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The Avalanches.
I start by casually asking Avalanche Darren Seltmann if he's done anything with his summer. "I went camping for the first time ever over Christmas and it rained every day. And then we hit a wombat in my car!" he exclaims.
It turns out it was a roadkill first for Seltmann, who was on a holiday with wife Sally (better known as New Buffalo).
"I was always pretty 'I'll drive anywhere, anytime', and now I don't think I'll ever drive at night through the bush. It was like hitting this massive rock. It buckled the chassis in the car, just killed it. And then we had to camp in the middle of nowhere. Luckily we had a tent in the back of the car, and then this old couple towed us back to Melbourne, but we had to listen to their stories all the way. It was actually almost intolerable. They were kind of racist, and sexist," he bursts out laughing. "Like everything you would never want to spend time with. But of course, they were lovely in that they wanted to take us back to Melbourne."
With a couple of band members leaving and a continuing long gap between albums, The Avalanches have been out of the news for a while now. On the other hand, the New Buffalo album has garnered plenty of positive reviews in the last few months. After he reveals that Sally is about to start recording a new album, I ask Darren how much involvement he had.
"Not much," he answers. "It was a pretty conscious decision on her part to feel like she did it herself. It's funny because originally when we shacked up it was like 'We'll make a band together'. It's not that it'll never happen, but that's something we could do in our fifties, you know?"
As for the Avalanches, they've actually been very busy. A number of remixes and potential collaborators are on the cards, among them Mike Patton and possibly Michael Stipe.
"He got in touch with us, and said 'Have you got anything I can sing on?' So we sent him some stuff, and then he said 'Great. I've got two albums, a film, and four tours, and then I'll do it.' So we're still sort of waiting. But it actually doesn't matter, because we've reworked that song a bit, we almost feel like saying don't worry about it! But it is Michael Stipe, so..."
Meanwhile The Avalanches have been hosting a monthly night in Melbourne under the name Brains. It's all part of The Avalanches going back to their roots, away from the arduous sampler and computer-driven approach that was taken with 'Since I Left You'.
It all started with the addition of a number of African refugees
the band met when playing a fundraiser for an asylum seeker
centre. A lot of those refugees ended up contributing to The
Avalanches' remix of Belle And Sebastian's I'm A Cuckoo
and eventually joined the Brains crew.
"We just decided maybe six, seven months ago that we'd better get back out in the world, and have some fun," he explains. "So we started this Brains night in Melbourne once a month, and that's just been the most fun we've had ever. And somehow that stuff we always wanted to play but were too scared to, in terms of the album, is all sort of crossing over. The Brains aspect is evident now on the album and its changed direction again. With the time issue, it's sort of been so long that it doesn't matter now, in a lot of ways. But at the same time, we are pretty excited about the prospect of it being finished. I think the next year will see a bunch of things, the album included, but Brains has also started something else," says Seltmann, hinting at more than one Avalanches release this year (also talking about recording some "ambient horror music").
The billing for the upcoming tour poses some problems for Seltmann. For example, they are being billed as The Avalanches, but Seltmann says they're just taking the Brains night on the road.
"Well, it's us," he says. "There's only three Avalanches, it's always just been a couple of people making the records and then we take our friends on the road, that's always the way it's been. So there's no real difference, to be honest."
And don't expect to be hearing Frontier Psychiatrist.
"It has been a few years," says Seltmann. "So I'm sure people
are smart enough to realise that we've moved on, and that they
should too!"
Eddie Chan
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Brains (The Avalanches) hits Jive on Fri 11 Feb.
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