The Avalanches unravel the past: ‘If an ad is seared into my brain, is that of any less worth than a great piece of pop?’

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Robbie Chater and Tony DiBlasi are not exactly sure what time zone their bodies are in right now. They’ve just done a whirlwind press tour that’s taken in Melbourne, Sydney, Milan, New York and Los Angeles, before returning to their adopted home town of London. Where in London exactly?

“Hackney, like every other musician in London,” says DiBlasi, with a self-deprecating grin. “It’s compulsory, like musicians having to live in St Kilda or Fitzroy in Melbourne back in the day.”

The two core members of The Avalanches (new third member Andy Szekeres, formerly of Midnight Juggernauts, wasn’t present) live about 50 metres apart, in separate apartments in the same building. They used to live even closer together when they were teenagers in the ’90s, just out of high school and sharing a dilapidated flat in Carlton.

“Parts of the ceiling in the lounge room actually fell through, so you would sit in there and see the sky and be open to the elements,” remembers DiBlasi.

“We shared a bedroom with two single mattresses on the floor and a bong and a stereo in between us,” adds Chater. “We had this one Beatles tape and I remember we used to play Across the Universe over and over again.”

The past has been on both their minds of late. Their new album No Bad Memories – its cover artwork depicts an anthropomorphised iPod and floppy disk – is based around the theme of a nostalgic yearning for the sounds and technologies of the recent past, whether that’s a 1980s breakfast cereal commercial jingle or the start-up sound of a 1990s computer hard drive.

“Working with samples all our lives, we’re always thinking about memory and the past life that music had,” says Chater. “And now we’re a bit older, I think we’re reflecting on our lives as consumers in this crazy capitalist society. And also the devices where we used to store our memories now have this poignancy, whether that’s the iPod, this personal library you held on a device before streaming and the cloud, or floppy disks, which are special to us because every sound on Since I Left You was stored on them.”

Since I Left You , their debut album, was a phenomenon. Released in 2000 and built entirely from samples – reportedly more than 3500 of them but even Chater and DiBlasi are unsure – it was groundbreaking in its construction as well as being a commercial and critical success, hailed as a masterpiece and pioneer in the genre that became known as “plunderphonics”. Technology may have advanced at an astounding rate since then but a quarter of a century later they still see similarities between how they approached music then and now.

“Obviously, some things are completely different,” says DiBlasi. “We no longer use floppy disks and we now have nice, light laptops instead of a computer that weighs 42 kilos or whatever.”

“Back then we were all on the dole, so we didn’t have much money,” says Chater. “We had a map of all the Melbourne train lines and would go along them one by one and do every op shop down each line, scouring them for old records. You could get 10 records for a dollar.