Laika
Silver Apples of the Moon
(Too Pure)
1994
When you first encounter Laika’s debut album Silver Apples of the Moon, it even looks like a package delivered to you by mistake from an alternate universe. The CD artwork is made up to look like a package, tied up in string, with the band’s name and the album title stamped on the front and two Albanian stamps from the 60s showing the band’s namesake, the famed first dog in space. The track listing on the back is printed on a customs form. It demonstrates the band’s playful sense of humour, but thirty years ago in the October of 1994, for any music lover who came across the album it must have sent a Philip K. Dickian shiver down the spine in anticipation of the otherworldly music contained within.
Silver Apples of the Moon was released by UK indie label Too Pure a month and a half after UK indie label Creation Records released Oasis’ Definitely Maybe. While the latter cast its derivative, parochial pall over generations of British indie music to come, the formed signposted an exciting new future for music that never came to pass. In many ways, Silver Apples of the Moon was the album everyone should have been paying attention to at the time. Laika’s brilliance lies in how their work is a synthesis of all the interesting and exciting trends happening in independent music at the time, whilst not quite fitting into any of the trends. In Silver Apples’ grooves, we can hear the melding of dub and drum and bass that Massive Attack achieved on their epochal debut Blue Lines (1991), the bold mixing of sampling and found sound with a live band pioneered by post rock pioneers such as Disco Inferno, Bark Psychosis and Tortoise, the innovative experimentation opened up by the modern electronic music of Warp artists Aphex Twin and Autechre, and the sensuous atmospherics of shoegaze titans My Bloody Valentine. Yet while the influence of all those disparate artists can be heard in Laika’s sound, Laika don’t particularly sound like any one of them, instead fusing their rich influences into a complex and multilayered yet instantly appealing new sound that is theirs alone.
To understand Laika, first we must go back to the band that birthed them. Moonshake were formed in 1991 by guitarist Dave Callahan, who had been in C86 band The Wolfhounds, and American multi-instrumentalist and singer Margaret Fielder. The two recruited bass player John Frenett and drummer “Mig” Moreland, and with producer Guy Fixsen the band created Eva Luna (1992), itself a contender for the most devastatingly original and unfairly overlooked albums of the 90s up there with Silver Apples. Moonshake, like Laika after them, would reject the indie orthodoxy of guitar/bass/drums in favour of bold experiments with dub and samplers. Much of the excitement of Eva Luna is generated by the tension between Fielder and Callahan as songwriters – the album is split evenly between songs penned and sung by either singer, enhanced and distorted through collaborations with the rest of the group. Whilst Callahan’s songs favour splinters of noisy guitar and his harsh, shouted vocals, Fielder’s compositions were already demonstrating a more sophisticated palette, exploring similar themes of urban alienation and sexual heat via her breathy, whispered vocals and kinetic rhythms in complex time signatures. These differing approaches made Moonshake a uniquely thrilling proposition, but inevitably resulted in a split, with Callahan and Moreland staying in Moonshake whilst Fielder and Frenett left with Fixsen to start Laika in 1993.To complete Laika’s initial line up, they recruited saxophonist/flautist Louise Elliott and percussionist Lou Ciccotelli. From the start Laika were a less tense proposition than Moonshake, but their unconventional line up and their intra-band chemistry allowed them to better pursue Fielder’s vision for a new kind of pop music. While their Britpop contemporaries would draw on an ever-decreasing self-referential pool of the same stale, white, male influences, Laika demonstrated a very 90s openness to a wide range of diverse influences. In their repetitive, funk-inflected grooves you can hear the influence of krautrock. Their shuddering basslines are drawn from dub, and recall the innovative mixtures of deep bass detonations and shards of splintered noise deployed by post-punk pioneers like Public Image Limited and The Pop Group. The inventive use of layers of samples is part of a lineage that extends through hip hop, from the gloriously noisy sound collages the Bomb Squad built on Public Enemy’s albums and Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted through to De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest’s witty repurposing of jazz, blues, pop culture and television soundtracks. The complex chords and saxophone flourishes betray their love of jazz, with textures that at times approach the abstraction of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis. The album’s title signposts another key Laika influence. It’s taken from Morton Subotnick’s cult 1967 album, the first piece of electronic music commissioned by a record company. This connects Laika to the pioneering days of electronic music, but also the world of library music and television soundtracks that this music inhabited for so long. This strain of electronic music was also a huge influence on Stereolab, the avant-pop group who were one of Laika’s few aesthetically aligned contemporaries, and would go on to influence a generation of hauntological musicians from Mordant Music to the entire Ghost Box label. Laike proved that all these decidedly non-rock influences had a crucial place in the more interesting modern music genres, something that has been picked up and developed by those who have come in their wake.
Laika’s pedigree in experimental music might imply that Silver Apples of the Moon is a forbidding listen. Nothing could be further from the truth. Part of Laika’s genius lies in how they integrate all these ideas from experimental music into an instantly appealing whole without losing the individuality that makes these ideas interesting in the first place. Album opener ‘Sugar Daddy’ rides in on a hiss of radio static before coalescing into a polyrhythmic bass-led groove overlaid with fizzing and burbling noise. Out of this dense psychedelic haze, certain elements pop out and make themselves known – a frenetic marimba line, a blissed out flute solo, discordant blasts of saxophone, the warm buzz of a moog synthesizer. Low in the mix, Fielder and Fixsen sing together in close harmony, a sweet melody belying the sinister undertones of the lyrics. This is the template from which all of Laika’s work spirals out. Fielder usually takes the lead vocals, her strong melodic voice capable of delivering both sweetness and sinister paranoia, with Fixsen providing the occasional whispered counterpoint. The parallels with the trip hop of Massive Attack and Portishead are clear, although Laika are both more frenetic and dissonant than most trip hop ever dared to get.
Although Laika’s sound was less confrontational than Moonshake’s gleeful embrace of guitar noise, the sheer listenability of the album and the prettiness of many of its songs does not negate the pre-millennial tension rumbling throughout. Fielder’s lyrics are less explicitly dystopian than Callahan’s, but her songs are still shot-through with darkness and paranoia. They are inhabited by broken and alienated characters living on the thin edge of sanity and sexuality, teetering on the abyss of violence and depravity. The itchy rhythms of ‘Let Me Sleep’ burrow under the listener’s skin, as the sleep-deprived narrator cries, “He’s screaming he knows where I’ve been”. ‘Honey In Heat’ sees Fielder growling with barely-controlled lust. ’Red River’ and ’44 Robbers’ are fantasies of sex and violence, told in dream-like stream-of-consciousness lyrics over a swirling psychedelic backing. ‘Thomas’, a rare outing for Fixsen on lead vocals, is all sublimated fear and paranoia drawn in impressionistic sweeps. Most disturbing of all is ‘Coming Down Glass’, in which Fielder inhabits the mind of a violent misogynistic sex predator stalking his next victim. With its propulsively funky baseline, its eerie atmosphere and its desperate whispered chorus, it’s possibly the band’s single most powerful achievement. That’s not to say the album is all unrelenting darkness though. ‘It You Miss’ is an affirmational mantra repeated to a nursery rhyme-like melody over a dreamy bed of marimbas and twinkling keyboards, and ‘Marimba Song’ is a breathless celebration of sensuality, in which sex achieves an almost divine transcendence, over a bubbling loping rhythm and luscious sonics. Silver Apples of the Moon never charted, and ’44 Robbers’ was released as a single with ‘Coming Down Glass’ as the B-side to similarly muted sales. If the commercial climate that saw Blue Lines and Tricky’s remarkable debut album Maxinquaye (1995) hit the album charts suggested that there might be a space for Laika’s experimental yet catchy music, it sadly wasn’t to be. Britpop’s poisonous cultural and commercial dominance was just round the corner. However, Silver Apples of the Moon managed to pick up impressive accolades on its original release from those who were paying attention. Critic Simon Reynolds cited them in an early article describing the post-roc genre, praising Laika’s ability to mix samplers and flesh-and-blood musicians. They were interviewed in the music press, and supported Radiohead on tour. Radiohead’s post-OK Computer turn towards experimental, post-rock and electronic music with Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001) has since been heralded as one of the key musical moments of the modern era, bringing experimental music to a mass audience and influencing generations of music makers to come. It is not unreasonable to assume that some of the music on those albums, which themselves merge techniques and instrumentation from electronic music with Radiohead’s traditional guitar band to startling effect, was influenced to some degree by Laika and their ‘all channels open’ approach to music.
Laika would release three more albums – Sound of the Satellites (1997), Good Looking Blues (2000) and Wherever I Am I Am What Is Missing (2003) before going into an indefinite hiatus that persists to this day. Some of the reason for this is the breakdown of Fielder and Fixsen’s romantic partnership. Fielder went to law school in 2005, and has since worked as a copyright lawyer. In the meantime, she has kept busy as a session musician, playing as part of P.J. Harvey’s touring band and with post-punk legends Wire. Laika’s post-debut albums are all worth hearing, particularly Sound of the Satellites which is full of melancholy spacey beauty, but they lack the tension and spark that makes Silver Apples of the Moon such a powerful record. The compilation Lost In Space: Volume 1 (1993-2002) offers a decent summary of the highpoints of their career, plus some essential early EP tracks and Peel session recordings, an intriguing live recording that gives some sense of their power and versatility as a live unit, and a handful of remixes. This is the extent of the recorded legacy Laika have left us – the quality is high but it remains tantalisingly brief.
It felt important to me to write this article to celebrate Silver Apples of the Moon’s thirtieth anniversary because there’s an extent to which Laika have been forgotten. The album was reissued in 2015, where it gratifyingly picked up more positive press than it did on its original release, and in certain circles it is rightly regarded as an underrated classic. The album featured in Fact magazine’s list of best trip hop albums and Treble’s list of best post rock albums, showing that all these years later Laika’s work still troubles genre boundaries. And their legacy lives on in the fringes of experimental music, the more interesting remnants of post rock, and the more eccentric practitioners of electronic music. But I can’t help wonder how differently the past thirty years of music might have played out had Laika managed to crack the mainstream. Laika stood for a kind of playful, joyous experimentation that Britpop would drive out of mainstream indie music for at least the next five years. Theirs was a legacy of musical inventiveness, of being open to musical ideas from across the wide spectrum of recorded music, but at the same time approachable and never obscure or difficult for its own sake. For this alone they should be remembered and cherished.
