Silver Apples

“Silver Apples is an organic mechanism composed of the Simeon and the Taylor Drums”. With these words, in 1968 producer Barry Bryant introduced the project of two New York musicians, Danny Taylor and Simeon Cox, who had decided to call themselves “Silver Apples” in homage to a poem by William Butler Yeats. It wasn't a band, but an “organic mechanism” endowed with its own vital functions beyond human comprehension. Indeed, silver apples are not fruits of this world, or at least not of this planet. If there really were intelligent life forms out there in the universe, on some far-flung planet in a remote galaxy, it's easy to imagine their musical tradition would be made up of sounds similar to those the Silver Apples crafted in the late Sixties. There is, in fact, something paradoxically primitive, atavistic, in their sonic futurism. It's like listening to the world music of the universe, the folk music of ancient alien civilizations.

The technical equipment used by Taylor and Cox was worthy of Asimov's Martian visions: the former 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, pulsations with the regular cadence of a programmed machine, and on the other, tribal-style rhythmic sequences; Cox, for his part, had built an electronic apparatus named after himself, “The Simeon”. This was, in practice, a sort of giant mixer made up of nine oscillators: the main one for melody and three for rhythm were triggered by manual buttons, while the remaining five for the bass were controlled via pedals. Rounding out the arsenal were – among other things – a radio, a microphone, three amplifiers, an echoplex and a wah-wah effect. All told, a grand total of eighty-six controls!

This technological arsenal is what allowed the New York duo – on this self-titled debut album and on the equally hallucinatory follow-up, “Contact” – to conquer new psychedelic territories no longer ruled by acid guitars and delirious organs, but by technological artifacts bearing human names, like replicants. Silver Apples were prophets of the electronic realm, sent to earth to explain to men with guitars that a day would come when they'd do without the six-string electric; a day when the new kings of rock would bear Teutonic names (Kraftwerk, Neu!) or sinister ones (Suicide).

Indeed, kraut-rock is already present in the broken rhythm – forerunner of the Can's “Mushroom” – of “Lovefingers”, while the seeds of new wave incubate in the spectral visions of “Velvet Cave”, multiplying in the obsessive litany of “Oscillations” and in the extraterrestrial little march of “Seagreen Serenade”. Moreover, the deadpan recitation of “Dust” – based, like most of the tracks, on a poem by poet friend Stanley Warren – and the pagan ceremony of “Dancing God” – which sets a Navajo religious rite on Mars – seem cut specifically to reveal the most remote origins of the darkest OMD and the Dionysian Simple Minds of “Empires And Dance”.

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.

After the two groundbreaking albums of 1968-69, Silver Apples left the scene for almost thirty years, returning only in 1998 with three releases that tried in vain to pick up the thread of a legendary past. There was no need, though: the history of rock had already enshrined them as visionaries who came from outer space.

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25/11/2012