11. The AvalanchesSince I Left You
God what a great record! Around the time that I’m living in New York and I’m starting to hang out on Christopher Street in the West Village, hanging out in Chelsea, meeting the drag queens and getting my gay on, at the coffee shop I went to every day, the Factory Café, there was a fellow named Mark Dennis, who was a flight attendant for Continental and he used to do Europe all the time, fly from New York to wherever. He lived on the Upper East Side and on his work day, he’d come down to Christopher Street so he could get the PATH train to go over to Newark to get on a plane and he was a big, big music guy.
He would make all these CDs that they would play in the coffee shop, this great vintage disco and house stuff, and he would just sit there and hold court and play this music. He burned me a copy of The Avalanches and said, I think you’re gonna like this, and I listened to it and was just blown away. That was the record where sampling was just over the top – hundreds and hundreds of samples and layers. The depth of the record – I was just fascinated by it – and it became part of the soundtrack of that time.
It was really funny, ’cause he gave me the burned CD and I went to the record store down the street, a couple of days later and bought the CD, and then later I saw a friend of mine, gave him the burned CD and said, you’ve got to listen to this, and if you like it you’ve got to buy it and give the CD to someone else. It was of that time, [but] it’s a record I still go back to. When I’m DJing, a song like ‘Electricity’ is a great getting-started song – it’s like ‘Face To Face’ by Daft Punk, you can put it on and go anywhere you want after.
