Music, Style & Culture

DIY Does ATP: Silver Apples: ‘I Always Look Forward To ATP’

We interrupt Simeon in the middle of his hardware store shopping to chat about this weekend's Nightmare Before Christmas.

It's no stretch to say that Silver Apples are the forefathers of electronic music as we know it. Back in the 60s, whilst everyone else was busy inventing rock n roll in a more traditional sense, Simeon and Dan Taylor decided to do something completely different, melted together bits of radios and sound filters to make an oscillator, and called it the Simeon. Ahead of their Caribou curated ATP show, we thought we'd put in a long distance call and interrupt Simeon in the middle of his hardware store shopping and get the low down on what we can expect to find in deepest darkest Minehead.

Hi Simeon! How're you doing?
Hi! I'm actually in a hardware store, hang on, I'll go outside and talk to you. It'll look like I'm shoplifting!

Please don't get arrested on our account. So, are you looking forward to ATP?
Oh absolutely, this will be my fourth one, and I always look forward to ATP. It's almost like a family of musicians who play ATP, they're not in competition with each other, they're always very supportive of each other. There's a lot of interaction between musicians, both on stage and off, where you sit down and have lunch with so and so and talk with them about their projects, exchange information and ideas, everybody's always sitting in with everybody. It's got that flavour to it. I think Barry Hogan has created a real positive attitude with all of the ATPs, and I just totally love doing them and I'm really excited to be invited.

Is there anyone else on the line up that you're particularly looking forward to seeing?
I'm interested to see what the Sun Ra Arkestra are about these days! I saw them back in the 60s, when Sun Ra was still alive. They played a little bar in New York, and me and my girlfriend were the only people in there. And they've come quite a ways! I'm interested to see what Caribou does, of course, that's always different. I'm also intrigued to see Battles and see what they're doing.

Me too! Now, you have a really unique sound, can you tell us a little bit about how you started using oscillators?
I was just a rock n roll singer, I had bands that I worked with and we played clubs around New York. And I was more interested in doing original material, doing something else, not doing something everyone else was doing. And one day I heard a friend of mine who was a classical musician, a serious musician, monkeying around with an oscillator, and I was just curious as to what he was doing. And he talked to me about that type of music a little bit, I'd never heard of electronic music, didn't even know what it was. So I borrowed that machine one day, took it on stage with my band, we were playing some club in Greenwich Village, and when I did that, the way the oscillator worked with the drums, for me that was just amazing. So that's how I got into it, just one oscillator, and it built into two, and then five, then ten, then fifteen, until it got out of control. Just me and the drummer, doing our thing; Silver Apples.

Was it a deliberate move to make the music so completely timeless?
We weren't really trying to make music that was accepted by anybody, we just wanted to make the music that we liked. So you know, we weren't trying to stay trendy, or any of that, so maybe we just avoided all that. We just made music that reverberates through your soul, through the ages. That's the way I feel about it. It has it's own place, it doesn't get attached to any time period.

So how have you had to adapt to a more technological age?
Technology has changed me. I don't carry sixteen bulky oscillators around with me anymore, I have the sound of oscillators sampled. And so I can carry much smaller amounts of equipment around, because I have the oscillators in my studio and I sample them, so the audience is getting the same sound, and I'm doing the same performance. My sampler doesn't have a keyboard on it, it's a regular push button sampler, and that's the way I used to play. Different coloured push buttons. So it's just the technology that's different.

Finally, do you have any surprises in store for us at ATP?
Well, I'm going to do two songs that I've never done in public before, from the second record, 'CONTACT', a song called 'You're Not Fooling Me' which has a telephone ringing all the way through it, and a song called 'Fantasies'. I've never done them live before, we didn't even do them live back in the day with Danny, I'm gonna do them live for the first time at ATP.

Cool! We're looking forward to seeing that on Sunday!
I'm looking forward to the whole experience myself!

ATP Nightmare Before Christmas will take place from 9th - 11th December at Butlins, Minehead.