3. Silver ApplesSilver Apples

People who know my albums from ten years ago will have heard me trying to rip off Silver Apples. I think it was Kieran Hebden [Four Tet] who introduced me to their music. It’s so remarkable – it doesn’t sound like anything else that was happening at the time. This record was made before Can started recording – it was actually a toss-up between this or something from Can or NEU!, or something along these lines. If this record came out today people would still be flipping out over it. It still sounds like the sound of tomorrow to me, but it has those amazing folk melodies over the top of it. I guess most of my favourite music is both strange and familiar at the same time, and has some kind of melodic content you can hum along to and gets stuck in your head. The production and the musical ideas around it are totally otherworldly on this record. We booked Simeon for the ATP shows we curated a few years back, but I’ve never really read any interviews with him to try and find out how this happened – how they made a record that sounded like this in 1968. It didn’t sound like anything else.