Since I Left You, from a duo named The Avalanches, was released on November 27, 2000 and might seem like a normal instrumental hip-hop/dance album at first, but this record had actually been put together entirely out of samples from other songs and sounds. The genre named Plunderphonics, a term invented by John Oswald, refers to “the compositional technique of utilizing and manipulating one or more pre-existing audio sources to create a new composition.” Although it might seem to some that this would be much easier than creating the actual sounds, having to create music that still holds rhythm, melody, and a beat is extremely hard when you are taking samples from hundreds of different songs.
The album consists of 3,500 samples, or 200 samples per song on average, and people are still finding different samples 20 years later. There is much debate surrounding the use of samples and whether it is deemed plagiarism, but in The Avalanche’s case, the original samples are very hard to distinguish from the samples used in Since I Left You, it’s almost a moot point arguing plagiarism. Longtime music connoisseur Nick Hornby compared the argument to accusing plagiarism of “a writer whose books contain words that other writers have used before.”
Although most of their samples consist of music from previous decades, The Avalanches even managed to incorporate wacky and quirky sounds into their album such as a horse neighing and dialogues from old western films. The entire idea of Since I Left You is very chaotic and mismatched, but it sounds fresh and raw. The album has inspired the sampling in songs heard today and has even lowered the stigma surrounding sampling. The impact that Since I Left You has had on 21st-century music is matched only by a handful of other albums.