Simon Reynolds has unearthed his contemporary reviews of the Avalanches album, Since I Left You, as well as his liner notes for the reissue thereof.

I’m kinda surprised to discover that Reynolds, arch-theorist of the hardcore continuum, is so effusively fond of it: as he notes here, it’s coded in stark opposition to the bass-heavy darkness of jungle, which is Reynolds’s manor, and also to the lo-fidelity hi-energy clatter of big beat, which was my own bailiwick at the time.

Me? I hated that record. Utterly despised it.

I would argue that my intense dislike was less about the toppy-femme happiness that Reynolds describes here—though, if I’m honest, and looking back on my state of life and state of mind in that period with the rather more objective eye that a couple of decades provides, the absence of and opposition to moody darkness was probably a big part of it—and much more about the very technical accomplishment that, for Reynolds, seems to be its finest feature.

I’d gotten into sample-collage music in 1993, thanks to the same housemate who taught me—slowly, and very patiently—to beatmix. Indeed, lush, down-tempo psychedelic soundscapes were what I’d end up playing in the chill-out rooms of Southsea house-parties through the late Nineties: the lesser-known Ninja Tune stuff, like Funki Porcini; Mo’ Wax B-sides; other oddities which I had found at car-boot sales and down the back of bargain bins.

(I was particularly fond of my Magic Roundabout: Dougal and the Blue Cat LP, which I both literally and figuratively scratched the crap out of, and in so doing impressed a total of zero people.)

So when Since I Left You dropped, it felt like someone sidling up on that same sampladelic practice and throwing an absurd (and admittedly impressive) amount of effort and accomplishment at it; as Reynolds notes, it walks a very clever line between seamless detail and the see-how-we-made-it pastebin vibe of sample collage music. I was annoyed at the way this was treated as somehow novel by the same people whose comedowns I’d been soundtracking for five years or so… but what I really hated was the glossy top-coat of middle-brow whimsy.

The dopey dad-joke non sequiturs of “Frontier Psychiatrist”, the inescapable hit single, set my teeth a-grind from the very first listen, precisely because they seem so calculated, in a manner that’s entirely of a piece with the masterful joinery of the music itself. The comparator I always reached for at the time was Tubular Bells for the pills-and-MTV generation: finnicky, technical, glossy, navel-gazey, a beautiful box that’s utterly empty of anything. I loathed it then, and—having been memory-earwormed very thoroughly by reading this piece—it would appear that I loathe it now, too.

Interesting, though, that Reynolds identifies it as the swansong of sampladelia: I wouldn’t have thought of it that way, but it seems very obvious now he’s said it. I’m not sure the causal analysis is entirely right, though. Reynolds sees it as a “shrinking from the challenge”, but I suspect there was at least as much of a shrinking from the legal and financial risk of sample-driven music. Imagine trying to get the clearance for all those samples now!

(There’s a reason a whole lot of records from labels like Skint and the more minor big-beat imprints have disappeared into history, available only as second-hand vinyl: they were made and sold quickly, ahead of the lawsuits. Indeed, it’s clear to me now—in a way that it rather laughably was not at the time—that the whole appeal of white-label records was precisely that you could use a howlingly-obvious uncleared sample, press and flog a few thousand copies to various vinyl outlets from the back of your XR3i, and spend the cash before it ever touched your ledger, assuming you even kept any such thing. Totally deniable copyright infringement for cash. It was fun while it lasted!)

On my reading, then, the mash-up era—which I also loathed, though this time more for its cynical beckoning-in of boorish beery people who’d finally got bored of Britpop—was a reversal into a methodology whose simplification was aimed at riding the cut’n’paste wave all the way to the lowest common denominator, while also substantially lowering the overheads: clear two big obvious samples, whose owners were probably already raking it in from oldies-station radio play, staple the thing together in a weekend, and get it out in the Camden clubs, whence it would quickly radiate to the more provincial alternative discotheques. Less paradoxical, then, than a reaction to shifts in the underlying legal-technological infrastructure—though I fully concur with Reynolds’s “dopamine blast for the cheaply amused and easily amazed” assessment.

I’m tempted to draw a line from there, through the bloaty late-Noughties period of rappers using eight distorted bars of a record from your dad’s AOR collection as a bed for their mumbled threats, and on to the current trend for “what if a cover version of that memorable minor hit from the mid-Eighties, but re-performed by studio AI and sung with an insipid lack of conviction?”… but as those changes started to happen, I was paying much more attention to science fiction books than I was to music, so I’ll leave the punditry to those who’ve actually got more knowledge than grouch.