A Film Canon

 

 

The first - and strongest - installment in David Bowie's 'Berlin Trilogy', Low is conspicuously divided into two halves. The first side is a series of pop songs, two of which are entirely instrumental, and several of which only feature Bowie's voice in a truncated or fragmented fashion. This evokes a gradual recovery of language and consciousness, perhaps from the severe cocaine addiction that left him unable to recall the recording sessions for Station To Station, and finds most poetic expression in "Sound And Vision", whose lengthy introduction and colourful, minimal lyrics narrow this awakening to the sensory organs. The second side features four extended electronic pieces, all of which evoke Cold War Berlin on the verge of losing consciousness; a more industrial, Gothic-inflected version of the disorienting, amorphous no-places that gave rise to ambient music during this period, to the extent that the melancholy of Bowie's saxophone solo on 'Subterraneans', the last and finest track, results much from its disruption of an otherwise digital soundscape as its evocation of a Weimar past. The result is an uneasy identification between Bowie and Berlin, perhaps explaining his brief flirtation with Nazism as the product of a topographical, rather than ideological, imperative, and finding supreme expression in "A New Career In A New Town", whose plaintive harmonica suggests melancholy conclusion, rather than a fresh beginning.