Free David Bowie's Low by Hugo Wilcken

Eventide Harmonizer. He sent the snare to theHarmonizer, 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. I asked, instead, how they thought I did it and I got some great answers that I found inspirational. One producer insisted I compressed the drum tracks three separate times and slowed the tape down every time, or something like that.” The heavily treated drums and the foregrounding of the bass was another inversion—instead of just getting the bass and drums down and doing the creative stuff on top, Visconti and Bowie were refocusing on the rhythm, which goes to the heart of what popular music is about. The sound itself later became a post-punk trope when producers finally twigged to how it was done, but at the time it was a radical departure.
    Sonically, the first side of
Low
is about things opposing each other—the synthetic versus the organic, noise versus music, the abrasive versus the melodic. And it’s all already there on “Speed of Life.” The first sounds are the fade-in of a scratchy, descending dissonant synth noise—vaguely reminiscent of the one in “Mass Production”—which then plays over the swirling guitar and ARP arpeggios that makeup the main theme (actually recycled from the intro of Bowie’s novelty non-hit “The Laughing Gnome,” from his wannabe light entertainer days). Everything is descending on this track: treated drums, lead guitar, synth effects, harmonising synths. And all the different elements are fighting it out, aggressively drawing attention to themselves as if in an orchestra composed of soloists. This is an album where the seams show: no bones are made about processed quality of the sound, which refuses to cohere in the way it did on
Station to Station
. Essentially, it’s an artier take on
Station
’s funk-krautrock hybrid.
    Just at the moment you might expect the track to develop into something else, or for the vocal to finally materialise (as it did after “Station to Station’s” extended intro), “Speed of Life” fades out. It’s a matter of deflecting expectations. Eno again: “What I think he was trying to do was to duck the momentum of a successful career. The main problem with success is that it has a huge momentum. It’s like you’ve got this big train behind you and it wants you to carry on going the same way. Nobody wants you to step off the tracks and start looking round in the scrub around the edges because nobody can see anything promising there.”

i’ll never touch you
    We have to wait for the second track before we get any Bowie vocals. “Breaking Glass” is another fragment, not even making two minutes, and probably the shortest song Bowie has ever recorded. It’s got the heavily treated funk-disco beat, Eno’s moog fanning from right to left speaker, and a menacing Carlos Alomar rock riff—one of the few stabs at a rock sensibility on the album. According to Alomar, “Dennis Davis had a lot to do with that. David wanted a song that was much lighter and much sillier, and ‘Breaking Glass’ was definitely it. If you leave a hole open in the music, you’re going to get a signature line on the guitar for the introduction, which I duly did. For the rest of the song, I wanted to ape a Jew’s harp, just a drone. We were just having fun. If you listen to all the quirks in the music—the call and response stuff between bass, guitar and drums—that was done with just three members of the band.”
    The last time we heard Bowie singing on record, on the final track of
Station to Station
, he was offering a seriously histrionic