Silver Apples

Long after their influential run came to an abrupt and unexplained close, Silver Apples persist as one of pop music’s genuine riddles. This uncanny pair, virtually without precedent, probed cosmic drones and sustained tones, driving beats, and synthesizer-crafted lines well before comparable approaches surfaced among followers that included Suicide, Spacemen 3, Laika, and Beak>.

Before the Silver Apples existed, vocalist Simeon Coxe and drummer Danny Taylor performed in the conventional 1960s rock outfit Overland Stage Electric Band. Coxe’s insertion of a 1940s audio oscillator so unsettled the remaining members that only he and Taylor remained; the pair launched Silver Apples in New York City during 1967. Coxe expanded his array of oscillators into a custom device named the Simeon, which, per the liner notes of the group’s self-titled 1968 debut LP, comprised “nine audio oscillators and eighty-six manual controls…The lead and rhythm oscillators are played with the hands, elbows and knees and the bass oscillators are played with the feet.” Coxe and Taylor also enlisted emerging poet Stanley Warren, who supplied lyrics for numerous early compositions, among them their emblematic single “Oscillations.”

Kapp Records issued The Silver Apples; despite the record’s complete lack of commercial appeal—an inventive tumult of electronic beeps, buzzes, and pulses—the duo returned in 1969 with Contact and crisscrossed the United States. The sleeve showed Coxe and Taylor at the controls of a Pan Am jetliner on the front and, on the reverse, superimposed the pair over an image of a wrecked European airliner. Pan Am filed suit against Kapp and the band; Contact vanished from stores and Taylor’s drum kit was seized. The third album, The Garden, stayed unreleased, the group dissolved in 1970, Coxe turned to graphic design, and Taylor took employment with a telephone company.

Silver Apples seemed erased from memory until a 1994 German bootleg of the first two albums revived attention. Coxe revived the project two years later; unable to locate Taylor, he recruited keyboardist Xian Hawkins of Sybarite and drummer Michael Lerner. This lineup toured North America and Europe, releasing the Steve Albini-engineered Beacon in 1998. Taylor resurfaced after hearing Silver Apples material on New Jersey’s WFMU, enabling the duo to complete and issue the long-shelved The Garden that same year. Another set of fresh songs, Decatur, also appeared in 1998 with Lerner on drums. Coxe and Taylor performed a few concerts until November 1998, when their van crashed returning from a New York show, injuring Coxe’s neck and spine. During prolonged rehabilitation he re-taught himself the Simeon. The Spectrum collaboration A Lake of Teardrops surfaced in 1999; the next year a joint recording with U.K. psych/noise band the Alchemysts followed.

Although Taylor succumbed to cancer in 2005, Coxe retained enough of his drum tracks to sample them for concerts and fresh material. From 2007 onward Coxe maintained a steady touring schedule, appearing at experimental festivals such as 2011’s All Tomorrow’s Parties I’ll Be Your Mirror in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he performed one evening with Cluster’s Hans-Joachim Roedelius under the name Silver-Qluster and joined Portishead the following night for their Silver Apples tribute “We Carry On.” Coxe continued recording in his Alabama home studio alongside singer/songwriter Lydia LaVert in Amphibian Lark and as Silver Apples. The project’s first album in nearly two decades, 2016’s Clinging to a Dream, incorporated songs drawn from an opera Coxe composed about a society of invisible vegetarian vampires and bore production by Bark Psychosis’ Graham Sutton. Silver Apples also contributed to the Dymaxion Groove compilation I Said No Doctors, which featured tracks by Dan Deacon, Jad Fair, and David Grubbs. Simeon Coxe died on September 8, 2020 at the age of 82. ~ Jason Ankeny & Heather Phares