The Sound of Subliminal Nostalgia: How The Avalanches Turn Late-20th-Century Commercials into Art on No Bad Memories

Main Facts

For legendary Australian electronic music outfit The Avalanches, the past is never truly gone; it is simply waiting to be resampled. On their anticipated album, No Bad Memories, founding members Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi turn their sonic microscope toward the overlooked audio landscape of their late-20th-century childhoods.

Rather than relying solely on traditional musical samples, the duo has pivoted to the catchy jingles, early computer startup chimes, television station sign-offs, and commercial interludes that formed the invisible acoustic wallpaper of the 1980s and 1990s.

The project explores how passive media consumption shapes long-term memory. Long before the era of algorithmic streaming and personalized playlists, households were united by a shared, broadcast-driven auditory experience. Commercials for household brands, public health announcements, and corporate audio logos embedded themselves deep within the collective subconscious of a generation.

For Chater and Di Blasi, sampling these fragments is an exercise in audio archeology. It begs a larger cultural question: What happens when the advertising jingles designed to sell us cordial or sun safety become the emotional anchors of our childhood memories?

Chronology: A History of Sound, Sampling, and Memory

To understand the conceptual weight of No Bad Memories, one must look back at the trajectory of The Avalanches and how their relationship with found sound has evolved over decades.

1980s–1990s: The Analog Acoustic Environment of Melbourne

Growing up in Melbourne during the 1980s, Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi were immersed in a very specific media ecosystem. Television and radio dominated leisure time, broadcasting a continuous loop of commercial jingles, public service announcements, and corporate signifiers. Without conscious effort, Australian children absorbed cultural touchstones like the Cancer Council Victoria’s "Slip, Slop, Slap" campaign or the ubiquitous Cottee’s cordial commercials. These snippets of audio were fleeting, ephemeral, and designed for commercial persuasion, yet they quietly anchored themselves to the formative years of millions.

2000: Since I Left You and the Art of Collage

The Avalanches stunned the global music community with their landmark debut album, Since I Left You. Composed of an estimated 3,500 vinyl and media samples, the record was a masterclass in emotional audio collage. It proved that fragments of forgotten pop culture could be repurposed to evoke profound euphoria, melancholy, and nostalgia. At the time, the focus was largely cinematic and musical—pop records, movie dialogue, and obscure soundtracks.

The 2010s–2020s: Deepening Introspection

As the band matured through subsequent releases like Wildflower (2016) and We Will Always Love You (2020), their music increasingly grappled with themes of mortality, space, grief, and spiritual connection. Sampling shifted from a clever structural gimmick into a deeply philosophical exploration of time and human consciousness. They began treating sound as a spiritual medium capable of bridging past eras with the present.

No Bad Memories: The Commercial Archive

With their latest project, Chater and Di Blasi take their signature methodology to its logical and psychological extreme. By turning their attention to commercial audio artifacts, startup chimes, and corporate jingles, they bridge the gap between mass-market consumerism and deeply personal childhood remembrance. The album explores the paradox of how corporate-sponsored soundscapes can paradoxically evoke pure, unadulterated personal nostalgia.

Supporting Data: The Psychology of Sonic Nostalgia

The premise of No Bad Memories taps into well-documented psychological phenomena regarding how the human brain processes auditory cues and memory retrieval.

• The Involuntary Memory Trigger: Neuroscientific research consistently shows that auditory cues bypass the brain’s analytical filters much faster than visual stimuli. A jingle heard for five seconds in 1985 can instantly reactivate emotional states associated with that era, a phenomenon often linked to music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs).
• Passive vs. Active Consumption: Unlike a favorite pop song that a listener intentionally puts on, commercial jingles and startup chimes are consumed passively. They slip into the background of daily life while children play, eat breakfast, or watch Saturday morning cartoons. This passive absorption binds the sounds directly to the sensory environment of youth rather than conscious musical taste.
• The Scale of the Archive: Since I Left You famously utilized thousands of distinct samples. While the exact inventory of No Bad Memories remains under wraps, early previews indicate it weaves together dozens of obscure television cues, Australian public service broadcasts, and obsolete digital sound files from the dawn of home computing.
• Cultural Specificity and Universality: While anchors like the Cottee’s "My dad picks the fruit" jingle or the "Slip, Slop, Slap" campaign are hyper-specific to Australian upbringing, the broader experience of growing up surrounded by corporate broadcast media is a universal late-20th-century phenomenon. Listeners worldwide find themselves projecting their own local equivalents onto the album’s thematic framework.

Official Responses and Artist Insights

Reflecting on the creative process behind No Bad Memories, Robbie Chater has opened up about the surreal experience of unearthing these long-dormant audio memories.

When discussing the iconic "Slip, Slop, Slap" sun-safety mnemonic—a public health campaign launched by Cancer Council Victoria that taught generations of Australian children how to protect themselves from UV rays—Chater notes how deeply locked away the memory was until the sampling process brought it to the surface.

Similarly, when reminded of the classic Cottee’s cordial commercial featuring the lyric "My dad picks the fruit"—a tune so pervasive it became a staple of schoolyard teasing and cultural shorthand—Chater’s reaction was one of genuine astonishment.

"Oh my goodness," Chater beams, reflecting on the enduring power of the advertisement. "It’s so evocative. I haven’t thought about that one for years, and the jingle is just embedded in my brain. It’s crazy."

For Chater and Di Blasi, the studio environment functions as a psychological excavation site. They view the act of sampling not merely as an engineering feat, but as an empathetic bridge to the past. By isolating these corporate audio fragments and reframing them within lush, hypnotic electronic compositions, the duo strips away the original commercial intent, leaving pure, distilled nostalgia in its place.

Implications: Reclaiming the Soundtrack of Consumer Culture

No Bad Memories raises profound questions about our relationship with mass media, corporate history, and personal identity. In an age where digital footprints are meticulously tracked and consumer experiences are hyper-personalized, the late 20th century represents a unique historical window: an era of mass-broadcast monoculture where millions of children consumed the exact same commercial breaks, station IDs, and technological startup noises.

By weaponizing nostalgia against the very corporations that originally generated these sounds, The Avalanches perform a brilliant act of cultural subversion. They take corporate jingles—tools historically engineered to manipulate buying habits—and transform them into emotional monuments of collective childhood.

In doing so, No Bad Memories suggests that our memories do not strictly belong to us; they are co-authored by the media environments we inhabit. Yet, through art, we have the power to reclaim those sounds, stripping them of their commercial utility and imbuing them with beauty, melancholy, and enduring grace.