Silver Apples of the Moon is the debut album by American composer and musician Morton Subotnick, released by Nonesuch Records in July 1967.

[1] Recorded over a 13-month deadline, Subotnick spent up to ten hours a day working on the composition, hoping to create sounds that other musicians would find hard to recreate.

Upon release, Silver Apples of the Moon became a surprise success, selling well in the classical music category, and received critical acclaim.

The album's sequenced rhythms are credited with anticipating electronic dance music, and today the record is considered to be Subotnick's signature work.

[3] Subotnick began creating electronic music as a student at Mills College in the late 1950s, a period when he also played clarinet with the San Francisco Symphony.

[6] In the early 1960s, Subotnick and Sender searched San Francisco for an engineer who could help materialize their concepts about sound manipulation via electronic circuits, and soon found Don Buchla.

[5] As the creators' vision for the Buchla 100 was to provide a new way of creating music, the instrument lacked a black-and-white keyboard and instead focused on "the movement and manipulation of frequencies.

Suspicious of institutional settings, he requested off-campus space and located a studio on Bleecker Street, in the centre of the city's downtown scene.

[4] Around this period, Jac Holzman, an executive from Nonesuch Records, visited Subotnick in the middle of the night, and offered him $500 to create an electronic album for the label.

Although Subotnick thought he had "really blown it", having been unable to find a telephone number for the label, Holzman returned to his house, offering a new sum of $1,000.

[10] The musician felt he was not using the Buchla 100 on Silver Apples to create music, but rather to offer "a kind of sound that you would find it very hard to replicate.

[4] The movements of the record are not necessarily presented in the order they were worked on, as the composer's production approach was to create musical sections in "gobs.

[14] According to writer Kevin Lozano, the sounds on Silver Apples of the Moon resemble "the byproduct of an experiment gone wrong: Its eerie tones, elliptical pulses, enigmatic thumps, and waves of cybertronic wails are still otherworldly.

Running for over sixteen minutes,[17] "Part I" is a slow, moody section,[6] incorporating 'pinprick' tones which move around the stereo field, and calm passages which are abruptly interrupted by electronic noise.

[11] The track makes wide-ranging usage of glissandi, whistles, sirens and other sounds and tones, and also incorporates irregular sections and "capricious shapes.

"[18] The "atomized melodies, eerie sighs [and] hissing explosions of sound" are reminiscent of early electronic compositions by Milton Babbitt and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

[10] A rhythm in the middle of the track emerges alongside numerous high-pitched melodies atop underlying minimal noise,[17] while the coda features low and slow bass tones.

"[19] The musician said at the time that the name was chosen because he felt it aptly reflected the composition's unifying theme, which he said was "heard in its pure form at the end of 'Part II'.

But I had the beginnings of it, and those are those little ding-y, high pitched silver-like sounds—they sound like...little...silver apples!...so that’s what attracted me to the title, to that line in the poem.

"[12]Robert Hunter named a Grateful Dead song "Silver Apples of the Moon," found on Infrared Roses (1991), after Subotnick's album.

[20] The album sleeve of Subotnick's Silver Apples features a psychedelic design by William S. Harvey, incorporating artwork by Anthony Martin.

[13][17] Prior to its release, Subotnick played Silver Apples of the Moon at the opening night of the famous New York nightclub Electric Circus in June 1967, where the composition was enhanced by the usage of strobe lights.

"[5] Robert Barry of The Quietus believes that, with this, "Subotnick might just have been the first person to get a club full of people [...] dancing to purely electronic music.

"[5] Upon its release in July 1967, Silver Apples of the Moon was a surprise hit for Nonesuch,[4] becoming one of the best-selling records in the classical category,[19] and also selling respectably for an experimental album.

[9] The record also became an underground hit,[9] and was described by Alfred Hickling of the Guardian as swiftly becoming "an essential psychedelic soundtrack," although Subotnick said he did not take drugs during the production of the album.

[18] In a review of the remastered edition, Blair Anderson of AllMusic praised side one of the album, commenting on its "fascinating vocabulary" and writing that interest is sustained by the variety of gestures and tones.

[18] Musician Julian Cope, also a musicologist,[23] wrote in a retrospective review that the album reflected Subotnick's interest in both technology and music, and described it as an "unsung" release.

[30] The rhythmic second side of the album attracted the attention of rock bands the Grateful Dead and Mothers of Invention, who began spending time with Subotnick at his studio.

[37] Subtonick performed Silver Apples of the Moon at Adelaide Festival on 7 March 2014, using a re-creation of the first Buchla (the original is housed in the Library of Congress).