Hatsune Miku: What´s the #? (The Apples in Stereo cover, 2011)
No hace mucho, curioseando por Facebook, me encontré con esta ingeniosa versión de What´s the #?, tema incluido en el segundo álbum de una de mis bandas favoritas, The Apples in Stereo: Tone soul evolution (1997). Originalmente ocupaba el segundo lugar en la escala de canciones del disco, un álbum preñado de temazos que les confirmó como una de las mejores bandas Indie del momento.
Pues esta versión está realizada por un personaje llamado Hatsune Miku (o al menos éso es lo que he entendido leyendo en YouTube), con un teclado y un Midi. El resultado, además de típicamente japonés, es bastante curioso. Además, acompaña de un enlace para descargarlo gratuitamente.
Hatsune Miku – What´s the #? (The Apples in Stereo cover, 2011)
The Apples in Stereo: Cinco bandas y un compositor que les hicieron aficionarse a la ciencia ficción (Una entrevista)
Aunque el último disco de The Apples in Stereo, Travellers in Space and Time no ha sido precisamente de lo mejorcito de su carrera, he encontrado esta divertida entrevista en la que Robert Schneider nos confiesa, medio en broma medio en serio, sus principales influencias en cuanto a la influencia de la ciencia ficción en su música. Lo cierto es que comienza bastante en serio, pero en cuanto habla de Kool and the Gang o Labelle… comprobadlo vosotros mismos.
Even before The Apples In Stereo frontman Robert Schneider starred as a time-bending scientist in a promotional video for the band’s newest record, Travellers In Space And Time, The Apples’ oeuvre was already noticeably rife with sci-fi imagery and groovy space effects bouncing around amid the ’60s pop. A charter member of the Elephant 6 collective, the Denver-based power-pop band has conjured much more exotic locales than Denver, like a rocket ship circling Earth’s orbit (“Rocket Pad”) or desolate regions of the universe (“Floating In Space”). Schneider’s experiments in music theory surely appeal to the science and math whizzes: His non-Pythagorean scale, based on natural logarithms and used during disorienting interludes for 2007’s New Magnetic Wonder, sounds more like a discarded take from the UFO communication scene of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind than a song from an indie-rock band. Before his band plays Lincoln Hall on Friday, The A.V. Club talked to Schneider about which bands influenced him to take The Apples In Stereo into alien galaxies, mind-bending dimensions, and Star Trek conventions.
E.L.O.
Robert Schneider: I would say the sci-fi influence on our music comes more from art and maybe album art than it does from specific songs. That being said, the new Apples album is extremely influenced by ELO, and particularly by the ELO album Time, which is really overtly sci-fi. It seems like they had started in this direction, we just picked up and followed up on it. A sort of sci-fi, baroque kind of pop. There are a couple of songs on that album, one’s “Twilight,” and the other, “Yours Truly, 2095”—that’s basically the template for the sounds that I wanted for our album. In general, ELO uses a lot of vocoders and robot sounds, pulsing synths, in the context of ’70s pop.
A big influence as far as the sci-fi theme is ELO’s album art. I wanted to make a record that sounded like their album art looked. I love the idea of a roller-skating disco party on a UFO or a recording studio on a UFO. I love space art, too, in general. My whole life I’ve always loved these old kind of futurist space art books from the ’70s and ’80s that I used to read as a little kid, where it has photo-realistic paintings of a space colony on a barren kind of moonscape, or it’ll be a different world and it’ll have three suns.
The A.V. Club: Any specific album cover that inspired your sound?
RS: Oh yeah, the album cover for ELO’s Out Of The Blue, which is mind-blowing. It’s got this huge UFO on the outside, and inside you open up and it’s this huge recording studio with all this kind of retro, outmoded computer station gear. That’s where I wanted it to feel like it was recorded.
Pink Floyd
RS: “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd is another one. It’s extremely futuristic. The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn sounds like a UFO. Given that it’s from the ’60s and it’s a psychedelic track, it’s pretty futuristic. That was one of the things when we started The Apples: We wanted our band to sound like it was “Interstellar Overdrive.” It totally feels like you’re flying through space on a UFO. In stereo.
AVC: So this whole idea of songs recorded in UFOs was an original intention of The Apples In Stereo?
RS: Yeah, actually one of our early songs was “Rocket Pad.” It was about, “We have this spaceship. Come on aboard and see our show, and you can hear our band. We just moved into this spaceship and the sounds are a lot better here.” The new album is magnifying a thread that was a sub-thread of The Apples.
Spacemen 3
RS: They totally had these blurby, trippy, UFO sounds behind their songs. That was a major element of early Apples. I figured out early on that you could take a little Casio keyboard and run it through a fuzz pedal, run that through a wah-wah pedal, then run that through a tremolo pedal, then you can make it sound like a synthesizer. Because you have the fuzz making it sound like a pure tone, instead of a Casio keyboard, and then your wah-wah pedal will go waaayyoooww, and then the tremolo will go dip-dip-deep-dip-deep, so then you kind of go wa-ba-ba-bing-ya-weayaa-ba-bing. [Laughs.] So yeah, I exploited those types of sounds heavily on our first 7-inch.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky
RS: My friend Jim McIntyre [of Elephant Six’s Von Hemmling] gave me a bootleg CD of this early-20th-century composer named Ivan Wyschnegradsky. He invented this piano with two keyboards that were tuned to quarter tones, so basically there were twice as many notes in the octave as there are on a regular piano. And he also made these great compositions—God, they’re good—that got my ear interested. Listening to this got me interested in wanting to mess around with different scales. It got my brain into a mode where it didn’t sound ugly to me or dissonant. I was freed from the regular scale for a period, and I was able to mess around with this thing and hear beauty in it.
AVC: So this composer was a gateway for your brain to look into music in a different language?
RS: Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like. At first it’s really alien, it really feels like you’re pulling these tones out of outer space or something like that. Putting them together, they don’t seem to make any sense. But I knew from the start they make sense mathematically. I just had to make the new connections that made my brain used to hearing these mathematical relationships instead of the other ones that we normally hear. You just have to kind of believe in it, you know?
RS: I would say late-’70s, early-’80s kind of R&B bands with a kind of sci-fi, post-Parliament look, Midnight Star, or The Dazz Band. And especially, musically, Kool And The Gang. I listened to their greatest hits a lot when we were recording the record. I think of them as being futuristic, cause ’70s R&B, ’80s R&B is that genre where bands would dress futuristically.
AVC: Are you guys going to do any fashionable stuff like that?
RS: We have silver costumes by Rebecca Turbow, a designer from New York. She had designed these awesome silver futuristic costumes because we’re trying to project that we’re traveling on a time machine, and we just showed up at the show and we’re like, “Oh, what date is this?” [Laughs.] It’s not like we’re super-theatrical about it, we’re just rocking out and playing our pop songs. But we’re trying to project some sort of a unity as if we were a space crew. So there’s a theatrical element to our new tour that we haven’t ever had before. You know, usually we’ve been kind of chaotic from the point of view of fashion. Not that that’s bad.
AVC: If you had a budget, would you have a Parliament-style UFO coming down from the ceiling or something?
RS: Oh my God, yes. That would be incredible, except it would turn out to be 6 inches tall like in [This Is] Spinal Tap with the Stonehenge. We had actually joked about that, trying to get a UFO and have it end up being like that.
RS: My wife just reminded me of my inspiration for wanting to get futuristic space costumes. There’s a song called “Lady Marmalade” by Labelle. I heard it on the radio a couple times. It’s the fucking best song I’ve ever heard in my life. So I looked it up on YouTube and I saw a video of the band playing it. It’s like these three girls who are dressed up super alien-looking, wearing costumes from the most bizarre Star Trek episode ever or something. When I saw that it really turned me on to the idea of wearing space costumes.
AVC: I didn’t anticipate you being so excited about Labelle.
RS: [Laughs.] I had forgotten about it. I got very excited about the whole futuristic thing. I love the way you can appear futuristic without necessarily needing to be futuristic. They weren’t being futuristic at all, except they looked like aliens” (avclub.com)
The Apples in Stereo: Dance floor (from Travellers in Space and Time, 2010)
Éste es el vídeo oficial del primer single de The Apples in Stereo, que ya reseñamos en The JangleBox en Semana Santa. En este post citado, puedes encontrar la forma de descargarte el Mp3 del single de forma gratuita, y éste es el vídeo en el que además aparece Elijah Wood, apoyando al grupo que pertenece a su sello discográfico. No es el mejor tema del disco (que tampoco es el mejor de The Apples in Stereo), pero tiene su gracia.
The Apples in Stereo: Dance floor (from Travellers in Space and Time, 2010)
Dance Floor es el primer single que The Apples in Stereo ha decidido editar de este último álbum de estudio, Travellers in Space and Time, que se ha editado en el sello de Elijah Wood, Simian Records, junto con Yep Records. La verdad es que no es la mejor ni la más representativa del disco, pero ahí está. Se trata de un corte claramente influenciado, como su propio nombre indica, por la pista de los clubs setenteros, vocoders y sintes incluidos. Yep Records ha decidido que puedes descargarla legalmente, si pinchas aquí lo comprobarás, además de poder encargar tu copia del nuevo disco de las Manzanas Estereofónicas.
“Studio-obsessed indie rockers The Apples in Stereo are celebrating the start of a new decade with the release of their seventh studio album, Travellers in Space and Time, their most hi-fi and hook-laden production to date. Described by frontman Robert Schneider as “retro-futuristic super-pop,” the album is the official follow-up to 2007’s New Magnetic Wonder, and the band’s second release for Elijah Wood’s Simian Records. The album will be released on April 20 via Yep Roc/Simian/Elephant 6.(yeproc.com)
Travellers contains sixteen piano-driven tracks, bubbling over with vocoder harmonies and sci-fi sound effects, like 70’s AM radio filtered through a UFO; including the robotic first single “Dance Floor”, the four-on-the-floor dream-scape “Hey Elevator”, the Hall and Oates-tinged “Told You Once”, and the epic, yearning “Dream About The Future,” among many instant hits. The musical theme heard in these songs is strung throughout Travellers: intense pop hooks and electronic sounds, mixed with a pumping, get-up-and-moonwalk beat.
“I wanted to make a futuristic pop record, to reach out to the kids of the future,” Schneider relates. “It is what I imagine their more highly-evolved pop might sound like: shiny soul music with robots and humans singing together, yet informed by the music of our time. So we are sending a pop music message through time, hoping they will decode it and be into it.”
It is the first studio album from The Apples in stereo to feature new drummer John Dufilho, lead singer of Dallas indie rockers The Deathray Davies; and sees Bill Doss (Olivia Tremor Control, Elephant 6) and John Ferguson (Ulysses, Big Fresh), longtime Schneider collaborators, as full-time keyboardists in the band, alongside veteran members John Hill (guitar) and Eric Allen (bass). Original drummer Hilarie Sidney left the band in 2006.
Anyone familiar with The Apples in stereo’s career will know Schneider’s ever-evolving production process is as intricate as the recordings he generates. Engaging the same primary engineering team used to record New Magnetic Wonder, most notably Bryce Goggin (Trout Studio’s vintage recording wizard), as well as many studio-savvy friends and cohorts, the band spent well over a year in the studio recasting their signature pop sounds in chrome-plated futurism, all while adding a dance-driven vibe channeling ELO, Barry Gibb, Wild Honey-era Beach Boys and Off The Wall-era Michael Jackson.
With Travellers in Space and Time, Schneider continues experimenting with his recent invention, the Non-Pythagorean musical scale based on the logarithm, a mathematical function. Schneider is a passionate student of mathematics, and recently composed music based on prime numbers for a play written by world-class mathematician Andrew Granville, performed at the hallowed Institute for Advanced Study (home of Albert Einstein) in Princeton, New Jersey. Travellers includes “C.P.U.,” the first pop song ever to incorporate this novel scale.
In addition, the album features songwriting contributions from all of the other Apples, including “Wings Away” (Bill Doss/John Ferguson), “Next Year At About The Same Time” (Eric Allen), “No Vacation” (John Ferguson/Robert Schneider), “Floating Away” (John Dufilho), and “Dignified Dignitary” (Robert Schneider/Bill Doss/John Hill).
The 2007 hit album, New Magnetic Wonder, spawned late night performances on Conan and Colbert, commercial placements for The Apples’ music (Pepsi, New Balance, Samsung, and numerous others), invitations to perform at many prestigious festivals and venues (All Tomorrows Parties, Pitchfork, Primavera Sound, R.E.M. Charity Tribute Concert at Carnegie Hall), and a world tour that took the band as far away as Taiwan – not to mention a polished performance of their hit song “Energy” by the contestants on American Idol.
Since then, the band has been increasingly busy, gaining ownership of their spinART Records back catalog and readying the albums for re-release, compiling the best-of #1 Hits Explosion, and releasing Electronic Projects for Musicians, an album of rarities. Schneider also made his children’s music debut with 2009’s Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine (Little Monster Records), which made it to many Year-End Best Of lists; made numerous mathematics convention appearances; released Buddha Electrostorm (Garden Gate Records), an album of lo-fi garage-psych recorded with his brother-in-law Craig Morris (who played and engineered on Travellers) under the name Thee American Revolution; and topped it all off with his featured keynote talk and Australian debut performance at the Big Sound Music Conference, where he was featured alongside many musical luminaries, including noted Brian Wilson collaborator (and one of Schneider’s heroes), Van Dyke Parks… and all of this while hard at work on The Apples’ most ambitious studio production yet” (yeproc.com)
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The Apples in Stereo: Travellers in Space and Time (2010)
The Apples in Stereo están de vuelta, y lo hacen con su séptimo álbum de estudio, sin incluir recopilaciones ni Ep´s. Todos unos supervivientes que editan un álbum en el que, según las propias palabras de Robert Schneider, querían ejecutar un ejercicio de Pop futurista, mezclando en él elementos del Pop de toda la vida para que fueran interpretados por igual tanto por humanos como por alienígenas. Pues me duele decirlo, porque The Apples in Stereo son una de mis bandas favoritas, pero el ejercicio se le ha quedado un poco a medio camino, porque la mayor parte de los temas, en particular los firmados por Robert, acusan un deje demasiado retro y algo anclado en los setenta, con demasiada influencia de la Elo, los sintes y los vocoders (Hey elevator, Dance floor, Told you once, Nobody but you); cuando no de la huella de McCartney/Wings (Wings away, No one in the world), eso sí, llevándose el material a su terreno para reinterpretar esas influencias de esa manera particular que Schneider tiene de entender el Pop (It´s all right, Dream about the future –que es la mejor dentro de este grupo de temas-). Otros temas compuestos por Robert sí resultan más epatantes: Dream about the future, ya mencionado, por su línea melódica y su construcción impecable. C.P.U. sí que tiene mucho de Pop-futurista e Indietrónica, utilizando una escala de acordes de su invención. Dignified dignitary (Schneider, Bill Doss, John Hill) es el tema más rockista de la colección, canción irónica y más en la línea Applesiana anterior, con la huella del sonido neoyorquino actual. Sin caer en la grandilocuencia en ningún momento, sin embargo hay algo en el disco que no termina de engancharme y me chirría, quedando algo algo distante de anteriores discos, incluso de el ambicioso New magnetic wonder (2007). Basta contemplar el hecho de que sólo en uno de los temas del disco aparece un solo de guitarra, y el sonido de éstas queda algo relegado durante toda su escucha a un plano algo inferior. Sin embargo, las aportaciones ajenas a Robert Schneider son las que mantienen el tipo con mayor fuerza en el disco: No vacation (JohnFerguson/Robert Schneider) es un tema enorme, con ritmo setentero pero con la influencia del Power-Pop y no del Dance-Floor como en muchos de los temas de Robert. Next year at about the same time (Eric Allen) es otra gran canción de Pop vanguardista arropada por sintetizadores pero que alberga las mejores frases de guitarra del disco. Floating in space (John Dufilho) está cercana en cuanto a concepción a la anterior, perfecto ejemplo de Electro-Indie en el que destacan los sonidos de sintes analógicos para dar cuerpo a un tema de idea futurista. El disco, en definitiva, resulta ser una idea un tanto fallida de aunar pasado y futuro, porque a Schneider se le ha ido un poco la mano en lo que a influencias setenteras se refiere, y no toma un claro camino decidido por una u otra tendencia. Resulta ser algo así como el White Album de The Apples in Stereo, en tanto que se nota demasiado la dirección del líder, con una idea muy clara de sus canciones y sus sonidos, y los temas ajenos, que sí que giran hacia un concepto más contemporáneo del Pop. (El link lo podéis encontrar hoy en los comentarios)
The Apples in Stereo: Numbert#1 Hits Explosion (2009), Yep Roc
Hoy nos encontramos de nuevo con uno de mis grupos favoritos de siempre, The Apples in Stereo, quienes acaban de editar un nuevo disco, en este caso un recopilatorio con algunos de sus mejores temas. Dieciseis temas que repasan la ya larga trayectoria del combo liderado por Robert Schneider -llevan en activo desde 1995-, y aún en una forma rabiosa. En su búsqueda incesante de la canción Pop perfecta, Robert hace este año una parada para presentarnos un grandes éxitos plagado de temas impecables del mejor Pop pero en el que echamos en falta algún tema inédito o algún CD extra con demos, directos o todo ese material que se suele filtrar por cualquier álbum recopilatorio. Sea como fuere, aquí está esta colección de éxitos que si somos completamente objetivos, no sería tal, ya que The Apples in Stereo nunca han sido un grupo de éxitos sino más bien todo lo contrario, aunque su coherente carrera invite a pensar lo contrario. Ya sea desde su primer álbum, ya posteado en The JangleBox, Fun Trick Noise Maker (1995) hasta el último, el doble New Magnetic Wonder (2007), o sus alter-ego Marbles, Robbert Bubble; The Apples han trazado líneas maestras en las que las pautas del mejor Pop, con influencias más experimentales o psicodélicas –Robert fue miembro fundador del colectivo Elephant 6-, o más tradicionales –Beatles, Beach Boys, Elo… han sido algunas de sus influencias declaradas-, garajeras o sencillamente indies, les han llevado a lograr un universo sonoro personal e intransferible. Os dejo con un disco con el que seguramente muchos descubriréis a una banda de Pop autenticamente cautivadora.“The shiny pop centerpiece of the famed Elephant 6 collective, The Apples in Stereo was born of Robert Schneider’s infatuation with sound and his near pathological compulsion to write the perfect pop song. Schneider’s attempts, and some would argue his successes, in that quest have now been compiled for the 16-track best-of collection #1 Hits Explosion due on Yep Roc September 1st, 2009.
Citing Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys as their root text a decade before it was indie-en vogue, Robert and former and future band members Hilarie Sidney, Jim McIntyre, Chris Parfitt, John Hill, Eric Allen, Chris McDuffie, Bill Doss, John Ferguson, John Dufilho, along with countless friends and cohorts, used their basement-D.I.Y. beginnings as a launching pad into a kaleidoscopic galaxy of sound. Constantly mutating from debut album Fun Trick Noisemaker through recent opus New Magnetic Wonder, that galaxy has expanded from 4-track recordings made in Robert’s bedroom to 100-track sonic experiments complete with new musical scales. The collection will look back at six albums of Apples material, highlighting 16 of the most well-known tracks of their already classic output.
“We have always pursued new sounds and different directions, trying to make something special,” says Schneider. “There is no better way to have a band.”
Through his songwriting and playing with The Apples, his influential production work for other Elephant 6 bands (Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Tremor Control) and his many side projects (Marbles, Thee American Revolution, Ulysses), Schneider has been long respected as an architect of modern indie-pop. In recent years he has performed in feature films (Mike Myers’ The Love Guru) and on the Colbert Report (‘Stephen, Stephen’). He’s given lectures at prestigious Mathematical Association of America conferences, had his songs interpreted on American Idol (‘Energy’), and completed a children’s album (Robbert Bobbert & the Bubble Machine), all amid touring with The Apples and writing and recording new material. All of these extra-curricular activities have enabled Robert to bring the Elephant 6 ‘create-anything you can, any way-you-can’ ethos into the eye-line of popular consciousness and the mass media, yet #1 Hits Explosion marks the beginning in a new phase of focus on The Apples culminating in a new album in 2010. According to Schneider, “We are currently working on an album of soul music, filtered through a UFO” (Nota de MySpace)
MySpace
The Apples in Stereo: Energy (included in Number#1 Hits Explosion, 2009), Yep Roc
The Apples in Stereo: Fun trick noise maker (1995), Spin Art; Elephant 6
En este disco de debut están casi todos los elementos que nos gustan de cualquier grupo: melodías, guitarras distorsionadas, letras ingeniosas, y sobre todo, imaginación y creatividad a raudales. La banda está liderada por Robert Schneider, un tipo con un ego quizás algo agigantado que impregna a todos los elementos de la banda, pero al que le sobran las ideas (la semana que viene hablaremos de él) y las buenas composiciones. Un enamorado de la música Pop, de la música de los ´60 en general, y de la Psicodelia en particular; y del sonido Surf (nunca han ocultado su admiración hacia grupos como The Beatles, Beach Boys o la Elo). Canciones como Tidal wave, High tide, Green machine, Lucky charm, Innerspace, Show the world, Love you Alice o Pine away son los mejores exponentes de lo que hemos querido decir: mezcla perfecta de Psicodelia con Pop y Surf, guitarras con numerosos matices sonoros y artificios electrónicos dan como resultado temas realmente extraordinarios que no han perdido un ápice de frescura con los años y con los discos editados posteriormente por la banda. En otros temas, el grupo se presentaba de manera algo más sencilla: Dots 1-2-3, Glowworm, Winter must be cold, con la participación vocal de la entonces batería Hillary Sidney, son temas más cercanos a unos The Buzzcocks algo más edulcorados.
The Apples in Stereo representaron entonces la parte menos experimental y más lúdica de Elephant6 y han sabido llevar adelante una carrera discográfica más que interesante, superando con creces el listón ya alto dejado con este Fun Trick Noise Maker.
Click en la portada/Click on the sleeve.
MySpace
The Apples in Stereo: Electronics projects for musicians (2008), Yep Roc
¿Qué decir a estas alturas de The Apples in Stereo? Pues poco nuevo, tan sólo que son uno de mis grupos favoritos de toda la escena indie, y que acaban de publicar este segundo recopilatorio tras Science Fair (1996). El álbum incluye temas extras de ediciones japonesas, singles compartidos, caras-b, y algunas canciones inéditas. Se echan de menos temas como Time for bed o Signal in the sky, de anteriores compilaciones o bandas sonoras. Uno también se da cuenta de The Apples reservaron su mejor material para sus álbumes, como sólidos ejemplos de texturas indie, experimentación psicodélica y sólida composición. Con todo, hay excelentes temas como Shine (in your mind), The Oasis o la inédita Dreams, que podría haber aparecido en Tone Soul Evolution. El único tema que desmerece es Stephen Stephen, una broma que grabaron para el programa The Colbert Report y que realmente no merece aparecer en un álbum que puede descubrir el sonido de la banda a nuevos seguidores. Por cierto, como en todos nuestros posts, puedes pinchar su my space clicando en el título, y en el caso de The Apples, el suyo está muy bien construido. Puedes descargar el disco pinchando en la portada.
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