David Bowie's Low (33 1/3)

Author:Hugo Wilcken
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Music, Arts & Photography, Musical Genres, Rock, History & Criticism
ISBN: 0826416845
Publisher: Continuum
Published: 2005-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

through morning’s thoughts

Low kicks off with a brief ode to movement, “Speed of Life.” The difference between this opener and that of Bowie’s previous album could hardly be more striking. As we’ve seen, Station to Station’s title track is a sweeping epic of cocaine romance. Although it has no narrative in the storybook sense, there is nonetheless a lyric arc that moves from the alienated magician “lost in my circle,” to redemption in the “European canon.” There is a musical arc too, with a succession of melody lines and a progression of themes. By contrast, “Speed of Life” is an instrumental—Bowie’s first ever—and so has no narrative to offer. (Originally it was supposed to have lyrics, as was “A New Career in a New Town,” but Bowie struggled to come up with the words on Low, and in the end these two pieces were left as they were.) Musically, it is not structured progressively, but cyclically (major theme repeated four times, bridge, minor theme repeated twice, major theme repeated four times, bridge, etc.). “Station” was a series of fragments spliced together and stretched out to breaking point. But “Speed of Life” is a fragment in isolation—as are most of the tracks on side one. (Eno: “He arrived with all these strange pieces, long and short, which already had their own form and structure. The idea was to work together to give the songs a more normal structure. I told him not to change them, to leave them in their bizarre, abnormal state.”)

Like “Station to Station,” “Speed of Life” fades in. But whereas “Station” has a train slowly coming in over the horizon, the fade-in to “Speed of Life” is abrupt, as if you’d arrived late and opened the door on a band in session. The album has already started without you! And that sense of catch-up never lets up on the track, which drives frenetically on until fade-out. It feels a little like one of the instrumentals from Eno’s Another Green World, only re-recorded by someone in the manic phase of bipolar disorder.

The first thing you notice is the startling drum crash, like a fist pounding at your speaker. “When it came out, I thought Low was the sound of the future,” recalled Joy Division/New Order drummer Stephen Morris. “When recording the Ideal for Living LP, I remember we kept asking the engineer to make the drums sound like ‘Speed of Life’—strangely enough he couldn’t.” It was a trick Visconti used with the Eventide Harmonizer. He sent the snare to the Harmonizer, which dropped the pitch, then fed it straight back to the drummer. It was done live, so Dennis Davis was hearing the distortion as he played, and responding accordingly. Visconti added the two onto the mix to get Low’s signature sound, which is not just the thump but also a descending echo. Visconti: “When the album came out the Harmonizer still wasn’t widely available. I had loads of producers phoning me and asking what I had done, but I wouldn’t tell them.

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