Released 55 years ago this month, in June of 1968, it's the eponymous debut LP from Silver Apples. It's an album which may well be the single most foresightful collection of rock music to ever predict the future.
Silver Apples was formed in NYC by electronics wiz, Simeon Oliver Coxe III, and drummer, Danny Taylor. Simeon played a bizarre conglomerate of electronic oscillators and effects processors which were crudely affixed to a wooden frame. He played the oscillators via telegraph switches triggered with his hands, elbows, knees and feet. Drummer Taylor worked with a kit which was composed of two complete drum sets, each tuned to a different key so that he could change the key of his playing in synch with pitch changes from the electronics. Together, the duo created a sound which was completely and utterly idiosyncratic of their era. There simply were no other artists exploring anywhere near their sound.
The use of synthesizers in pop music was barely getting off the ground in 1968, with a scant few examples of artists utilizing the recently release MOOG modular system. Micky Dolenz had picked one up and used it on a couple of songs with The Monkees, the Rolling Stones had followed a few months later, but for the most part, it was a mere novelty. It certainly wasn't the source of any band's principal sounds like with Silver Apples.
Silver Apples had started out as a fairly conventional rock band by the name of The Overland Stage Electric Band, with Simeon on vocals, but once he started bringing an old 1940s military oscillator into the picture, the other band members felt alienated and soon departed, leaving only Simeon and Taylor to rename themselves as Silver Apples in 1967. For their first album, seven of the group's original songs had lyrics provided by poet friend, Stanley Warren, including the album's single, Oscillations.
While the album and its followup were both commercial flops at the time of their release, and a third aborted album fell into a void of lost obscurity, the music of Silver Apples would eventually find a cult audience in decades to come. As electronic music came into its own in the 1980s and 1990s, its supporters began to rediscover the prognosticating brilliance of Silver Apples, who's sound was like a blueprint for experimental electronic music which would surface a full decade after the original albums were released. In the 1990s, Simeon would revive the band as a solo outlet, performing at techno raves.
