My dislike of anything Apple is fairly well known within the family. But there are occasions where friends or random strangers at university or elsewhere will unexpectedly find themselves on the receiving end of one of my inspired rants about the ‘good looks, bad software’ that have propelled the Cupertino, CA company so far into the zeitgeist that not boasting a titanium-finished MacBook now seems an affront to mere existence. That said, the marketing power of the company that, not so long ago, was a second-rate competitor to the dominance of the Windows/PC alliance, is something remarkable. In my scornful way, I always put the company’s success to date down to their advertising gurus who decided that bold colours, blank white, silhouettes and hands were all they needed to sell their sleek, effortlessly cool, planned-for-obsolescence devices. All that and, obviously, a damn good sountrack.
I’ve riffed previously on just how good their choices in the superbly punk-garage sounds of Steriogram and Swedish-cool-apathetic-alternative-rock vibe of Caesar’s Palace were, but in both of those instances, the Apple hypnosis team were almost too good – picking bands for which the picking would be the zenith of their musical careers and that would never surface in the world of popular music again. The use of Royskopp’s ‘Eple’ – conveniently ‘Apple’ in Norwegian – as the first thing Mac OS X Panther users would hear on booting their computers for the majority of 2003 was something else, something entirely more inspired. As one Norwegian news website quoted, celebrating the ‘Norwegian success duo’s’ now significantly enhanced distribution network; ‘“It is unnecessarily to ask why the song “Eple” was chosen”, says Arne Odden in Apple Norway to the Norwegian Broadcasting Company.’ I couldn’t have put it more heartfelt or syntactically-challenged myself.
‘Eple’ is at once patently extraterrestrial and intensely human. It is the contradiction of sound that defines Royksopp – Norwegians Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland who met in their early teens – and makes their brand of downtempo synthpop eminently listenable. Where other acts can lose listener interest rapidly, distancing audiences with ambience that bores rather than intrigues, Royksopp’s 2001 LP ‘Melody A.M.’, from which this song comes, was such a success because it did simplicity without repetition, complexity without confusion. ‘Eple’ is an exemplar of the Norwegian’s hybrid approach, built around a common synth riff that warps and mutates as it is reeled back in, spun out and sent underwater with a low-pass filter effect. While remaining faithful to the riff, however, Royksopp effectively construct an ecosystem around the theme, fleshing it out with myriad other synths, percussive elements and tonal shifts – creating a musical environment of sorts in the same way Daft Punk did on ‘Discovery’. It has hints of love, evolution, happiness and hope all wrapped up in it’s 3’36” contemplation of what are essentially six keyboard notes – supreme functionality, the ‘Eple’ way.
Royksopp – Eple
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