Silver Apples

The Arc of Silver Apples

The pivots — what forced Silver Apples to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Oscillator Invasion

   Between 1968 and 1969, Simeon and Dan Taylor cut two albums of skeletal, propulsive electronic rock in New York. Danny played custom drum kits with double bass drums to lock in with Simeon's manual oscillator sweeps. They recorded the self-titled debut on a primitive four-track machine, punching in frequencies on the fly using foot switches. It was physical, sweaty labor that sounded like nothing else in the Summer of Love era.

2. 02

   The Lost Decades

   A lawsuit over the cover art of Contact derailed their momentum in 1970, forcing the band to split and leaving their third album, The Garden, unreleased on tape in a box. Simeon went to work as a news producer in Alabama while Taylor drove a school bus. Decades of bootlegs kept their name alive in underground circles. Simeon finally resurrected the project in the late nineties after realizing kids in indie rock bands were treating his old records like holy relics.

3. 03

   The Late-Career Resurrection

   Simeon reformed the project in 1997, collaborating with Steve Kember of Spectrum and eventually recovering Dan Taylor's lost 1970 drum tracks to finally finish The Garden. Taylor passed away in 2005, but Simeon kept touring with the massive oscillator rig until his own death in 2020. These late-stage records, like Clinging to a Dream, traded the raw garage grime of the sixties for a cleaner, more deliberate electronic pulse.

Influences

• The Lovin' Spoonful — Simeon was a singer in the Greenwich Village folk-rock scene when John Sebastian's outfit was ruling the local clubs. He directly cited Sebastian's use of an autoharp as the catalyst for wanting to bring a non-traditional, electrified instrument into a rock band. You can hear that same folk-structured vocal delivery hiding underneath the oscillator noise on tracks like 'Velvet Cave'.
• Karlheinz Stockhausen — Simeon attended avant-garde electronic music recitals in New York during the mid-sixties where Stockhausen's sine-wave generator pieces were performed. He lifted the concept of using laboratory test oscillators for musical tones directly from these academic experiments. He just brought them down to earth by pairing them with a heavy rhythm section.
• Bo Diddley — Dan Taylor's drumming on 'Oscillations' is a direct adaptation of the classic, heavily syncopated Bo Diddley beat. Taylor was obsessed with early R&B and rockabilly, which kept the band's sound anchored in physical groove. Without that greasy, street-level rhythm, the oscillators would have just sounded like a cold physics lab.
• The Jimi Hendrix Experience — Simeon and Hendrix were friendly in the New York scene, even jamming together in 1969 on an electronic version of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Record Plant. Hendrix's radical use of feedback and signal distortion convinced Simeon to run his low-frequency oscillators through wah-wah pedals. That feedback-drenched attitude is all over the track 'Water'.
• Fats Domino — Dan Taylor's early musical education was rooted in New Orleans shuffle and rhythm-and-blues records. You hear this heavy, rolling snare work anchoring the frantic electronic chirps on 'Lovefingers'. It prevents the avant-garde electronics from drifting into academic abstraction.