The Avalanches, and why they matter.
The Avalanches, for the sake of a formal definition, were a six piece electronic group who specialized in the under-appreciated genre of plunderphonics. Plunderphonics is an extremely niche sub-genre of electronic music whose entire sound revolves around the manipulation of sampled works to create a wholly original track. The reason plunderphonics as a genre has sort of died over these past couple of years relates solely to the way sample clearing has changed. It used to be much simpler back in the late Nineties and early 2000s, with the smaller-scale music publishers in the industry being more easy to negotiate with when it came to contracts determining how much to compensate the publisher for allowing use of the sample. Nowadays, those smaller scale publishers are borderline non-existent and the powerhouses of the music industry e.g. Universal Music Group, Epic Records. Sub-Pop, etc. find themselves less inclined to clear samples unless rather hefty percentages are given to them