision

The band also made choices that anyone who thinks sampling is mere nostalgia should note. Chater says they wanted the new music to be upbeat and joyful, and Di Blasi says a brighter, more party-minded record was a conscious choice ^[1]. Their previous album, 2020's We Will Always Love You, was by the Guardian's account a more subdued meditation on death, the cosmos and the beyond ^[1]. The band chose to turn the other way.

They are also experimenting with form. Chater says the group tried cutting songs off mid-cycle instead of giving them conventional endings, and Di Blasi describes the abrupt cuts as a way to move between musical ideas ^[1]. I have not heard the whole album, so I cannot say whether this works over an hour. It could feel like a string of interruptions. But it is a compositional gamble, and a gamble of that kind is what a mere nostalgia act does not take.

Memory is a sampler

The film gives the theme away. The Avalanches made a 35-minute companion piece, a mix of live action, collage and animation, starring Haley Joel Osment as Ken, an employee of a fictional digital archive service whose memories begin to blur with commercial imagery ^[1]. The band invented a console called Superfun and a soft drink called El Dorado, and wrote jingles and advertisements for both. Osment recorded advertisements that serve as interludes on the album ^[1].

The notion that advertising and technology shape memory is not new, but sampling is a fitting way to say it. Chater and Di Blasi connect the jingles and device tones on the album to precisely that process ^[1]. A jingle is built to lodge in the head and stay there, long after we have forgotten the product and the year.

I spend my days now with someone for whom a tune outlasts a name, so this idea lands with me harder than it might with others. Memory does not store whole recordings. It keeps scraps, a few bars here and a phrase there, and then rearranges them without being asked. A sampler works the same way, deliberately, with a conscience and a plan. That is why the form suits this subject so well. The Avalanches are using memory's method to examine memory.

The pressure of a masterpiece

There is a human cost to being the best argument for something, and the band is candid about it. Chater says the debut's spontaneous creation and the long gap before its follow-up helped build its reputation. He and Di Blasi both describe the pressure of trying to live up to it while making Wildflower, which arrived in 2016, sixteen years after Since I Left You ^[1]. That is an unusual predicament for a group of sample-based musicians, who are often assumed to be coasting on other people's work. A debut like theirs sets a bar that the original makers of its sources never had to clear.

No Bad Memories is also the first Avalanches record with a new member, Andy Szekeres ^[1]. A group that adds a person and a new set of sources a quarter-century in is not tending a museum.

What to watch

The claims of this column are open to test, and the tests are coming. When the album and the film are released, ask three things. Does the finished record hold together as a journey, or does the cutting-off turn into a tic? Does the film say something about memory and advertising that the music alone does not? And will the credits and clearances be clear enough that the question of fairness can be answered as well as the question of art?

If the answers are yes, the sceptics will have to find a new complaint. If they are no, I will say so in print. But after 26 years, the evidence is still on the side of the band that turns a children's lesson on a synthesizer into a song. The Avalanches have never stolen a memory. They have given a few back.