Silver Apples - The psychedelic cosmos

When tracing the history of electronic music, you simply can't skip an entire chapter on Silver Apples, the duo from New York.

In the early 60s, Simeon Oliver Coxe III and Danny Taylor joined a band called The Overland Stage Electric Band, as singer and drummer respectively. Almost immediately, Simeon decided to experiment with a 1940s audio oscillator (the circuit that allows synthesizers to generate sound) in order to add evocative sound effects to the band's live shows, but the other members weren't keen on the idea, being rather wary of tinkering with electronics. They were more attached to mainstream acoustic and electro-acoustic forms and reluctant to embrace change.

Either way, discontent within the group grew, and members began to leave, leaving Simeon to experiment with synthesizers alongside Taylor alone, practically the only one he agreed with on the musical direction to take. They were growing interested in the nascent psychedelic scene, in early avant-garde electronic compositions, and in expressive currents based on "free form music", but they felt the need to go further, to reach a personal synthesis of their influences.

Now reduced to a duo, they decided to change their name to "The Silver Apples" and then simply "Silver Apples", drawing on a line from the poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by Nobel Prize-winning writer William Butler Yeats (which we Italians perhaps know better set to music by Branduardi). It was a highly symbolic choice given their artistic intentions, since silver apples are not fruits of this world, or at least not of this planet. In this way they were already signalling their intent to create an alien sound, at least by the standards of that decade, even compared to many already avant-garde experimental acts. It's no coincidence, either, that in 1967 composer Morton Subotnick released his debut LP, titled, of all things, "Silver Apples Of The Moon", which revealed certain affinities with the New York duo.

In the meantime, Simeon began buying up more oscillators, eventually stacking nine of them together, along with numerous manual controls to manipulate the sounds and direct the bass and electronic beats with his limbs. But since he had no traditional training in playing synthesizers (that is, he had never learned to play keyboard), he ended up building an entire one from scratch, which he named after himself and which was played using his own personal system of keys and pedals. It was, in practice, a sort of giant mixer built primarily around the nine oscillators: the main one for melody, three for rhythm operated by hand-triggered buttons, and the remaining five for bass controlled via pedals. Rounding out the arsenal were, among other things, a radio, a microphone, three amplifiers, an echo-plex, and a wah-wah effect. All told, a grand total of eighty-six controls!

Taylor, meanwhile, had assembled an imposing drum kit — made up of thirteen drums, four cymbals, a hi-hat and two bells — which allowed him to produce, on one hand, pulses with the steady cadence of a programmed machine, and on the other, tribal-style rhythmic sequences.

Necessity sharpens ingenuity, and unusual circumstances push people to explore uncommon territory: with these premises, in 1967 the duo recorded, with lyrics by Stanley Warren, their self-titled debut album, Silver Apples, later released the following year on Kapp. The album could be seen as the springboard that led from psychedelic rock toward kraut-rock and kosmische musik, framed by lyrics that draw on hippie counterculture. But there's much more to it than that. Their music is lean, "tribal," yet sounds alien, while also not shying away from sounds that seem more "playful," managing in this work of synthesis to combine very different elements.

The two didn't define themselves as a band, but rather as an "organic mechanism" endowed with its own vital functions that "escape human understanding." Thanks to the obsessive rhythms, there is indeed something paradoxically primitive, something ancestral, in their sonic futurism. It's like listening to the world music of the universe, the folk music of ancient alien civilizations, pulsing with nothing but percussion and electronics, played with whatever means were available; stripped down to just drums and oscillators, early psychedelic rock thus evolves into something completely different, into a humming, extremely paranoid kind of music. It doesn't even make sense to talk about where rock ends and electronics begin, because the duo's style forms a single, indivisible monolith.

The broken rhythm of "Lovefingers," the spectral visions of "Velvet Cave," the stubborn litany of "Oscillations" and the extraterrestrial little march of "Seagreen Serenade" are all small gems of apparent naivety that conceal darkness, and in some ways anticipate industrial music.

It's the shadows of the mind, then, that dispel the darkness of the soul, and that's hardly more reassuring: “Whirly-Bird” and “Misty Mountain” are imaginary, demented fanfares, whereas “Program” finally betrays a shred of reason in mixing the house specialty (paranoid rhythm and amniotic pulsations) with radio interference that, echoing John Cage's Radio Music and the pioneering experiments of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, overlays fragments of announcements onto Vivaldi's Concerto No. 3.

Silver Apples is a revolutionary record, a crucible of obsessive, tribal rhythmic pulses perfectly fused with the atmospheres of the new space age. Holding it all together are minimal arrangements, reverbs, drones and dissonances. The psychedelia the two Americans started from is still present, but transfigured: no longer governed by acid guitars and deliriously overdriven organs, but by technological artifacts bearing human names, like replicants. The seeds of works like the self-titled debut of Suicide are already here, a band that would push this music to its most self-destructive extreme. The most "disconcerting" thing is that the record manages, in its own way, to come across as melodic in certain respects, albeit in a hallucinogenic form of melody.

The following year, again on Kapp, came Contact. It's even more visionary lyrically, emphasizing all of the band's most dreamlike and cosmic nuances, while also leaving room for plenty of claustrophobic, paranoid digressions, largely the product of Simeon Coxe's inventiveness. Musically it doesn't seem to stray far from the debut, of which it is essentially a second chapter — so much so that nowadays the two are issued together as a single release, both on physical formats and on digital streaming platforms. In fact, compared to the first album, Contact tends to expand on its darker side (especially on the tracks with the aforementioned lyrics) and its more "free" attitude. The end result is harder going on the ear, sonically more experimental and "chaotic." In its more distorted passages it even anticipates noise music in certain ways, in a manner not unlike the Velvet Underground, albeit starting from different ingredients.

It's certainly an ambitious record, but the result doesn't always prove more intriguing than the debut, which remains the high point of Silver Apples' discography. There's no shortage of well-crafted and interesting moments, some of which rank among the most enjoyable for their bittersweet contrasts, such as the use of banjo in place of the oscillator to try to achieve a similar sonic effect starting from a different source (on tracks like "Confusion" or "Ruby"). At other times, though, the experimentalism grows too exhausting ("You're Not Fooling Me," with its telephone ringing for a full six minutes straight over playful dissonances).

The atmosphere pervading the record is that of a hybrid between obsessive robotic quality and human organic quality, the latter tied above all to the psychedelic side and to lysergic trips "aided" by suitable "recreational substances," generating a kaleidoscope of spatial sounds.

What the album is best remembered for, however, is its cover, which depicts the duo inside the cockpit of a PanAm airliner (the logo prominently displayed in one corner). Inside the booklet, meanwhile, the two are shown playing the banjo (a real fixation of theirs) amid the wreckage of a plane crash. Add in the hidden drug references, and in no time at all a lawsuit arrived from PanAm, who were none too pleased and weren't about to leave Silver Apples so much as a leg to stand on. The resulting legal battle led to the duo's breakup, even though they had already finished recording their third album. That work, hampered by Kapp's acquisition by MCA Records, would remain stuck in editorial limbo and would not see release until almost thirty years later.

Artistically speaking, it's hard not to regret that this early end kept them from making further contributions to the music scene, experimental or otherwise. But just two albums were enough to exert a vast and deep influence on countless later artists, only a few of the most famous of whom we'll touch on here. The avant-garde electronics of Silver Apples had no equivalent in America at the time. If anything, they seem to push the concepts of psychedelic rock to the extreme and anticipate the German pulses of the following decade (Can, Cluster and Neu! owe a great deal to this album, especially in terms of its "mechanical" and "broken" rhythms), as well as, on the other hand, the colorful schemes of much of new wave (from Simple Minds through to Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark), of Brian Eno and, by extension, David Bowie.

In between stand Kraftwerk, who, starting out from the kraut-rock context, would also draw inspiration from the electronic weaves of Silver Apples, going on to give birth to synth-pop. Above all, the American duo's brief but intense run would have a powerful knock-on effect on modern electronic music as a whole, even on techno and dance music, which would steer its rhythmic pulses in more catchy directions.

The work of Silver Apples, moreover, already lays down much of the sonic groundwork that would later be reinterpreted in their own personal way by the first industrial acts (Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, and, on the EBM side, Front 242). It would inspire the tragic yet deranged avant-rock of Residents, as well as the terrifying atmospheres of Suicide, the psychedelic trip-hop of Laika (whose debut, not by chance, was titled "Silver Apples Of The Moon") and the cosmic shoegaze of Spacemen 3. Even a band like Portishead owes something to Silver Apples, particularly on "Third," an album dripping with stylistic tributes to them, forty years on.

Alongside a precious handful of other works from the late '60s, like those of Velvet Underground or "Phallus Dei" by Amon Düül, the two Silver Apples albums mark a decisive turning point for the avant-garde in the history of rock music. After them, inevitably, nothing would be quite the same, and the scarcity of their records in the decades that followed would earn them cult status. Echoing Eno's famous line about the Velvet Underground, one could say of Silver Apples that "hardly anyone bought one of their records, but everyone who did went on to form a band and record one of their own."

The story of the New York band picked back up rather suddenly in 1994, when the German label TRC released their two LPs on CD without authorization, drawing a great deal of attention from both the public and music journalists. Simeon Coxe thus regained interest in the project, bringing in Xian Hawkins (aka Sybarite) on keyboards and Michael Lerner on drums, and set off on a new tour of the United States. The renewed lineup also recorded unreleased material, put out in 1998 across two releases that veer between psych-pop and industrial and that are, all things considered, fairly forgettable.

On the first, Beacon, the electronic touches are pleasant but timid and watered down. The song structures are regular, more conventional and predictable. The arrangements are soft in a bland sort of way, but all in all the result is reasonably catchy. It's not a bad record, it simply comes across as a dutiful, by-the-numbers exercise with no great flashes of creative inspiration, and the comparison with their earlier work is unforgiving. Telling is the re-recording of some "old" tracks, such as the closer "Misty Mountain," which in this new version sounds slowed down, watered down, defanged, losing all the bite of the 1968 original.

Decatur, on the other hand, a single 40-minute suite, fails to be nearly as catchy, lingering over noisy textures and minimalist improvisations that aim for avant-garde but end up making the work sound too repetitive and self-indulgent, if not outright tedious in the worst moments.

Beacon and Decatur are two complementary albums: one explores the more melodic side of the Silver Apples sound, the other the more lysergic side, with a touch of nostalgia that, however, never quite comes into focus or finds adequate inspiration to back it up.

We'll leave it to the reader's personal taste to choose between preferring a watered-down, simplistic version of the Doors (Beacon) or a faded version of Morton Subotnick and Throbbing Gristle (Decatur).

On both albums what's most sorely missed is Danny Taylor on drums: the playing here is technically fine, but it lacks that obstinate, mechanical, relentless edge that meshed so well with the alienating atmospheres of the 60s records. Simeon himself doesn't seem at the peak of his inspiration either, vocally or compositionally, lacking an equally creative drummer to back up his ideas and help build tracks capable of going beyond their initial premise.

Right, but what had happened to Taylor? He'd vanished and cut all ties, much to Simeon's dismay (not least because he had the tapes of the never-released third album). After, in Simeon's own words, "a lot of searching", Taylor was tracked down and contacted to put together a reunion. The lost third album, titled The Garden, was recorded in 1970 but wasn't released until 1998, on the Whirlybird label. Alongside the complete tracks from the original recording sessions, there are a few new additions. It's a work that's dissonant and catchy at the same time, blending unsettling yet steady beats, noisy digressions and melodic hooks that are disturbingly addictive. There's a lot of krautrock in it, with entire passages that sound as though they were lifted straight from the most important German avant-garde bands of the era, except that when all this was created, those bands either didn't exist yet or were only just taking their first steps. All of it, though, hints at a direction the group intended to pursue toward a more melodic dimension, without giving up the lysergic trips, but cross-pollinating them with funk, blues, space-rock and the first glimmers of what would become new wave.

1998 is an important year for Silver Apples for another reason too, this time a far less happy one: a serious car accident leaves Simeon with a broken neck. All plans for further shows and a new album are scrapped as a result. It isn't until 2004 that Simeon regains some of his mobility and is able to walk again, but his ability to play in his own peculiar way is lost forever.

Only in 2016 does the long-suffered, hard-won new album finally arrive, titled Clinging To A Dream and produced by Graham Sutton of Bark Psychosis, but sadly the result is disappointing. All of the album's positives are contained within the dreamy opening track "The Edge Of Wonder", by far the most interesting piece here; it's no coincidence that it's reprised in a more intimate version as the album's closer.

But the candle burns out fast, and elsewhere only the sci-fi dub of "Missing You" seems to hold its own. The experiment fares even worse when Simeon Coxe tackles murky spoken-word pieces ("Colors", "The Mist"), house-music algorithms ("Nothing Matters") or radio-friendly dance-pop sequences ("Susie").

If back in the 60s the future painted by Silver Apples seemed downright frightening, today on Clinging To A Dream it's merely frighteningly in line with the current landscape, especially on the electro-noir of "Fractal Flow", which sounds as though it could have been lifted straight off a White Lies album.

Silver Apples' releases from after their golden period try in vain to pick up the thread of a legendary past. Not that it was ever needed, though: rock history had already enshrined them as visionaries beamed in from outer space.

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