The Essential Music Video series features different music videos, both new and old, that are great or historically relevant in some respect

Most DJs sample two or three pieces of source music at a time when creating their own music; Australian band The Avalanches use 100-200 source samples, so to say that The Avalanches aren’t much like most other bands is a bit of an understatement. Released in 2000, The Avalanches debut album Since I Left You is a simply fantastic album, and the song, Frontier Psychiatrist, and its accompanying video, make for one of the most absurd, yet musically satisfying, combinations in memory. It’s also, perhaps, the only song that can be said to have a parrot solo, so thank god for that.

Because the song itself is unlike most of modern music, it’s only natural that the video itself would also be unlike anything else. The video features small visual cues, meant to replicate various moments from the song, looped over and over as the audio cues play through. There’s not much of a story to the video, but that’s fine because there’s not much of a story to the song either.

Thankfully for all of us, after a 16 year hiatus, The Avalanches finally released their follow-up to Since I Left You, Wildflower, last year; while it didn’t quite live up to the standard of their debut, it’s a wholly satisfying album in its own right.