Capturing the fraught moment in popular music history as reflected in and anticipated by Since I Left You (2000), the debut studio album from electronic music group The Avalanches.

Since I Left You has a reputation amongst its advocates that exceeds those of nearly all of its closest peers. Yet despite the inordinate amount of attention this album has received, it has never been thoroughly examined in context. While repeatedly celebrated for its artistry, technical skill, and emotional resonance - in particular its sample-based material and then-cutting edge technological feats within the electronic music genre - it has never been definitively placed in the world that produced it.

Charles Fairchild studies this album in a way no one else has. Since I Left You is placed in its historical, technological, and cultural contexts and is examined for the social and aesthetic attributes it was said to possess at the time of its release. There is a focus on the clear set of aesthetic aspirations that guided the album's creators and how those creators pasted together the fragments of many sound worlds.

Charles Fairchild is Associate Professor of Popular Music at the University of Sydney, Australia, and the author of Musician in the Museum (Bloomsbury, 2021), Sounds, Screens, and Speakers (Bloomsbury, 2019), Danger Mouse's The Grey Album (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Music, Radio and the Public Sphere (2012). His work focuses on cultural mediation in the music industry, focusing especially on the period from 1975 to the present, examining how intermediaries within different kinds of institutions shape the ways people consume and make meaning from music.