David Bowies Low: a Critical Analysis

David Bowie s Low - Critical Analysis !

(Notes based on David Bowie s Low (33 1-3) by Hugo Wilcken) !    !   

Overview > Conceived from the beginning as one side of pop songs and the other side ambient. > Pitch-shifting Eventide Harmonizer. > George Martin s 60 s work with The Beatles was an inspiration to Visconti - Instead of live takes Martin took different instrumental, vocal and percussion tracks, building them up layer by layer. !

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> Visconti regards Strawberry Fields  as the moment in which George Martin showed the recording studio itself was a musical instrument. The Beatles had recorded two versions of the song. Lennon had liked the beginning of one and the end of another, the problem was they had been recorded at different speeds and the keys differed by one semitone. Martin sped up one version, slowed down the other and then spliced them together. "

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> The rhythm section was told to jam with a lose chord progression, and would provide the foundations for the majority of the first side. > Once Bowie was happy with the backing tracks, work with the overdubs then began - such as guitars and other solos. These were generally treated electronically by Visconti, Bowie and Eno. > Instruments were treated as the musicians played them, Visconti used the harmonizer, various tone filters, reverbs, as well as other studio techniques. > Eno mostly used a portable EMS Synthesiser, complete with an arcade style joystick, which Eno would pan around in circles, making swirling sounds. > Eno was often left to lay down a “Sonic “Sonic Bed ” and create what he called “...a distinct textural feel that gave it a mood to begin with.”  > According to Eno “It Eno “It would just be doing the thing you can do with tape so that you can treat the music malleable. You You have something down there but then you can start squeezing it around and changing the colour of this and putting this thing much further in front of something else and so on.”  > Bowie used a method on Low  called  called Oblique Strategies  which Eno had created with the artist Peter Schmidt the previous year. This was a deck of cards, each inscribed with a command or an observation. When a creative impasse was reached, you were to turn up one of these cards and act upon it. The emphasis is on capitalising on error as a way of creating randomness, fooling yourself into an interesting situation, and crucially leaving room for the thing that can t be explained - an element that every work of art needs. "

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> Eno himself said “The Interesting place is not chaos, and it s not total coherence. It s somewhere on the cusp of those two.”  !    !   

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> Once Bowie had found his voice, the rest would slip into place - and a melody line would materialise. > Low is full of harmonic twists that on a musical level don t quite connect, stop what seems to be halfway through. The vocals are sung in quite a flat tone, the lyrics are a mix mix of strange juxtapositions and occasional cliche. !

> Low  sudden  sudden mood swings and music changes. > The second half of the album consists of four slower, textural compositions that according toWilcken  to Wilcken  “descend into mutism” .

> Imaginary languages, hums, chants and vocal wordlessness. > A mix of funk/disco beats, dissonant synths, scratchy guitar and fragmented lyrics of a modernist persuasion. > The instrumentals on the second side are tone poems that appear to be about places, landscapes whether interior or exterior “extrapolating the world from the self” . > Low s whole second side shows minimalist influence. !

Speed Of Life > Musically speaking - not progressively structured (major theme repeated four times, bridge, minor theme repeated twice, major theme repeated four times, bridge etc.) > The opening track quite unusually fades in. > Has a certain feel of one of the instrumentals from Eno s Another Green World, but re-recorded by “someone in the manic phase of bipolar disorder” . !

> Stephen Morris the drummer from New Order kept asking his engineer to make the drums sound like Speed of Life  but he couldn t. It was a trick Visconti used with the Eventide Harmonizer. He sent the snare to the Harmonizer, dropping the pitch, It was then fed back to the drummer. Because it was done live, Dennis Davis was hearing the distortion as he played, and responded accordingly. Visconti added the two together in the mix to achieve Low s signature sound (not just the thump but also a descending echo). "  

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> Visconti and Bowie were focusing on rhythm - the heart of popular music. > Sonically speaking, the first side of Low  is about opposing forces - synthetic versus organic, noise versus music, abrasive versus melody. > The first sound of “Speed Of Life”  are the fade-in of a scratchy, descending dissonant synth noise. > The sound is descending on this track: treated drums, lead guitar, synth effects, harmonising synths. All the different elements are fighting against each other, aggressively drawing attention to themselves“as if in an orchestra composed of soloists”.

Breaking Glass > Heavily treated funk disco beat, Eno s moog pans from right to left speaker. !

> Lyrics appear to have been composed using a Burroughs cut-up sort of style. Bowie would take phrases he had written and rearrange them in unusual combinations, trying to break down the sense so new meanings could emerge - or so they cancelled each other out.

What In The World > Crashing drums (of a heavier disco persuasion), in terms of texture there is a “synth-generated bubbling noise”  prominent in the mix. > Everything sounds sped up - there s a sense of building tension in the song - “a manic quality” . !

Sounds & Vision > Definite pop sensibility. > The intro to the song is much longer than the body of the song.

> Instrumental piece with fragments of lyrics. > Eno s idea was to hold back introducing vocals in order to create tension. !

> Harmonized drums with a hissing noise (a heavily gated snare), “sitting strangely with a jaunty, jangly rhythm guitar riff”, synth melody lines that sway towards a lack of subtly. > The backing vocals and instrumentation were “all recorded before there was even a lyric title and melody” says Visconti.

Always Crashing In The Same Car > Always crashing in the same car and be my wife signal a shift in form and mood. > Has as more conventional song structure . > Metallic guitar solo (heavily treated). > The slower beat, Eno s swirling synth instrumentation and the ghostly keyboard treatments add to the track s disorientated dream like feel. !

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> There is a Kraftwerkian almost slightly retro about the theremin-like sounds Eno engineered on this track.

A New Career In A New Town > The track begin with a short but fragile electronic passage, similar to the instrumental parts of Radio-  Activity, but slightly more unbalanced . > A thick suffocated bass drum taps out a delicate and precise beat that has an interesting pre-house feel to it. It contrasts with the crashing snare that comes in at 0:36. > An entirely different theme begins at this point with Bowie s blues harmonica, and another bar-room melody in a Be My Wife style, plonked out on treated keyboards. !

> There is no bridge returning us to the opening kraftwerkian fragment, this kicks in abruptly at 1:22, before returning to the blues/honky-tonk of the second theme again at 1:36. > Splices together two fragments that seem to be from not only two quite different bits of music but also two very different genres as well. > The track is the sonic equivalent of a Burroughs cut-up, “juxtaposing clean-lined electronica with old-  fashioned piano and harmonica to reflect that feeling of arriving and departing all at the same time”.

Warszawa > Intro features a Piano drone. > Eno suggested that they laid down a track of 430 metronome clicks to begin with (this method was also used for Art Decade and Weeping Wall). This gave them a pulse which they could improvise over, rather than falling into the tap of using a conventional time signature like 3/4 or 4/4. Its a pulse has striking similarities to the minimalist “groove” used by composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. !

> There are no bars of music, only chords and sections coming in and overlapping at randomly predetermined click numbers (such as click 59 for instance). This technique gives the composition room to breathe, without the narrow restrictions of two, four or eight bar phrasing. > Roland and Yamaha Keyboards were used, as well as Eno s EMS Synth and Bowie s Chamberlain (a version of the tape-based mellotron sampling keyboard). !

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> Slow tolling piece. > It starts with “bare octaves in A, followed by a modal melody also in octaves, then modulates to D-sharp minor in the main section of the piece” .

Art Decade > Main theme descends constantly, with odd almost organic sounding electronic effects that drop in pitch and then fade slowly. > The Cello part that adds warmth to the bright piece that “recalls the work of Harmonia and the early, more pastoral Kraftwerk” . > Starts off with an enigmatic introduction that sounds like it s coming from somewhere far away. !

> The main motif of the piece enters abruptly, is repeated several times, and is then “freeze framed on a four-note figure”, repeating over and over again hypnotically. > The endless repetition with little variance is very similar to the work of minimalist composer Philip Glass, who chooses to use repetition and texture over melodic. > The Freeze framed repetitions aren t resolved but progress into an controlled climax, before unexpectedly revisiting the main theme and “cutting directly in to the four-note figure” . !

> Bowie and Eno use the metronome click technique on this track, the chance happenings of the sequence changes work to good effect.

Weeping Wall > Track most influenced by minimalism. > Has a lot of similarities with the pulse sections of Reich s seminal performance “Music For 18 Musicians” . !

> “Music For 18 Musicians” and Weeping Wall share similar sonic qualities due to a mix of (wordless) chanting, xylophones and particularly a vibraphone (a type of marimbaphone that creates a special vibrato). > The vibraphone adds to the “ethnic”  feel of the second side, which begun with Bowie s pseudo Eastern wailings on Warszawa . Weeping  Wall and Music For 18 Musicians  use a kind of pulsation rather than a conventional rhythm, “aiming at a certain stillness In motion” . !

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> There is little or no melody in the Reich s pulse based pieces, just a series of subtle harmonic changes occurring at particular intervals, (often inversions of minor to major chords or vice versa). There is a brief melody line on Weeping Wall , but it is secondary to the pulse and texture of the instrumentation. !

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> The track differs from Reich in its display of organic sounds (percussion and vocals) and how they play off the harsher synthetic ones - one of low s strongest musical features. After the backing track of bubbling xylophone and vibraphone sounds were down, Bowie once again used the metronome click method to randomly introduce chants and hums, synths, and a distorted guitar riffs, giving the composition its distinctive impression. !

Subterraneans > Ultimately Low s  most moving moment. !   

> Faint jazz saxophones represent memories (about the people who got caught in east berlin after the separation). Sombre and confined, it features a slow, five-note bass figure that repeats itself at intervals throughout the track. Bowie layers on even slower synth lines and disorientating backwards tape sounds (something he had used to good effect on the intro to Sweet Thing  on Diamond Dogs . "  

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> There is a melancholy wordless chant, then at 3:09 comes a beautiful and emotional saxophone line (a very bowie-esque touch). > At 3:53 the incoherent lyric “share bride failing star, care-line, care-line, care-line, care-line, briding me shelley, shelley umm”. > “Ends in an impasse, after which the incantation the Gregorian style chant returns as does the saxophone, making a final subdued, tentative stab at some sort of melodic line before the edifice crumbles, again seemingly mid track”.