Laika: Silver Apples Of The Moon

Laika: Silver Apples Of The Moon

Too Pure records

CD | Limited Vinyl

Originally released October 1994

Martin Gray takes an appreciative look back at the scintillating debut album from Laika, Silver Apples Of The Moon, which was originally released in October 1994 and still sounds remarkably current and prescient 30 years later.

Laika – named after the first dog in space that was carried aboard Soviet space orbiter Sputnik 2 – comprised Margaret Fiedler (vocals, guitar, samplers) and John Frenett (bass), former key members of the inventive experimental outfit Moonshake, who split in half in the latter part of 1993 due to creative tensions between main songwriters Fiedler and David Callahan (who then retained the name and continued with drummer Mig Morland under a new incarnation). Together with former Moonshake producer, ‘unofficial fifth member’, and renowned engineer Guy Fixsen, the trio immediately set to work on new material and within a year relaunched themselves with an EP, Antenna, in summer 1994 before their first full length album appeared in the autumn.

One label, now two separate bands!

Remaining with Too Pure Records, Laika thus existed as a recording and touring entity in direct parallel to their previous band. Unsurprisingly, the material on their debut album Silver Apples Of The Moon largely picks up almost imperceptibly where Fiedler’s last Moonshake outing (1993’s Big Good Angel) left off, with a similarly eclectic and beguiling suite of polyrhythmic post-rock, proto-Jungle and ethno-electronica that sounded quite unlike anything else that was released during that year.

If anything, it takes the approach of the three tracks that Fiedler contributed on that last Moonshake release and ups the ante further towards something that defies simple pigeonholing or categorisation, creating a quite distinct and unique sound of their own. The songs plough a decidedly more esoteric furrow whilst utilising a bewildering array of samples, and deploying off-kilter jazz time signatures and busy, dense arrangements. This impressive debut positively throbs and pulsates with a glorious sense of keening urgency and exhilaration from start to finish.

Home made packaging: a novel approach

It is worth mentioning first of all the cleverly inspired packaging that this album was presented in. Laika’s home-made ethic (all their albums were recorded initially at their home studio) was also carried through to the record’s cover art: which meant that for this debut album, the initial run of CD booklets and vinyl covers were all hand-finished (featuring real – replica vintage Russian – postage stamps stuck on the covers and hand-stamped black ink roundels showing the band name and album title, plus Air Mail stickers and real Customs Labels attached to the rear).

This novel approach ensured that each CD / LP cover of this initial pressing was slightly different. It would thus transpire that for their first three albums, the running theme of cartoon representations of the eponymous canine (Laika) would be continued in the cover art and also even merchandise.

Side One

Laika’s adeptness at conveying a sense of – alternately – urban freneticism and dreamy, neo-psychedelic, swoonscapes is most notable on the first three tracks alone: Sugar Daddy comes bowling in with all the urgency of a bustling street scene complete with traffic noises before it gradually yields to a more serene groove that features main writers / producers Fiedler and Fixsen duetting together for the one and only time on the album, with words of escapism from the drudgery of the mundane: ‘Sugar daddy, take me away from this bad bad place / I’m sick and tired of trying and I wanna fly away / I guess we got our wires crossed / He’s thinking driftwood I think twigs / Nothing nothing’s gonna save us now / And I wanna fly away’.

On this evidence, Laika’s speciality lies in constructing impeccable and imaginative sound fragments that are almost transcendental: they literally do elevate you up to a higher state of consciousness….there is nothing on this album that can be even considered downbeat. Everything is hustled along at quite an uptempo pace throughout.

The following Marimba Song is built on an hypnotic, clattering, percussion loop (as the title suggests) augmented with occasional flurries of flute, and simply enchants with its world music undertones and a pleasingly earthy sound. The words are almost stream-of-consciousness metaphorical phrasings that hark directly back to the lust-filled sentiments of Fiedler’s final Moonshake track (Flow, from Big Good Angel). There are also occasional bursts of jazzy discordance which prevent the track’s pace from becoming too complacent.

This is then followed by the urgent and agitated Let Me Sleep, which is as close to a pre-emptive form of drum’n’bass as it is possible to get: the feverishly frantic tempo of this track with its relentless percussion (both played live and programmed) and a deeply amplified cyclical dub bass line is quite breathtaking. It positively stampedes its way into your cranium with a sense of fiery purpose. Fiedler’s voice is almost an instrument in itself, riding as they do atop the compelling rush of syncopated polyrhythmic crossfire.

Let Me Sleep capitulates straight into a short interlude (Itchy & Scratchy) comprising nothing more than the sound of a needle stuck on a crackly vinyl record overlaid with unobtrusive loops and a sleepy sounding bass before side one ends with Coming Down Glass – an odd, unearthly-sounding number based around a slow, ominously skittering, mutant hip hop beat which could arguably have pre-empted trip-hop. Spooky woozy sampled noises and strange little glitches run throughout, plus a deep thrumming bassline which seems to be such a prominent feature of a lot of the album. Atop all this Fiedler recites a lyric of debauched voyeurism based on a real life incident of herself making a call in a telephone booth and then catching sight of a stranger stood right outside, observing her intently before ejaculating against the window. The words, perversely, are written from the lecherous male’s point of view!

Side Two

The second half continues with If You Miss – which ushers in on a rush of sampled steam train sounds forming a percussive and mechanical backbone over which a low bass, woodblocks and an insistent vibraphone motif sketch out another cyclical rhythm. If there could be a less fraught and more chilled out sounding cousin to Two Trains (from Moonshake’s Big Good Angel), then this is probably it.  There’s a pleasing dichotomy between the relentless chugging of the instrumentation and Fiedler’s lulling, repeated refrain ‘Jump at the sun, and if you miss / You can’t help but grab some stars’, which floats effortlessly over everything as if beamed in from a distant half-remembered dream: psychedelic trance at its most beatific and celestial. You can almost imagine a halo surrounding this track.

44 Robbers which follows is a return to the urban paranoia and psychosis. Over another off-kilter, clattering breakbeat (played in real time and not programmed) interspersed with weird clipped guitar samples and other strange recurring loops, Fiedler intones/raps her hilariously overwrought tale of being confronted by the eponymous intruders of the title and sets about trying her hardest to shake them off, threatening them with all manner of domestic implements, and then fearing for her life every time she in so much as steps outside. It’s all very droll and deadpan and the rhythmic undercarriage actually recalls another Big Good Angel composition (Girly Loop this time).

The pace doesn’t let up for the remainder of the album. Red River is insidious and irresistible: a slithery, serpentine loop-driven beast in 3/4 time, with some truly inventive percussion throughout from guest musician Lou Ciccotelli (of God, a UK experimental / noise / industrial collective founded by Kevin Martin) interjected with jarring counter-breaks at regular intervals.

This is duly followed by the super-sleazy sounding, drum-heavy strut that is Honey In Heat, which once again takes its premise of rapacious carnal lust from Fiedler’s Girly Loop but this time with its bug-eyed sexual cravings magnified five-fold and just dares you to ride the whole thing out.  ‘Yeah I want it so bad I’m howlin’ and all you dogs sniffin’ butts outside / Don’t need it half as much as me / I’m honey in heat with nothin’ to do / ‘cept wait around for mutts like you / guess I’m just an easy lay until the day they get me…’ There’s an obvious sense of intentionally tongue-in-cheek humour in Fiedler’s absurd and predatory sensibilities on this one.

The penultimate track, Thomas, maintains the hectic, accelerated tempo of the album’s final stretch with a pile-driving percussion-and-unearthly-samples-laden number that, much like earlier track Let Me Sleep, pre-figures the onset of jungle and drum’n’bass, with its complex and disorientating clamour of frenzied snares (again played live by Ciccotelli) and deep booming subterranean bass. It’s quite an astonishing contrivance of surging momentum where random robotic bleeps jostle with unhinged freeform jazz flute solos whilst Guy Fixsen’s only solo lead vocal on here is all but rendered practically inaudible among the relentless maelstrom.

Just as the unrelenting rush nears its crescendo, it crashes into the closing instrumental, Spider Happy Hour, a briskly-paced little jazz shuffle that, through its relative brevity, serves as a bit of a welcome respite to bring this dazzlingly promising debut to a close. Only then can the listener finally catch their breath from this strange and beguilingly sprightly head trip into the outer reaches of the stratosphere.

Influential too….

The eclectic, genre-melding and almost cosmopolitan sound on this album is very much unique, and it comes as no real surprise that soon other bands would cite Laika as an influence. One notable example being Radiohead, who, impressed with this album and its 1997 successor (Sounds Of The Satellites – again released on Too Pure), they opted to have Laika open for them during their UK tour for that same year’s epochal OK Computer album. Indeed, Thom Yorke later repaid the debt he owed them by his liberal use of Rhodes organ for their later material (for instance listen to Kid A’s track Morning Bell – the keyboard sound and the 5/4 time signature it’s played in is pure Laika circa their 2000 album Good Looking Blues).

Even Tricky, of all people, was aware of Laika. He expressed an initial desire to work with them but his own intensely demanding commitments around the time of his massively successful 1995 breakthrough Maxinquaye and then its immediate follow up (multi-artist collaborative project) Nearly God, put paid to any prospects of that becoming reality. Nevertheless, he had them on his radar, because later, in an unintentional twist of fate, he would come up with an almost identically-structured number for his Pre-Millennium Tension album of 1996.

The album cut in question, Lyrics of Fury (an Eric B. & Rakim cover), bears an uncanny resemblance, arrangement-wise, to 44 Robbers from Laika (which, in turn, may or may not have been subconsciously inspired by the same type of freestyling hip-hop that prevailed in the late 1980s)!

I recall speaking with Laika’s Margaret Fiedler and Guy Fixsen after catching them playing live in Manchester, during their 1997 mini-tour in support of the release of their album Sounds Of The Satellites, and I broached the subject of the Tricky collaboration that never was, then enquired in passing whether or not they had heard his album Pre-Millennium Tension – specifically his version of Lyrics Of Fury. Strangely, they admitted that they hadn’t, but they were of course aware of Maxinquaye, so when I hinted to them that it bore more than a passing similarity in its sound to 44 Robbers (right down to an almost identical BPM), they were immediately intrigued, but also quite flattered and amused nevertheless.

A delightful dichotomy

On this recording, Laika come across as a rather delightful dichotomy: a trio who are fully in control of their destiny and who, through their original conception, have produced a debut album that is reassuringly current and forward-looking in its execution and production whilst also maintaining nods to previous genres and styles (jazz, funk, hip-hop, post-punk). Theirs is a pleasing synergy of the natural/organic and the mechanical/electronic, and even though much of the music sounds unmistakably modern, there is also a very distinct warmth and human quality apparent in everything too (via the ethnic influences such as African marimbas/djembes and other hand percussion, woodwind/flutes).

Laika were never the most prolific of bands during the entirety of the 1990s – the decade which saw so many incredibly inventive and ingenious albums released by a whole slew of similarly creative, genre-defying groups that were all bracketed together under the umbrella of experimental electronica or post-rock – they released just four albums and five singles at roughly 3 year intervals between 1994 and 2003 before going on indefinite hiatus or disbandment.

Silver Apples Of The Moon is a brilliant encapsulation and embodiment of how it is possible to make fascinatingly progressive sounds using a combination of digital samplers as well as all manner of traditional and analogue, as well as ethnic, instruments. It also proves that modern electronically-based music need not necessarily be mechanical, robotic and cold or devoid of humanity or soul. It’s simply one of those glorious paradoxes that occasionally one gets to enjoy and luxuriate in.

If you have never heard this album before (maybe you weren’t yet born when it originally came out, which is pretty likely!) and are reading these words of appraisal for the first time, then I would certainly recommend that it is on your must-hear list of 1000 albums to listen to and appreciate before you die. That way you get to salute the indefatigable spirit of the little dog who embarked on a mission and was forever lost in space!

all words by Martin Gray

More articles and reviews from Martin can be found here.