To this day, he can still feel that tremor in the tips of his fingers, a hot shiver that shook like the high note he knew he had to play, the one that wrested him from literal paralysis.

"People who know me can tell that I have some balance troubles," Simeon Coxe, the composer and founding member of the pioneering New York 1960's electro dance duo Silver Apples, says of the lingering damage from a brutal car crash in 1998 that broke his neck. "Sometimes I stumble when there's nothing to stumble over, sometimes my legs just don't work."

But his first hurdle was simply crawling out of bed. Soon after sewing him up, Simeon's surgeon purchased a cheap synthesizer for the ailing musician, laying it just out of reach on the bed stand.

"I couldn't even move my fingers at the time. [My doctor] just set it there as something for me to stare at," Simeon says of the bulky old synthesizer that offered physical and psychic therapy with its plastic keyboard and myriad of nubby dials. "I remember staring at the brand name, etched in white letters on the side. It was a Korg."

He didn't recover noticeably until 2004, but in the months that followed the accident Simeon's fingertips started tingling, then jittering, until he finally managed to slump forward, wince past the aches, and outstretch an atrophied arm toward the keyboard.

"I just pushed down one key to hear what it sounded like," Simeon paused, struggling to find words vivid enough to capture that long faded echo. "It was just the most amazing sound... the first sound I had made since the accident...I just played it until I had enough nerve to let it go and hit another note. But I think I let that [first] note go for two or three minutes."

Searching for sounds

In a way he's groped for such notes since the very beginning. It all started in the 1960s in New York's East Village, when Simeon's band mates became alienated by his tinkering with a decades-old audio oscillator that emitted hauntingly dissonant rhythms, which contrasted with the gooey harmonics of the hippies feel-good vibes.

Before long, the band had deteriorated into a duo--Simeon and drummer Danny Taylor. Dubbing themselves Silver Apples, from a W. B. Yeats poem about plucking surreal forbidden fruits, the pair experimented further until they had more than a half-dozen synthesizers stacked upon each other, knotted together in a tangle of cords that the front-man embraced with every limb until he was coaxing and caressing notes from the pedals and keys with his hands, toes and elbows.

Simeon says mid-sixties equipment had limitations mirroring his own deteriorated motor skills since the accident.

"I have limited feeling in the ends of my feet and my hands, it's as though they're tingly and asleep all the time," he says, adding that the nerve damage drastically decreased the dexterity of his fingers. "I can't play a fancy keyboard... but Silver Apples has never been any kind of fancy keyboard thing."

In fact, it was the exact opposite. From their first performances, Simeon would simultaneously bewilder and coerce audiences into dancing to organic yet artificial rhythms rooted in simple bass lines he meted out with a mere half-dozen pedals mounted on a piece of plywood.

"It's still the same technique for me, physically. I'm as much a musician now as I ever was," he says of the limitations that grounded him long before the nerve damage he suffered in the car crash.

That lean vibe nabbed the duo a cult following that slowly flourished all the way into the late 1990s, when bootlegs reigned supreme for music diehards long after Silver Apples had split up a few decades before. Throughout the recordings and performances of their new millennium reunion, Simeon admired the breadth of his partner's drum technique as the foundation that held the songs together, along with his willingness to embrace stratospheric experimentation--right up until Taylor's death in 2005.

The passive observer

Simeon decided to continue touring and writing as Silver Apples without Taylor, paying tribute not only rhythmically or emotionally, but psychologically as well. The front man began wading through the stacks of tapes that his drummer left behind—a heap of old beats to choose from and mold new songs around.

Simeon is plumbing such spiritual dimensions on a thematic level as well on upcoming, decades-in-the-making concept album about invisible, otherworldly beings feeding off humanity's emotional energy.

"It's a story about beings living alongside us, but that we are unaware of, beings that observe and, in a way, protect us, because they sort of feed off of us," he says of the lyrical narrative that perfectly fits the 1960's sci-fi sonics he had first forged. The creatures' observations of humanity serve as foil for the artists' observations of modern society.

He was long ago cast in that unique roll of passive observer, having come of age during New Orleans' musical renaissance in the 1950s, sneaking into dive bars lining the legendary Rampart Street when he was only 15 years old. There he saw R&B icons like Fats Domino in their prime.

"I was often the only white kid there, everyone else was whooping it up and having a good time and there's a lot of beer and wine flowing, but I'm just standing there," he says of those early days in the present tense, as if he is still living them. "I got to hear Fats Domino [and] Joe Turner," Simeon says, adding that Fats Domino was a major inspiration.

As the dancers grinned and mingled, Simeon would inhale the tiny room's sweat-soaked air, sponging up the same kind of crucial details that sustained him after the accident, through his songs about far off aliens and through the echoes of his best friend's drum beats.

"In that respect, the accident didn't hurt me at all. If anything it gave me a chance to sit back and evaluate," he says, adding that it helped him take stock of the limitations of his body and his instrument. "I went back in with fresh vigor, and also a conviction that you gotta be happy with what you got and make the most out of it, rather than complain about what you don't."