Music
Aural Epiphany: Silver Apples, Silver Apples/Contact
Do you know your musical roots? Tom Rollins gets down to the sound of electronica’s great-granddaddy, love-beads and all.
Things looked different back in the 60s.
On the 29th August 2009 I attended Brighton Beach at Newcastle University. The poster bore images of The Jam, Sandie Shaw and Keith Moon, in an eye-catching red background (that reminded me of Gang of Four’s Entertainment!) with Quadrophenia-style font. Inside there were two rooms, the second played rare northern and garage-psychedelia. The place to dance to records you hadn’t heard before. All in all I had a really nice time, and then went home.
Sitting up in not so Dionysiac waking afterwards, any number of albums could have really sent me. My friends and I listened to Silver Apples, Silver Apples/Contact. The reason this record could be considered epiphanic or life-changing, ever-difficult in a life/world where the discovery and acquisition of new music if so easy, is just how it was introduced to me. It hit us in silence, until four songs in the question was asked – “When do you think this is from?”
Dirge, then those drums! Moving in enrapturing oblique circles that groove. Then those frightening bleeps and screams and that humming beneath. Then vocals that sound like Jacobean chanson wheeling in melody o’er metallic discord. The next song is ‘Program.’ An opening accordion sample slowly darkens and fades into another beat. It almost becomes like an ideological manifesto for Silver Apples’ proto-electronica, as vocals break down into the shuffling of frequency modulations. A simple act, how many times repeated in childhood! readily takes on sonic metaphor. Classical strings fade into sundry speech into Italian rhetoric-making into the crackle of radio-waves…primitive electronic sound; inhuman, diverse and spontaneous and beyond its era! And this, before post-punk, even before Kraftwerk introduced the thin-black tie of totalitarianism as the de-individualised image of electronica, nicht wahr?
In fact Silver Apples released their self-titled debut album in 1968, and Contact followed in 1969. (Both are now available as one record, re-released by MCA Records in 1997). Formed in 1967, Simeon Coxe III and Danny Taylor emerged from New York’s East Village (not unlike post-punks Suicide years later) with a frightening-glorious breed of electronic music, embellished with the esoteric lyrics of scene poet, Stanley Warren. Simeon built his own synthesiser (The Simeon), with 12 oscillators and countless switches and knobs and other recycled electronic debris, and played it with his hands and elbows and knees. Look!
The 1969 hair and the velvet and the love-beads, but surrounded by the most ridiculous wall of sound-changing genre-destroying nuclear-looking Thunderbird technology. Hendrix will be dead soon! Behold the longhair with The Big Red Button! Drop the Bomb along with your music histories!
Yikes. In 1969 Hendrix was capturing helicopters and napalm on his fretboard (perhaps), and not far away the prog rock dwarves and elves summoned from forests of acidic exploration were amassing. While electronic music was not unheard of at this time – Morton Subotnick (whose 1967 record Silver Apples of the Sun Simeon and Taylor might well have been winking to) was pioneering the kind of electronic sounds the BBC Radiophonic Workshop itself pioneered with the Doctor Who theme in 1963 – but in comparison Silver Apples created something so cogent and stylised that it raised them out of the late Sixties and up besides the likes of Suicide, Brian Eno and Public Image Ltd. They all blossomed after punk.
Of course there is something deeply subjective about musicology – everyone views the history of music with different turning-points and high-points. But this is no more subjective than describing why an album changed your life because it reminds you of that good ole summer ’06 when the sun went down and that certain tune meant something. Silver Apples forced me to reassess my own lineage of twentieth-century popular music, particularly my idea of punk. The DIY ethic, dissonant electronic instrumentation, just the way it sounds, all foregrounds the genre with something more than the usual proto-whatever accolades. Like looking for postmodernism in pre-twentieth century literature, we do find surprises.
Topics: Aural Epiphany, Music
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