Silver Apples: an oscillator a day keeps the sanity at bay

Title: Clinging to a Dream
Label: Chicken Coop Recordings

The simple drum rhythms, avant garden noises, drones and more from Simeon Coxe and Danny Taylor were not of the usual. This recipe was not unusual and has become almost passé in constructional terms. The duo’s raison d’etre, though was how that lot was put together. You see? Three and a half lines into the review and I’ve already had to step outside of the English language words to describe this otherworldly band. Such was their boundary-breaking approach to music. Other significant bands such as Suicide and Spaceman 3 would agree.
Seemingly living inside a giant oscillator, Silver Apples produced truly non-commercial outings in the late 60s, disappeared in 1970 and arrived back on the scene in 1994 after renewed interest tickled their creative hormones. Additional band members came and went and Taylor tragically died of cancer in 2005

The project’s first album in nearly 20 years, this new album features songs from an opera Coxe wrote about a society of invisible vegetarian vampires (someone had to) assisted by the production of Bark Psychosis’ Graham Sutton. Created in Fairhope, Alabama, the album features a simple production of simple almost primitive synth sounds with a vocals that were not quite so simple. They approached the unhinged without actually getting there: creative tension, you see. There is a sense, though, that this is a singer who has a ‘thousand years stare’. He’s experienced life and seen too much and has had just about enough, thank you very much.

In terms of the audiophile side of affairs, I was impressed by the overall mastering of the music on this CD, which has been treated with some respect, allowing the music to speak for itself. There is no midrange stridency to worry you. The music does that on its own.