He's an unlikely record company CEO. For a start, he's best known as a hobbit. But Elijah Wood, who played Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, wastes little time in impressing you with his passion for rock 'n' roll. He has just founded his own label, Simian, and signed his first act, US indie pop outfit Apples in Stereo. It's a labor of love: within minutes of meeting him, those big blue eyes are fairly bulging out of their sockets as Wood enthuses about his favorite bands and labels with all the nerdy zeal of an obscurer-than-thou NME reader.
"The last band I saw was Witchcraft from Sweden," he says, lighting a cigarette in the bar of London's Metropolitan hotel, and beginning a stream-of-rock-consciousness monologue. "They're not death metal; they're calling it doom rock. It's essentially an updated version of early 70s Sabbath. They're amazing live. The Sundays were the first band that had a huge impact on me. When I was 11, someone gave me a copy of Sgt Pepper's and it totally blew my mind. I love the Lennon albums, they're so open emotionally and stripped-down in terms of production. The McCartney ones are much more lush and dynamic. I love the stuff on Twisted Nerve and LA's Stones Throw — they've got an incredible underground hip-hop catalogue — and I love Honest Jon's: Damon Albarn is one of the heads and they do calypso and west African reissues. I missed Field Music last night at the ICA — I love those guys, they're amazing."
Wood finds a lot of music and musicians "amazing": the Zombies' late-1960s baroque-pop lost classic Odessey & Oracle (although he prefers their even more obscure Begin Here: "Oh my God, the drums on that record!"), Prince up to Lovesexy ("The last document of Prince as we knew him"), the Miles Davis Bitches Brew sessions ("Totally insane"), Tom Waits ("Real Gone was as good as anything he's done") and Gang of Four ("Were Franz Ferdinand influenced by them? Unabashedly!"). And now he is putting his money where his tastes are with Simian, which releases its first album this month.
That album is New Magnetic Wonder by the Apples in Stereo, the band's sixth release. The Apples are one of the mainstays of US underground pop: they founded the cult late-1990s psychedelic Elephant 6 collective/label, and in the UK, they won an astonishing third place in the fans' vote to determine the line-up for the All Tomorrow's Parties vs. the Fans festival, happening in May.
Robert Schneider, their singer, songwriter and producer, is probably the most breathless interviewee I've encountered since, well, Elijah Wood. Only in Schneider's case, his love of music, from ELO and Supertramp to the Velvet Underground and the Beach Boys — all of whose influence you can hear on New Magnetic Wonder — is superseded by a love of maths.
It turns out Schneider had something of a "near-mystical" experience a few years back, involving a mathematics formula. "When we were recording The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone [the Apples' 2000 album] I'd upgraded to a 1972 Ampex MM 1200 16-track tape machine that I'd coveted for years, but it broke down a lot and it was very expensive to fix. So I learned about circuit diagrams and electronic theory so I could repair it myself," explains the bearded, bespectacled studio whiz as he hyperventilates about this life-changing moment. "And I discovered this equation: voltage equals resistance times current flow. It's a basic electronic theory: E=RI. But it became this mystical equation that began controlling my destiny and I realized it provided the context in which I lived. Everything I did, from talking on the phone and playing records to the neuro-chemical reactions in my brain, were wrapped up with this equation that described how electricity flows."
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