Silver Apples

It annoys me when people talk about music and say "listen to this it was like soooo way ahead of it's time", or "when do you think this was made ?" and then you are meant to gasp that it was actually 10 years earlier than anything else that sounds like it.

However I'm going to be a complete hypocrite and say that I seriously couldn't believe this group the Silver Apples was from the late 1960's when I heard them, in fact it's hard to even think of anything to compare them to now, possibly it still doesn't exist yet .

The Silver Apples were a duo in the the New York psychedelic electronic scene (I think they were actually the only ones in the scene), with a pile of up to 9 audio oscillators and countless other custom built controls they produced some really quite fantastic tracks. They recorded three albums, Silver Apples 1968, Contact 1969 and The Garden 1970. The Garden (my personal favorite) was actually only released in 1998 after the recording was found in an attic. Apparently the cover of the Contact album with the Pan Am flight simulator on the front and the plane crash image on the back didn't go down too well and resulted in law suits and the end of the band and the record label.

Each album is full of unexpected surprises, The Garden takes the cake. There is a series of tracks called noodles, like Tabouli Noodle, Swamp Noodle or Fire Ant Noodle which seem like musical doodles, of pulsing bleeps and rhythms that build, then suddenly there's is a kind of electronic dueling banjo's sing along called John Hardy, before moving onto a very sweet poppy song about the life of an owl with hoot noises and a slightly deranged but pleasant synth melody.

I actually suspect these guys accidently slipped through a spacetime wormhole created when tinkering with one of their instruments (see below) and ended up in a highly advanced alien civilisation - dropped some acid, had a bit of a jam with the locals, then slipped back through and are waiting 400 years for everyone on earth to finally understand what they were on about, there's no other explanation.