David Bowie's

David Bowieʼs Low - Critical Analysis (Notes based on David Bowieʼs 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 Martinʼs 60ʼs 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. > Visconti regards ʻStrawberry Fieldsʼ 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. > 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 Bed” and create what he called “...a distinct textural feel that gave it a mood to begin with.” > According to Eno “It would just be doing the thing you can do with tape so that you can treat the music malleable. 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 ʻOblique Strategiesʼ 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 canʼt be explained - an element that every work of art needs. > Eno himself said “The Interesting place is not chaos, and itʼs not total coherence. Itʼs somewhere on the cusp of those two.” > 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 donʼt 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 mood swings and music changes. > The second half of the album consists of four slower, textural compositions that according 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”. > Lowʼs 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 Enoʼs 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 ʻSpeed of Lifeʼ but he couldnʼt. 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 Lowʼs signature sound (not just the thump but also a descending echo). > 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, Enoʼs 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 - thereʼs 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. > Enoʼs 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, Enoʼs swirling synth instrumentation and the ghostly keyboard treatments add to the trackʼs disorientated dream like feel. > 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 Bowieʼs 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. Itʼs 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 pre- determined 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 Enoʼs EMS Synth and Bowieʼs Chamberlain (a version of the tape-based mellotron sampling keyboard). > 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 itʼs 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 arenʼt 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.

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