The Avalanches’ new album launch is underway. Last fall, the Australian electronic duo teased LP4 on Instagram with a photo of a pile of LaCie Rugged drives. Recently they wiped their Instagram and unveiled a new logo (that may to take inspiration from Tasuro Yamashita's 1983 album Melodies). And, over the past few days, the Avalanches rolled out an RPG of sorts to kick off their new era.
The campaign is tied to a fictional company called Takumi. On Spotify, the Avalanches' looping Canvas video is now an animation that ends with the word "TAKUMI." It also surfaced on the Takumi Digital Archives Instagram account and YouTube channel launched last month.
Takumi appears to offer a service for clients to upload their memories, specifically of old advertisements, and its mascot is a magenta cartoon witch cat. "Our new TAKUMI data centre is now operational," reads the caption on the first post, shared Apr. 24. "The 155,000ft fault tolerant facility comprises 1,800 computing cores, three petabytes of high-density racks and 36 superchips with low-latency networking. A world first in Non-Volatile storage solutions. At Takumi, your memories are safe with us."
The same Takumi logo appeared on a van and on a uniform worn by Haley Joel Osment in photos posted on the Avalanches' Instagram Stories in December. (We last wrote about the Sixth Sense and A.I. Artificial Intelligence actor when he was sort of namechecked on Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us," released two years ago today.)
On takumiarchives.com, you can dig around and find covers of fake vintage magazines (Kool Kids, BD•R) and retro ads that some fans suspect contain song titles. There's a commercial for an effervescent tablet called Cloud 9, footage of a videogame called Unicorn Quest, and images of CDs, cassettes, floppy disks, VHS, and USB drives.
There's also a link to the 2011 Wired article "Ads Implant False Memories" and text from a real research study titled "Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories Of The Past" that was published in the scientific journal Psychology & Marketing in 2002. Here's the abtract:
Marketers use autobiographical advertising as a means to create nostalgia for their products. This research explores whether such referencing can cause people to believe that they had experiences as children that are mentioned in the ads. In Experiment 1, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with Mickey Mouse as a child. Relative to controls, the ad increased their confidence that they personally had shaken hands with Mickey as a child at a Disney resort. The increased confidence could be due to a revival of a true memory or the creation of a new, false one. In Experiment 2, participants viewed an ad for Disney that suggested that they shook hands with an impossible character (e.g., Bugs Bunny). Again, relative to controls, the ad increased confidence that they personally had shaken hands with the impossible character as a child at a Disney resort. The increased confidence is consistent with the notion that autobiographical referencing can lead to the creation of false or distorted memory. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Elsewhere, a couple of cans of the fictional beverage “el dorado” placed among real Japanese drinks in a supermarket. The messages on the cans (e.g, “I remember… we were at the club?,” “Yes. You were smoking again”) show up as prompts on the Takumi site. Text from the magazine covers also appears in those modules; they could be lyrics.
Thanks to a (real) casting notice, we also know there was a music video shoot for a song called “Every Single Weekend" in March.
The Avalanches first teased 2020’s We Will Always Love You, their previous LP and a Stereogum Album Of The Week, with billboards directing viewers to wwaly.earth, a website with Morse code hints about the title and single release date. That campaign lasted only nine days, so we could be getting new music very soon.
