Since I Left You by The Avalanches

Since I Left You, the debut album from Melbourne's Avalanches, came out on Modular on 27 November 2000, and it's a whole record stitched together from other people's records, a sunlit collage that plays like one endless party mix. Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann produced it under the name Bobbydazzler, working in two separate but near-identical studios and trading mixes of the records they'd sampled back and forth.

All those borrowed pieces came at a price: the UK and North American release slipped to 2001 and arrived slightly altered, so the group could clear the samples or swap them out. "Frontier Psychiatrist" is the gloriously deranged highlight, and the title track glides in like a lost holiday postcard. At the 2001 ARIA Music Awards it took home four trophies, and critics have since hailed it as the defining plunderphonics record.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.