Original member of The Avalanches, Gordon “Gordy” McQuilten, has uploaded a never-before-heard song from the band’s Since I Left You-era.
Dubbed ‘One Kiss’, the song is reportedly the first taste of a recently re-discovered four-track EP that the SILY co-producer recorded in his home studio in 2000 while The Avalanches were waiting on sample clearances for their then-completed but unreleased debut album.
Gordy – ‘One Kiss’
A mate of Gordy’s, who helped him track down the lost EP, announced the release via a Reddit post on the official Avalanches sub-Reddit, giving fans the background on how the new single found its way onto the internet.
“Gordon McQuilten was one of the original Avalanchers from their inception in 1997 until late 2001, so basically the entire El Producto-SILY classic line-up era. Live he was on keyboards, samplers, bass, vox, etc,” wrote the Redditor. “What a lot of people don’t know was that he was also one of the producers.”
The mate, who posts under the handle Yamaha_Superstar, went on to divulge that Gordy’s four-track, 16-minute EP was intended as “his contribution to what was going to come after SILY“. But it “was kinda put to one side in the wake of SILY‘s release.”
McQuilten left The Avalanches in 2001, at which point the tracks were “more or less lost,” said Yamaha_Superstar, “or very few people knew of their existence.”
He continued: “Cue 20+ years later, the tail end of COVID late last year, and I was over at his place with a mate fixing his PC. As an aside I mentioned his brother had told me about the aforementioned songs and I was keen to know if they 1) actually existed 2) I wanna hear them, now!
“Gordy assured me they did in fact exist, but they were burned on a CDR somewhere. He looked around his place and just as he was about to give up looking for them, he found a CDR copy he’d made of the songs in 2006.”
And apparently, they were pretty good.
“My mate and I were driving back from his and put the CDR on, and for the next 16 minutes we were speechless as our minds were blown by these awesome tunes,” Yamaha_Superstar said.
“And this was the only copy of the songs in existence (as far as we knew). I got home, backed the CD up, called Gordy and said the EP was amazing and it needs to get out to the world.”
Right now, the pair are in the process trying to tee up a record label to release the EP in full, but they’ve given us a little teaser in the form of ‘One Kiss’, which you can stream above.
The Avalanches’ critically-acclaimed debut album contained the breakthrough singles ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ and ‘Since I Left You’. The album won four ARIA Awards and reached a global audience. It has gone on to influence multiple generations of sample-based producers.
Further Reading
The Avalanches Cancel Tour Dates Due To “Serious Illness”
The Avalanches Announce ‘Since I Left You’ 20th Anniversary Edition
Listen To MF Doom’s Take On The Avalanches Classic ‘Tonight May Have To Last Me All My Life’
