Silver Apples, The Luminaire

One doesn't want to be prejudiced about audiences, but when you go to see a show by a “pioneer of electronic music”, particularly one in his seventies, you most likely expect a crowd that are fairly male, fairly unfunky and tending towards the middle-aged. And to be fair, there were a good few paunches and beards in evidence at the Luminaire – but there were also a quite startling number of young, dressed-up, attractive and really rather groovy twenty-somethings of both (and indeterminate) genders milling about the place too.

Listen to "Oscillations" and "Seagreen Serenades" by Silver Apples (YouTube):

Silver Apples – now consisting only of founder member Simeon Coxe III – are odd like that, though. For decades so obscure as to be borderline mythical, there has always been something psychedelically mischievous and outright fun about their music that stops them being the province only of chin-stroking Stockhausen aficionados. And when Coxe revived the group in the mid-1990s after more than a quarter-century break, they vaulted straight into pop cultural relevance with everyone from techno artists to Graham Coxon and Damon Albarn of Blur citing their importance, and each new generation of young musicians since then has kept their music current.

The support was the entirely instrumental London band Eat Lights Become Lights, who deal in a driving, no-nonsense updating of the 1970s “Krautrock” of Neu! and early, guitar-based Kraftwerk. Everything in their set was about relentless forward drive, a counterpoint of unsyncopated keyboard melodies, basslines and rolling drum patterns providing a framework through which clouds of guitar noise could rise up, building each groove to a heady peak.

It's not an original template, but – like techno or drum and bass – it is one that provides opportunities for endless new iterations of the sound, so ELBL sounded fresh and energetic. There was dancing, too, as the crowd grew, albeit sporadic dancing. The Luminaire is one of London's finest small music venues, clean and well laid out with a cracking soundsystem and generally good “vibe”, but there is something a little genteel about it, particularly on a Sunday night, that isn't entirely conducive to cutting loose and/ or wigging out.

A DJ set followed from Pete Kember aka Sonic Boom, the deeply estranged one-time partner of Spiritualized's Jason Pierce in Eighties psychedelic band Spacemen 3. His excellent, if slightly predictable set of retro psychedelia got the crowd loosened up a little, then a short documentary about the history of Silver Apples was projected on stage. Suitably keyed up by now, the crowd actually applauded the snippets of performance in this film, and when Simeon took to the stage were clearly in a state of some anticipation.

Simeon is an extraordinarily well-preserved 74-year-old, and his music sounded pretty fresh too. Rather than reel out the classic Apples sound, he has updated tracks, still keeping the rough-round-the-edges analogue synthesis that makes them what they are but in many cases toughening up the beats and giving them a hint of the techno that they helped to inspire. This could so easily be a disastrous strategy, but so unique and prescient were those initial recordings that on his renditions of 1960s Apples tracks like “Gypsy Love” and “Oscillations” it becomes impossible to spot where the original innovations stop and contemporary twists start.

New tracks, too, like an abstracted “I Don't Know”, showed his creative faculties in full working order. Without a beat, that track was built entirely from abstract tones sliding across one another as he recited his rather gnomic, Zen-like lyrics. Much of the music was pre-sequenced, coming from ageing electronic boxes playing various rhythmic loops including samples of Apples drummer Danny Taylor who died in 2005, while Simeon wrenched peculiar tones from his self-built handle-operated machine also known as The Simeon; he was joined for two songs by Sonic Boom doing a virtuosic turn on the Theremin, the fluid tones of both instruments snaking around one another to brilliant effect.

Silver Apples playing "Oscillations" live in New York (YouTube):

The “Sunday night effect” was still in operation, though, and despite the audience's enthusiasm, the night never quite ignited. There was more dancing and clear appreciation of each track – but as with Eat Lights Become Lights, the set felt like it might have been more successful much later on a Saturday night or in a nightclub venue (as in the New York show in the video above), with people willing to give in to wild abandon rather than worry about the last tube home. This is not a criticism of the music, however – quite the opposite. In fact, for an artist so old and formerly so obscure to attract a young audience and engage them on a level that implies or even demands wilder bacchanals, it is nothing short of a wonder.

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