In the late 70s and ear­ly 80s, a hand­ful of musi­cal duos emerged who would have tremen­dous impact on post-punk, alter­na­tive, new wave, and exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic music. Bands like Sui­cide, NEU!, and the Pet Shop Boys made far big­ger sounds than their size would sug­gest. Before them all came Sil­ver Apples, a duo who should right­ly get cred­it as pio­neers of elec­tron­ic exper­i­men­ta­tion in pop song form. Like many a pio­neer, Sil­ver Apples had no idea what they were doing. They also suf­fered from a string of some of the worst luck a band could have, dis­ap­pear­ing after their sec­ond album in 1969 until a mid-90s redis­cov­ery and brief return.

Band­mem­bers Sime­on Coxe and Dan­ny Tay­lor formed the band in 1967 from the ruins of a rock group called The Over­land Stage Elec­tric Band, which fell apart when Coxe began exper­i­ment­ing with old oscil­la­tors onstage. All of the mem­bers quit except Tay­lor, and Coxe set about build­ing his own syn­the­siz­er, “a machine nick­named ‘the Sime­on,’” Daniel Dylan Wray writes at The Guardian, “which grew to con­sist of nine audio oscil­la­tors with 86 man­u­al controls—including tele­graph keys—to con­trol lead, rhythm and bass puls­es with the user’s hands, feet and elbows.”

Coxe was the only per­son who could play the Sime­on, and he sang as he did so, his weird, war­bly voice com­ple­ment­ing his machine, as Tay­lor played pro­to-Krautrock beats behind him. “I had heard the word syn­the­siz­er,” he says, “but I had no idea what it was. We were dirt poor and used what we had, which was often dis­card­ed world war two gear.” They were essen­tial­ly mak­ing up elec­tron­ic pop music as they went along, iso­lat­ed from par­al­lel devel­op­ments hap­pen­ing at the same time. They named the project after a line by William But­ler Yeats (many of their lyrics were writ­ten by poet Stan­ley War­ren). Around the same time, com­pos­er Mor­ton Sub­ot­nick released his ground­break­ing all-elec­tron­ic album, titled—after Yeats—Sil­ver Apples of the Moon.

It was Sil­ver Apples’ fate to be over­shad­owed by oth­er releas­es that came out imme­di­ate­ly after their 1968 self-titled debut, such as Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach and Ger­shon Kingsley’s hit “Pop­corn,” both of which pop­u­lar­ized Robert Moog’s mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­ers. Moog him­self became so fas­ci­nat­ed with Coxe’s sin­gu­lar cre­ation that he vis­it­ed the Sil­ver Apples stu­dio to see it for him­self. The band’s man­ag­er scored them their very first gig play­ing for 30,000 peo­ple in Cen­tral Park, “pro­vid­ing a live sound­track to the Apol­lo moon landing—broadcast on enor­mous screens beside them,” writes Cian Traynor at Huck mag­a­zine, “as peo­ple took their clothes off in the rain.”

This mag­i­cal experience—and oth­er brush­es with fame, such as a one-off record­ing ses­sion with Jimi Hendrix—was no indi­ca­tion of a bright future for the band. For their sec­ond album, they were allowed to pho­to­graph them­selves inside the cock­pit of a Pan Am jet. The inclu­sion of drug para­pher­na­lia in the pho­to, and of a crashed air­plane on the back, prompt­ed a law­suit from the air­line. The album was pulled from the shelves, the band shut out of the indus­try, and a third album, The Gar­den, remained unre­leased until 1998.

For a look at how musi­cal­ly for­ward-think­ing Sil­ver Apples were, see the short doc­u­men­tary about their rise and fall above. They end­ed up influ­enc­ing neo-psy­che­del­ic elec­tron­ic bands like Stere­o­lab and 90s duo Por­tishead, whose Geoff Bar­row says, “for peo­ple like us, they are the per­fect band…. They should def­i­nite­ly be up there with the pio­neers of elec­tron­ic music.” Tay­lor sad­ly died in 2005, just after Coxe had par­tial­ly recov­ered from a bro­ken neck suf­fered the year of their 90s resur­gence. But Sil­ver Apples music is immor­tal, and immor­tal­ly oth­er­world­ly and strange, even if its cre­ators nev­er quite under­stood why. “To me and Dan­ny,” says Coxe, “it sound­ed per­fect­ly nor­mal and was a nor­mal pro­gres­sion into the areas we were try­ing to go.”

As so much exper­i­men­tal elec­tron­ic pop music that emerged around the same time proves, Coxe was more right than he knew. What Sil­ver Apples did turned out to be a “nor­mal” musi­cal devel­op­ment, though they had no idea that it was hap­pen­ing when they made their aston­ish­ing­ly groovy, spaced-out records.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Daphne Oram Cre­at­ed the BBC’s First-Ever Piece of Elec­tron­ic Music (1957)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Édith Piaf’s life was any­thing but rosy. Born in a Parisian slum, she was aban­doned by her moth­er and lived for awhile in a broth­el run by her grand­moth­er. As a teenag­er she sang on the streets for mon­ey. She was addict­ed to alco­hol and drugs for much of her life, and her lat­er years were marred by chron­ic pain. Through it all, Piaf man­aged to hold onto a basi­cal­ly opti­mistic view of life. She sang with a lyri­cal aban­don that seemed to tran­scend the pain and sor­row of liv­ing.

On April 3, 1954 Piaf was the guest of hon­or on the French TV show La Joie de Vivre. She was 38 years old but looked much old­er. She had recent­ly under­gone a gru­el­ing series of “aver­sion ther­a­py” treat­ments for alco­holism, and was by that time in the habit of tak­ing mor­phine before going onstage. Cor­ti­sone treat­ments for arthri­tis made the usu­al­ly wire-thin singer look puffy. But when Piaf launch­es into her sig­na­ture song, “La Vie en Rose” (see above), all of that is left behind.

Nine years after this per­for­mance, when Piaf died, her friend Jean Cocteau said of her: “Like all those who live on courage, she did­n’t think about death–she defied it. Only her voice remains, that splen­did voice like black vel­vet.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in Feb­ru­ary 2013.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Iggy Pop Sings Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” in an Art­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Video

Serge Gains­bourg & Brigitte Bar­dot Per­form Out­law-Inspired Love Song, ‘Bon­nie and Clyde’ (1968)

French Cou­ple Sings an Aching­ly Charm­ing Ver­sion of VU’s “Femme Fatale”

Play­ing a musi­cal instru­ment with wet hands usu­al­ly falls some­where between a bad idea and a very bad idea indeed. The Cristal Baschet, how­ev­er, requires its play­ers to keep their hands wet at all times, and that’s hard­ly the only sense in which it’s an excep­tion­al musi­cal instru­ment. Have a lis­ten to the per­for­mance above, Erik Satie’s Gnossi­enne No. 1 by Marc Antoine Mil­lon and Frédéric Bous­quet, and you’ll under­stand at once how excep­tion­al it sounds. Both ide­al­ly suit­ed to Satie’s com­po­si­tion and like noth­ing else in the his­to­ry of music — a his­to­ry which may ulti­mate­ly remem­ber it as, among oth­er things, one of the most French musi­cal devices ever cre­at­ed.

“It was invent­ed in France, so per­haps that’s why I have one,” says com­pos­er Marc Chouarain as he pre­pares to demon­strate his Cristal Baschet in the video above. “I put water on my fin­ger and I have to put pres­sure on the glass rods, and the sound is ampli­fied.” That ampli­fi­ca­tion hap­pens, like every oth­er process with­in the instru­ment, with­out the involve­ment of elec­tric­i­ty. Despite being ful­ly acoustic, the Cristal Baschet pro­duces sounds so loud and oth­er­world­ly that few could hear them with­out instinc­tive­ly imag­in­ing a sci-fi movie to go along with the sound­track.

Per­haps it’s no coin­ci­dence that Chouarain is a film com­pos­er, nor that the Cristal Baschet was invent­ed in the ear­ly 1950s, when the cin­e­mat­ic visions of the future as we know them began to take shape. That era also saw the dawn of musique con­crète (1964), with its use of record­ed sounds as com­po­si­tion­al ele­ments, and the influ­ence of the ear­ly Moog syn­the­siz­er, which would go on to change the sound of music for­ev­er. What influ­ence the broth­ers Bernard and François Baschet expect­ed of the Cristal Baschet when they invent­ed it is unclear, but it has sure­ly left more of a lega­cy than their oth­er cre­ations like the inflat­able gui­tar and alu­minum piano.

“Ravi Shankar, Damon Albarn (Goril­laz), Daft Punk, Radio­head, Tom Waits, and Manu Diban­go are among the musi­cal acts who have used the Cristal Baschet,” writes Colos­sal’s Andrew Lasane, cit­ing the offi­cial Baschet Sound Struc­tures Asso­ci­a­tion brochure. The instru­ment also con­tin­ues to get respect from adven­tur­ous film com­posers like Cliff Mar­tinez, who tick­les the glass rods in the video above. Accord­ing to an inter­view at Vul­ture, Mar­tinez first encoun­tered the instru­ment when com­pos­ing for the Steven Soder­bergh remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. He seems to have become a seri­ous Cristal Baschet fan since: the video’s notes men­tions that he now “incor­po­rates the instru­ment in all of his scores,” for more pic­tures by Soder­bergh, as well as by Nico­las Wind­ing Refn — anoth­er direc­tor of pos­sessed of dis­tinc­tive visions, and thus always in need of sounds to match.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Appre­hen­sion Engine: Bri­an Eno Called It “the Most Ter­ri­fy­ing Musi­cal Instru­ment of All Time”

Behold the Sea Organ: The Mas­sive Exper­i­men­tal Musi­cal Instru­ment That Makes Music with the Sea

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Debates about whether a gui­tarist is under­rat­ed often involve a lot of pos­tur­ing and need­less name-dropping—they don’t tend to go any­where, in oth­er words. This is not the case with Peter Green, founder and for­mer singer, song­writer, and gui­tarist for Fleet­wood Mac, who died this past week­end. He is, prob­a­bly most def­i­nite­ly, “the most under­rat­ed gui­tarist in British Blues,” argues the Hap­py Blues­man, or at least he became so in the last decades of his life.

Green expe­ri­enced a trag­ic end to his career with Fleet­wood Mac when his men­tal health declined pre­cip­i­tous­ly in 1970, and he was even­tu­al­ly diag­nosed with schiz­o­phre­nia. His leg­end lived long among musi­cians (and fans of the band who pre­ferred their ear­ly work), but Green more or less dis­ap­peared from pub­lic view, even after releas­ing a hand­ful of solo albums in a peri­od of recov­ery.

Fleet­wood Mac, the group he found­ed and car­ried to its first years of major star­dom became, of course, “a house­hold name, wide­ly rec­og­nized as one of the best soft rock bands ever for hits like ‘The Chain,’ ‘Go Your Own Way,’ and ‘Everywhere’”—songs Peter Green had noth­ing to do with, though he had the soft rock chops, as the melan­choly “Man of the World” beau­ti­ful­ly demon­strates. Hear him in some of his oth­er finest moments in the band, includ­ing a phe­nom­e­nal “Black Mag­ic Woman” at the top, before Car­los San­tana made the song his sig­na­ture.

The argu­ment for Green’s most under­rat­ed-ness as a blues gui­tarist is more than com­pelling, with endorse­ments from B.B. King—who said Green had “the sweet­est tone I ever heard”—and John May­all, who said he was bet­ter than Clap­ton when Green joined the Blues­break­ers at age 20. After found­ing Fleet­wood Mac, Green wrote “Black Mag­ic Woman,” sent a gui­tar instru­men­tal, “Alba­tross,” to the top of the British Charts in 1969 and, that same year, record­ed at Chess Records with, among oth­er blues leg­ends, Willie Dixon and Bud­dy Guy.

Was he the “best” British blues gui­tarist? He was “the only one who gave me the cold sweats,” King con­fessed, which sure is some­thing, even if you pre­fer Clap­ton or Jeff Beck. Is he the most under­rat­ed? Prob­a­bly most def­i­nite­ly. “With­in a few short years, Peter Green had achieved greater com­mer­cial suc­cess than two of the world’s most famous bands,” sell­ing more records in 1969 than “both The Rolling Stones and The Bea­t­les, com­bined.” Then he dis­ap­peared.

Green is receiv­ing the recog­ni­tion in death that elud­ed him in his last years, though fame nev­er seemed to tru­ly moti­vate him at any time in his life. Fel­low musi­cians have spared no superla­tives in online memo­ri­als, includ­ing Metallica’s Kirk Ham­mett, not known for going any­where near an ear­ly Fleet­wood Mac sound. But Green was a con­sum­mate musician’s musi­cian (he named his band after the rhythm sec­tion!), and he earned the respect of seri­ous rock artists and seri­ous blues artists and seri­ous met­al artists.

A long­time friend and admir­er, Ham­mett owns Green’s ’59 Gib­son Les Paul (nick­named “Gree­ny”). He recent­ly cov­ered Green’s last Fleet­wood Mac song—“The Green Man­al­ishi (With the Two Prong Crown)”—live onstage and was col­lab­o­rat­ing on new mate­r­i­al with his idol. “Our loss is total,” Ham­mett wrote in trib­ute, per­haps the most suc­cinct and dev­as­tat­ing trib­ute among so many. Fleet­wood Mac would nev­er have exist­ed with­out him. And his influ­ence on the British Blues and beyond goes even deep­er. See Green revis­it his love­ly “Man of the World” in a more recent per­for­mance, just below. He steps back from the fiery leads, play­ing sub­tle rhythm parts, but he still has the old mag­ic in his fin­gers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Clas­sic Per­for­mances by Peter Green (RIP), Founder of Fleet­wood Mac & the Only British Blues Gui­tarist Who Gave B.B. King “the Cold Sweats”

How Fleet­wood Mac Makes A Song: A Video Essay Explor­ing the “Son­ic Paint­ings” on the Clas­sic Album, Rumours

The Thrill is Gone: See B.B. King Play in Two Elec­tric Live Per­for­mances

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“Gen­tle, unas­sum­ing and pri­vate.” These are the words David Gilmour chose in his eulo­gy of Richard Wright, Pink Floyd’s key­board play­er and co-song­writer, who joined the band in 1964 and stayed with them through all of their major albums, leav­ing after The Wall and rejoin­ing for A Momen­tary Lapse of Rea­son. Wright was the qui­et one; drum­mer Nick Mason com­pared him to George Har­ri­son, and like Har­ri­son, he was also Pink Floy­d’s secret weapon, help­ing to deliv­er many of their most career-defin­ing songs.

Wright may rarely get much men­tion in song­writ­ing trib­utes to Pink Floyd’s war­ring lead­ers or its trag­ic elfin first singer/songwriter Syd Bar­rett (“had his pro­file been any low­er,” one obit­u­ary put it, “he would have been report­ed miss­ing.”), but his “soul­ful voice and play­ing were vital, mag­i­cal com­po­nents of our most rec­og­nized Pink Floyd sound,” Gilmour went on. “In my view, all of the great­est PF moments are the ones where he is in full flow.”

Wright’s jazz train­ing gave an impro­visato­ry bent. His for­mal music edu­ca­tion gave him an ear for com­po­si­tion. He was the band’s most ver­sa­tile musi­cian, play­ing dozens of instru­ments in addi­tion to his sig­na­ture Farfisa organ, and he was equal­ly at home writ­ing orches­tral pieces or falling into what­ev­er groove the band cooked up, as on their sixth stu­dio album, Med­dle, which emerged from sev­er­al stages of exper­i­men­tal meth­ods and hap­py acci­dents like the “ping” sound Wright’s piano makes at the begin­ning of the sprawl­ing epic “Echoes,” the 23-minute sec­ond side of the album.

The song con­tin­ued to grow, over­dub by over­dub. Waters wrote lyrics, Gilmour exper­i­ment­ed with a sound effect he’d stum­bled on by plug­ging his wah-wah ped­al in back­wards. If you ask Wright, as Mojo did in their final inter­view with him in 2008, the year of his death, it was large­ly his piece. Or at least, “the whole piano thing at the begin­ning and the chord struc­ture for the song is mine.”

Like so many of Wright’s com­po­si­tions, “Echoes” is also a show­case for Gilmour’s soar­ing solos and del­i­cate rhythm play­ing. The inter­play between the two musi­cians is on tran­scen­dent dis­play in Wright’s final, live 2006 per­for­mance of the song before he suc­cumbed to can­cer two years lat­er, for an audi­ence of 50,000 at the Gdańsk Ship­yard in Poland, record­ed on the last show of Gilmour’s On an Island tour.

This is real­ly great stuff. The filmed per­for­mance, which appears on Gilmour’s album and con­cert film Live in Gdańsk, shows both Wright and Gilmour in top form, trad­ing solos and cre­at­ing the kind of atmos­phere only those two could. Gilmour has said he’ll nev­er per­form the song again with­out Wright. It’s hard to imag­ine that he even could.

The band closed with the 20-plus-minute “Echoes” every night of the tour, and Wright brought out his old Farfisa just for the song. Giv­en how long Gilmour and Wright had been com­plet­ing each other’s vir­tu­oso strengths as co-cre­ators of instru­men­tal moods, every per­for­mance on the tour was sure­ly some­thing spe­cial. But in hind­sight, none are as mov­ing as this one—the last time fans would ever have the expe­ri­ence of see­ing Pink Floyd, or one ver­sion of them, recre­ate the mag­ic of “Echoes” live onstage.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pink Floyd Stream­ing Free Clas­sic Con­cert Films, Start­ing with 1994’s Pulse, the First Live Per­for­mance of Dark Side of the Moon in Full

Pink Floyd Films a Con­cert in an Emp­ty Audi­to­ri­um, Still Try­ing to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

Clare Torry’s Rare Live Per­for­mances of “Great Gig in the Sky” with Pink Floyd

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness