Saturday, March 17, 2007

Silver Apples (1968) / Contact (1969)

I can't remember right now how I found out about these guys but they are pretty far out. After looking twice while I was out of town for a couple weeks, I finally went looking for this two-for-one at my local music store, Bullmoose, and found a blank name card for them. Thinking that even this store, which tends to stock obscure music had failed me. Not so, it turned out they had categorized the Silver Apples as electronic. This genre overlap is actually quite apt for this avant garde 60's duo; it seemed fitting their name cards were in both places. I was telling my wife about this group and she immediately pointed out to me that their name is a reference to Yeats' poem, "The Song of Wandering Aengus," part of which goes thus:

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

[Of further interest: I have now also discovered that the title of a compilation album that the neo-psych-folk musician Devendra Banhart compiled, which is a good primer for this genre, is named after the last line of this poem. Probably not at all coincidental.]

So, if you are a fan of electronica, you will probably dig these guys if for nothing else than for (what should be, if it is not) an eminent place in the annals of this genre, but especially if you are also in to psychadelia. Their sound is spacey, ethereal, and busy with hypnotic, thumping and droning and pulsing and whirring and clicking beats both electronic and percussive. One of the members, known only as Simeon, constructed an eponymous machine described in the liner notes to their debut album as "nine audio oscillators and eighty-six manual controls...The lead and rhythm oscillators are played with the hands, elbows and knees and the bass oscillators are played with the feet." The drumming, courtesy Danny Taylor, compliments these aural curios with beats that seem precursory to those tracks now found on programed drum machines. Taylor used two differently tuned drum kits set up side by side so that he could switch to whichever tuning would most compliment the Simeon's sounds. The lyrics are, at times, psychedelic fairy-like musings, which makes for an unexpectedly intriguing and pleasing juxtaposition. At other times, I can't even really pay attention to the words because the sound is far more interesting.

One absolutely fascinating bit of information I discovered about the Silver Apples is that they were commissioned in 1969 by NYC's Mayor John Lindsay to write a song to act as the soundtrack for the mass viewing in Central Park of the Apollo 11 crew landing on the moon. The song was called "Mune Toon" apparently but I have yet to be able to find a place on the Internet where I can get a copy of it, not even sure it was ever recorded. According to an interview with one of the band members, the mayor declared the Silver Apples "the New York sound."


Silver Apples - Program

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