Is there a bigger pop music geek than The Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider? We asked him, but had to wait till he got back from "mathemagician" Martin Gardner's annual conference for our answer.
The Apples in Stereo's Travellers in Space and Time, out Tuesday, is a futuristic recording influenced by both science and sci-fi, all fed through the conceptual prism of Schneider, a disciple of The Beach Boys' musical genius, Brian Wilson.
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Q&A: Geeking Out With Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider
"We're making music for our audience in the future," Schneider told Wired.com during a wide-ranging e-mail interview touching on nerd obsessions like concept albums, Auto-Tune and The Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood (who heads Apples in Stereo's label, Simian Records). "[Space and Time] took us into sci-fi territory. 'Is it futuristic?' That was our main criterion in the studio."
The new songs benefit from Schneider's love of math, which recently fused with his musical day job when he invented what he calls a new, non-Pythagorean musical scale based on logarithms. You can check his math on the track "CPU," as well as the Travellers in Space and Time's online portal.
"Playing with a scale tuned to logarithms reveals different mathematical relationships to the ear than are revealed in the usual chromatic scale," Schneider explained. "There is the possibility, due to the special way logarithms add together, of composing purposefully with the beat frequencies and overtones. They are often also notes in the scale, which just is a beautiful and very futuristic idea to me, to have this extra layer of meaning and information in the music to play with."
Travellers in Space and Time's clever futurism is enhanced by two fake science videos featuring Schneider and his label overlord Wood. "Elijah is superfun, a really nice, gentle person," Schneider said. "He's also hilarious, smart and passionate about music, with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure shit. I loved working with him. We just tried to be weird."
As weird as the music industry's possibly dystopian future? We asked Schneider to power up his imagination, peer into the future and tell us what he saw. But after making allowances for his comparative ignorance – being a 20-year veteran of the music industry and all – he eventually gave up. It's just not his job.
"Our world changes constantly," he said. "The question in 20 years might be whether biochemical brain signals sound better than electrical ones or something.
"I think it isn't important how the music gets from the mind of the artist into the mind of the listener, just that the artists are creating and people are supporting them," he said. "I would hate to see the physical artifacts disappear, especially vinyl records that can be listened to even without electricity, by just dropping the needle and turning the thing with your finger. That might be the way people of the future hear music from our era, if their energy sources are depleted in some post-apocalyptic Dark Age."
Image courtesy Simian Records
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