Silver Apples played two shows in New York last week, and while the second — at the modest but well-equipped Coco’s 66 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn — may not have been able to boast the indie-scene cred of Oneida, the visual power of the Joshua Light Show, or the art scene cachet of the Abrons Art Center that the first had going for it, it did have good DJs playing in between sets, an impressive bill, and even some visual fireworks.
In the case of Brooklyn retro-techno trio Love Like Deloreans, who opened the show with a set of masterful Yellow Magic Orchestra-style synth jams, the band bounced around gamely behind their keyboards and provided a more interesting stage show themselves than many groups of their ilk do. But it was the projections, created by artist Jon Williams, played over the band that were most visually stimulating. While the forward progress of the songs was never in doubt, the projections played with the momentum of the set by variously interlocking and disengaging with the band’s rhythms.
Burning Star Core followed, turning in an astoundingly varied performance by way of six “parts” (for lack of a better word). The first part featured building violin loops, followed by a sparser movement of discordant riffs over a minimal drone, a quadrant featuring sampled vocalizations, a frighteningly intense noise section along the lines of Wolf Eyes’s “Dead Hills II,” and a finale during which lone member C. Spencer Yeh layed long violin double-stops over what could’ve been an ESG sample. Between the impressive volume, the often-harsh visual element — which ran from almost complete darkness to strange, diffuse, and disorienting floodlighting, to wild strobe flashes — and the stylistic shifts in the music, it was the sort of set that inspires strong opinions in all but the most indifferent. I, for one, thought it was amazing.
And with that, Silver Apples’ Simeon Coxe III took his place behind his oscillators and other assorted electronics and the main event was on. While some members of the crowd may have been surprised to see only Coxe up there, under a floppy hat, if he had internalized any particular expectations about what a Silver Applies performance was supposed to be, he wasn’t letting on. He quipped early on that he would be “playing old stuff, playing new stuff, and having some fun,” and while this was a simple plan, he followed it to the letter. Coxe’s voice, only mildly aged from the one you hear on Contact, carried each song to a new place. And, if somewhat lacking in the propulsive, paranoid character found in their original recordings, the current live incarnations of Silver Apples’ older songs have gained a weathered quality that allows them to reveal their history while also relieving them of the burden of imitating the 1960s versions of themselves.
This could explain why, while “A Pox On You” and “Oscillations” received a warmer welcome from the audience than some, Coxe was able to give every song its due and equal place in the set. Newer, spacier, more minimal numbers suited his sparse, acoustic-instruments-less setup and fit in perfectly with their environment. Oddly enough, for a show featuring a band reduced to one member, reformed to great acclaim 15 years prior following 25 years of silence, playing a small, recently established club in a generally neglected corner of an outer borough on a Sunday night, the whole thing seemed natural. The highest pleasure the show provided was that of witnessing a relaxed, seemingly happy performer with nothing to prove playing for the love of the game.