Sundaze (41)

Hello, another Sundaze coming up and today we go back, wayback in time...40 years to be precise, a time when you could fly rocketships to the moon with the computerpower of your cell phone...and you thought that Nokia delivered nifty possibilities... Seriously, its almost all American whats on offer here today. Silver Apples made a remarkble album, with DIY tech/oscilattors, there's some cool tracks on their debut way ahead these guys, having a poet as a lyricist surely adds to the value.. It took 25 years after they were shunned by their label, before a very successful bootleg restarted Silver Apples again, shortlived-almost literally as main man Simeon was severly injured in a carcrash after a gig. But he's overcome the new handicap and could be gigging at a place near you-if not -have him around.....The United States Of America probably thought naming themselves such, they could take over and clean that act up with their music...It was not to be, after just one album the system and systems got to them, and they desintegrated, leaving behind one acclaimed album... Lastly another American, David Vorhaus...he dodged his way to London and met up with some of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop people and together recorded one album. Considering what they had to work with. the result is remarkble. Vorhaus later said that An Electric Storm contained more edits than any other album in the history of recording. No wonder then it took a year to put (back) together. In hindsight it makes me wonder if all that computing power evident in music these days, really enhanced musical creativity.

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Silver Apples - Silver Apples (68 flac 205mb)

Silver Apples grew out of a traditional rock back called The Overland Stage Electric Band, working regularly in the East Village. Simeon was the singer, but began to incorporate a 1940s vintage audio oscillator into the show, which alienated the other bands members to the extent that the group was eventually reduced to the duo of Simeon and Taylor, at which point they renamed themselves The Silver Apples, after the William Butler Yeats poem The Song of the Wandering Aengus. The arsenal of oscillators used. also dubbed the Simeon, eventually grew to include "nine audio oscillators piled on top of each other and eighty-six manual controls to control lead, rhythm and bass pulses with hands, feet and elbows". Simeon devised a system of telegraph keys and pedals to control tonality and chord changes, and reportedly never learned to play traditional piano-styled keyboards or synthesizers

On the debut album, seven of the nine songs had lyrics by Stanley Warren, including the group's signature song, "Oscillations." Warren, subsequently a published poet, met Simeon and Taylor at the Third Annual Avant Garde Arts Festival in 1968 in New York City. Inspired by Simeon's interest, in the next few months Warren wrote the remaining six songs used on the "Silver Apples" album. Another song, "Gypsy Love," was used in the second album, "Contact." They were signed to Kapp Records and released their first record, Silver Apples, in 1968, and from that released a single, "Oscillations". The following year, they released their second LP, Contact and toured the United States. A third album was recorded in 1970, but Kapp was folded into MCA Records, leaving the album unreleased, and the group defunct.

Silver Apples was no more..until almost 25 years later a german bootleg cd sparked renewed interest. It prompted Simeon to reform The Silver Apples in 1996. Very quickly, the first two records were re-released as official records from the master tapes, and Simeon began a tour of the USA with a new Silver Apples band, featuring multi-instrumentalist Xian Hawkins. Eventually, "after much searching" , Danny Taylor was located, and a handful of reunion shows of the original lineup were performed. Taylor also had the tape of the unreleased third record, The Garden, in a box in his attic, and the record was finally released in 1998. In the ensuing years the Silver Apples released several albums of new material featuring the touring line-up of Simeon, Taylor and Hawkins: 'Decatur', 'Beacon', and 'A Lake of Teardrops'.

In 1999, their tour van was forced off the road by an unknown driver, breaking Simeon's neck. As of 2004, Simeon was much recovered, but he was unable to play his instrument in the way he used to. He never fully recovered his hand movements, so his keyboard work is much more simple and direct now. Since the accident, Silver Apples' activity has diminished. Simeon spends his time making new music, recuperating, and boating on the Gulf of Mexico. Xian Hawkins has released three albums of solo material under the name Sybarite. Danny Taylor died on March 10, 2005 in Kingston, New York. In September 2007 Simeon went on tour for the first time in years, performing as a solo version of the Silver Apples to much acclaim.



01 - Oscillations (2:45)
02 - Seagreen Serenades (2:50)
03 - Lovefingers (4:03)
04 - Program (4:01)
05 - Velvet Cave (3:24)

06 - Whirly-Bird (2:36)
07 - Dust (3:34)
08 - Dancing Gods (Navajo Indian Ceremonial) (5:49)
09 - Misty Mountain (2:37)

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The United States Of America - I ( 68 ^ 355mb)

The United States of America was led by composer and keyboardist Joseph Byrd, he played vibes in a jazz outfit as a student at the University of Arizona. Despite winning a fellowship to study music at Stanford, Byrd instead relocated to New York, intrigued by the avant-garde experiments emerging from the city's downtown music scene; there he began earning international notoriety for his own compositions, at the same time working as a conductor, arranger and associate producer.

Byrd eventually returned to the west coast, accepting an assistant teaching position at UCLA and moving into a beachfront commune populated by a group of grad students, artists and Indian musicians. He soon began studying acoustics, psychology and Indian music, but quickly turned back to experimental composition, leaving the university in the summer of 1967 to write music full-time and produce "happenings." To perform his new songs -- inspired by the psychedelic Summer of Love -- Byrd recruited a group of UCLA students (vocalist Dorothy Moskowitz, bassist Rand Forbes, electric violinist Gordon Marron and drummer Craig Woodson) to form the United States of America; the group's lone self-titled LP, produced by David Rubinson, was released on CBS in 1968, its unique ambience due largely to their pioneering use of the ring modulator, a primitive synthesizer later popularized by the Krautrock sound.

Early 1968 a time when there was a receptive audience for “underground music” which combined musical experimentalism with radical social and/or political lyrics, unsurprising then it was the subject of critical acclaim, the album spent over two months in the lower regions of the Billboard charts. The band's tour in support of the record led to difficulties of its own. Members of the band were arrested for drug possession, and they had a number of serious equipment failures - these and other tensions made Byrd increasingly difficult to work with, and the group largely unmanageable, and resulted in the band splitting up. Byrd resurfaced in 1969 with The American Metaphysical Circus, credited to Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, a group of a dozen musicians including vocalists Susan de Lange, Victoria Bond and Christie Thompson. A critical and commercial failure, the LP was his last until 1975, at which time he released Yankee Transcendoodle, a collection of synthesizer pieces. Three years later Byrd also produced Ry Cooder's Jazz album, and in 1980 he issued another synthesizer record, Christmas Yet to Come. He additionally wrote for films, television and advertising jingles.



01 - The American Metaphysical Circus (5:00)
02 - Hand Coming Love (4:47)
03 - Cloud Song (3:14)
04 - The Garden Of Earthly Delights (2:39)
05 - I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar (3:54)
06 - Where Is Yesterday (3:07)
07 - Coming Down (2:37)
08 - Love Song For The Dead Che (3:27)
09 - Stranded In Time (1:49)
10 - The American Way Of Love (6:38)

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White Noise - An Electric Storm ( 68 flac 194mb)

White Noise is an electronic music band formed in London, England in 1968 by American born David Vorhaus, a classical bass player with a background in both physics and electronic engineering. The White Noise project had its origins in the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. Among them Delia Derbyshire, Peter Zinovieff, and Brian Hodgson all were also members of a group called Unit Delta Plus, formed in 1966 to promote the composition and performance of electronic music. David Vorhaus had come to the U.K. to avoid the draft and earn an electronics degree, while also studying classical music and playing the double bass.Vorhaus persuaded Derbyshire and Hodgson to collaborate on a more pop-oriented project with him while maintaining their day jobs at the BBC. With two tracks in the can, recorded on a six-Revox setup synchronized by a single remote control. Vorhaus was introduced to Island Records' Chris Blackwell, who was so impressed that he commissioned a whole album.

They set about building their own studio-cum-science lab in Camden Town out of "borrowed" gear and improvised equipment. With no keyboard-based polyphonic synthesizers available to them, every last chord had to be assembled from numerous tape edits painstakingly stuck together. Using a variety of tape manipulation techniques, and noted for its early use of the first British synthesizer, the EMS Synthi VCS3. Much use was made of musique concrète techniques, whereby physically generated sounds would be subjected to all manner of electronic distortion and tape manipulation. Amongst many oddities, the first track on the album Love Without Sound employed speeded up tape edits of Vorhaus playing the double bass to create violin and cello sounds.Vorhaus later ventured his opinion that An Electric Storm contained more edits than any other album in the history of recording.

Through word of mouth Electric Storm acquired a reputation as an album that sounds like no other, and over the years it proved to be a cult classic, going on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies worldwidei.By 1970, however, White Noise had been overtaken by events. As the Moog synthesizer became widely available, the kind of equipment used by the Radiophonic Workshop team became obsolete almost overnight.

Following the departure of Derbyshire and Hodgson to other projects, Vorhaus released a second album, the largely instrumental White Noise II - Concerto for Synthesizer on Virgin Records in 1974. Typically dark in atmosphere, it was recorded in his own studio in Camden, North London. The album further utilized the ESM VCS3, as well as prototype sequencers. A third album, the single track 'space fantasy' White Noise III - Re-Entry was released by Pulse Records in 1980. By this time the instrumentation had expanded to include synthesizers and a drum machine. A further two albums were released, the atmospheric White Noise IV - Inferno (AMP Records) (1990), which incorporated use of samples, and White Noise V - Sound Mind (2000) an experiment in what he calls Dark Ambient:



01 - Love Without Sound (3:08)
02 - My Game Of Loving (4:09)
03 - Here Come The Fleas (2:15)
04 - Firebird (3:03)
05 - Your Hidden Arms (4:53)

06 - The Visitation (11:18)
07 - The Black Mass-An Electric Storm In Hell (7:22)

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