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."
So he started learning algebra and "took a couple of university classes to increase my facility with equations," after which he would lie in bed at night doing sums in his head till he fell asleep, often dreaming about them. In the course of his studies, he chanced across a new musical scale, based on Pythagorean theory, whose "microtonal quality, compared to native-American note intervals, we're not predisposed to dealing with culturally." Of the 24 tracks on New Magnetic Wonder, half are super-catchy pop-rock nuggets, and half are 30-second sound fragments using this new musical scale.
Is Schneider the brainiest man in rock? "I'm not sure about that," he laughs. "I'm hyperactive and my brain generates lots of noise. I'm not a maths genius — in fact, I've got quite a muddled brain."
Schneider was expelled from kindergarten twice for being "too hyper." He was recommended medication, which his parents refused to allow him to take. These days, he's married, with a six-year-old son and a reputation as the US indie Phil Spector: his production of the 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, by his Elephant 6 colleagues Neutral Milk Hotel, was enough to make him the new boy wonder of the mixing desk. So he's putting all that excess energy to good use. As he says, "I'm able to function in my own way."
Responding to the accusation that the Apples are too arch, too clever, for their own good, Schneider draws a distinction between his writing and production methods. "I don't write songs mathematically, although I arrange, produce and mix mathematically. I write songs more like Lou Reed or Dylan — from my gut. I hammer them out in five minutes on a guitar with three chords and try to turn them into something good by sculpting them in the studio. That's maybe where I'm a craftsman."
He spent many hours between 2000 and 2002 writing songs with XTC's Andy Partridge, either on the phone or at the latter's home in Swindon, England — songs that never saw the light of day for logistical reasons and are now locked in a vault. XTC are up there with the Beatles and the Beach Boys in Schneider's personal pantheon, even though they've never risen beyond cult status themselves. But then, XTC never had a Hollywood superstar as their label boss. Does Schneider think that Wood's patronage will help the Apples succeed, just as the Zach Braff Effect pushed the Shins (huge Apples fans since way back) into the top five of the US album charts when he used them prominently in his 2004 film Garden State?
"I have been swamped by much larger crowds than in the past, now that you mention it," says Schneider. "I've always been accosted by lots of geeky home recording kids similar to myself, and generally at shows I hang out and talk about recording and making friends. But on this last tour it's become a little bit overwhelming."
In his mind, the have been stars since their 1995 debut album, Fun Trick Noisemaker. "Even when we were recording on four-track cassettes, I was under the delusion that we were recording top 40 hits. I figured that eventually people would catch on. There's not that many people writing super-poppy songs in the world. I've always considered myself as writing songs for some theoretical radio station in heaven, or maybe a Martian top 40 station."
According to Elijah Wood, a long-term Apples fan, Schneider is "enigmatic," although he concedes that they're "not an image band." He's fascinated by rock's "darkside" pin-ups, particularly Iggy Pop, whom he is scheduled to play in a biopic later this year — a prospect that, he says, "scares me to death." And no, he says, he won't be taking smack for the sake of verite. But ultimately it's the music that most appeals to Wood.
"As I get older, 'darkness' is more intriguing because it's so about-face to what I've done in the past," he says, possibly referring to the Paula Abdul video he appeared in aged eight. "But I'm not that into 'method' — it can be a bit up its own arse. I don't feel like it's a catharsis for me, and there's nothing I feel I have to resolve through performance. It's more to be a part of something creative. That's why I wanted to start a label: to be around creative people."
What does he make of Kiefer Sutherland, who has his own bijou music imprint, or Juliette Lewis — Hollywood stars who seek cachet through rock 'n' roll?
"Everybody wants to be a rock star to a certain degree," he says. "If you're into the iconography of rock and you see these bands growing up ... . It's fair enough if people want to live out their rock dreams. Besides, the opposite is also true: musicians have been fascinated with the film world as far back as the Beatles."
So who looms larger in Wood's imagination: De Niro or Dylan? "De Niro's pretty fucking cool." Taxi Driver or Blonde on Blonde? "Probably Blonde on Blonde. I'm such a music nerd."
As for Schneider, he feels confident he has made the album to back up his sponsor's optimism. "As a producer, I never was able to hit it out of the ballpark before. But from beginning to end this one holds up," he says.
With its sonic particles linking songs of pure-pop beauty, is New Magnetic Wonder his equivalent of Brian Wilson's Smile? "Oh gosh, I wouldn't compare it to something as great as Smile. But Smile definitely raised the bar for me. To know that something begun in the 60s had finally been finished [in 2004], it was, like, 'Wow, it's do- able.' It almost destroyed the person who wrote it, but he [Brian Wilson] came back and finished it! It was like he built a rocket pack and he got up there again. It was extremely inspiring. And now I'm fine-tuning my rocket pack, too."
NOTE: New Magnetic Wonder is released on Simian on Monday.-
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