Yesterday I was at the Resonance FM studios doing a pre-record for this Friday’s radio show. My special guest will be Simeon Coxe of Silver Apples, stopping off in London before he embarks on a short UK tour this summer. Here’s a few photos of him setting up his equipment, playing and talking in the studio. As well as giving an hour-long interview, he recorded four songs in session, ‘Velvet Cave’, ‘A Pox on You’, ‘The Purple Egg’ and premiered a new song ‘The Edge’. As you can see his equipment includes some of his original 1960s oscillators. Whenever he flies, the contents of his cases draw puzzled remarks from customs officials. On this occasion he even saw one flight case falling off the baggage-handling truck, but although his $15 CD player is now broken, fortunately the oscillators (which require replacement valves and tubes from Eastern Europe, the only place that still manufactures them) survived intact. Simeon also has an old AKAI sampler that requires floppy disks (now virtually obsolete media); he takes three backups of these samples with him, but he says even so he can guarantee the data will be corrupt by the end of the tour.
Kool equipment!