Low: Classic or classic?

thanks to the live videos ums recently posted upthread, I now own my first Low album and it is v nice.

thanks for the reminder to listen to this again

Would love to see someone reissue the Vernon Yard stuff. Still hoping to stumble across a CD copy of the debut (the only full length I'm missing), but increasingly looking like I'll need to pay $40+ through discogs.

the band's said they've been trying to buy the rights to those albums back for ages to no avail

It wasn't difficult at all to get the second two, but the debut is proving quite elusive. And the EPs from that label? Forget it. I hope they are successful someday.

were those Plain Recordings vinyl represses maybe ten years back of that era bogus?

lol - never mind, I just saw what those represses were going for on discogs. BANK!

https://uproxx.com/indie/bj-burton-interview-producer-indie-low-bon-iver/

good interview with burton, a lot of focus on his work with low

would have loved to hear more about his work with charli though

it's mad how honest and confident this bloke is, just like 'yeah caned a load of ket and made a world-class record'. fair fucks, bj burton

"I just want to have a good time, man. There’s so much more important shit than music. I forgot about that in my 20s, and was a complete functioning alcoholic forever. Now I want to be happy. I mean, hopefully, my shit could land on the radio, if radio could open up their minds a little bit and stop serving everyone Mountain Dew every day. Just take a risk on some shit, that’ll be cool, because I think then I can get my foot in the door and I can get my fucking yacht and go sail around the fucking Caribbean, you know? I’m down for that. Listening to fucking Jimmy Buffett and shit."

That interview is awesome. I love the shit-talking. "I was doing a lot of vocals for music and I was like, “I want to put this with what I do with Low and just have their vocals always upfront and actually maybe even louder than pop music in a cool way.” Like Yeezus, almost. That’s how Kanye likes his vocals. But the difference is Alan’s not annoying. Alan’s actually saying shit that could be important."

I clicked through that link to see the live performance of "Clarence White" he cites, and it was dope but I didn't remember it being so dope on the record. So I went back to the record and, yeah, it's not as dope. I think "The Invisible Way" might have been really important for the band, in the sense that they got a name producer and went for a safer sound and it was met with relative disinterest, so they said, fuck it, we're turning this ship around and heading in the other direction. Of course, having worked with Fridmann in the past they certainly know about pushing things into the red, but I love the idea that they were willing to lose themselves entirely in the music.

Yeah great interview. Funny that he comes across as candid and unfiltered as his forum posts

Then I remember we were at Pachyderm when it first opened again. There was a bluegrass band we were tracking. The only reason I did that album was to get to Alan, because Alan was producing the album and Alan asked me to come help. So it paid off.

laughing at this trampled by turtles dig

Looool

I also loves how he doesn't say their names as if no one will be able to guess who it is out of the dozens of bluegrass bands Sparhawk has produced

Haha. Love the honesty:

Was it smoother working on i,i?

No. I didn’t really want to work with nine producers and engineers, and he had to go through this whole collaboration thing. I mean, honestly, I don’t think that’s a great album. The production’s all over the place. Sonically, it sounds like a ’90s record to me. It doesn’t hit.

Totally agree, and the unlimited budget + unlimited collaborators approach has really been a bummer for both Bon Iver and Kanye. The fact that it worked out for Yeezus is the exception that proves the rule. What if they were actually forced to produce an album for themselves, or with just their main producer/engineer?

I do a lot of ketamine. A lot of HEY WHAT is very ketamine-based. I got into that and it kind of changed my life for the better.

Not a sentence I hear every day.

Ketamine therapy works for some people!

The fact that it worked out for Yeezus is the exception that proves the rule.

*cough*

Yeezus is a great record, the hatred it gets on ILM is thoroughly the minority opinion

So does disliking mist Kanye West after 2011.

*most

Half of Yeezus is great, half is pure unmitigated bullshit

Burton got into the gear nerd side a bit here
https://gearspace.com/board/electronic-music-instruments-and-electronic-music-production/1261587-lows-double-negative-sound-awesome-production-info.html

Half of Yeezus is great, half is pure unmitigated bullshit

― talkin' about his flat tire (DJP), Thursday, September 30, 2021 12:36 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I actually agree with you here, but the strong points are some of his strongest afaic. Plus it contains my favorite lyrics of the teens.

yeezus was the last good kanye record

it's mad how honest and confident this bloke is, just like 'yeah caned a load of ket and made a world-class record'. fair fucks, bj burton
― maelin, Thursday, 30 September 2021 12:49 (yesterday)

Indeed. mego-like melodic glitch was always the future of pop. Finally people are catching up to what I have been saying for 10000 years.

the Mego releases do seem like they influenced the last two Low records

I posted this a bit upthread but yeah, definitely: https://pitaemego.bandcamp.com/track/get-out-3

right on, robbie. i'm just breaking into mego & pita now via fennesz, and eschewed my instruments for just my laptop now...

re: Mego, I thought Florian Hecker's Acid In the Style of David Tudor was good, it seemed like a precursor to Rashad Becker's Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol 1

off topic, but Becker's record is one of the more incredible things I've heard in the last decade

Hitting the ground running in 2022! pic.twitter.com/jjCm8z4ZOz

— LOW (@lowtheband) October 3, 2021

wtf?

lol

i was walking around listening to 'hey what' on headphones today and a helicopter flew low overhead from behind me and i thought it was the music

im curious about bj’s process. he says in that interview upthread that they send him “songs” and have “complete trust” in him.. how much back and forth is there between them? how much of the sound is post-processing versus pedals?

i feel like the manipulated digital distortion comes more from techno and industrial than editions mego. not that it has to be one or the other

they've been pretty clear that the songs were all written beforehand & then deconstructed & arranged in the studio with bj's help.

https://www.vulture.com/2021/10/low-interview-alan-sparhawk-mimi-parker.html

this interview gives a bit of insight into the back & forth between the band & bj. i get the impression that alan really loves playing around with pedals etc. to get weird sounds, but he doesn't have the deep technical know-how that bj does, so bj's job is to execute alan & mimi's sonic or conceptual ideas, or just do his own thing and see if they like it.

thx!

it's still setting in for me that there are no drums on this record aside the last song. i literally never even noticed

It's like finding out the Doors didn't use bass. except for a band I actually care about lol

Oops apparently that's not really true? Let's just forget I mentioned that sub-Low band

there's a lot of side-chaining to the drums that got taken out which kinda gives the feel of the drums being there even though they aren't

since we're attempting to trace possible electronic music antecedents to the new Low sound, the first thing that came to mind when reading Burton comments about deleting the drums and using 'negative space' as a rhythmic device was Pan Sonic

for me though, what is most compelling is not Burton's production—which isn't really that unsual for those of us familiar with experimental electronic music, noise, etc.—but the band's openness and commitment to this new structural approach. I just love this sense of adventurousness and curiosity about finding new ways to articulate their songs, it speaks volumes to their intelligence and integrity as artists that they're still out here taking risks when they could be coasting on their rep, and this latest album shows that it's not just a late-career anomaly but a genuine development. it's really inspiring!

It's like finding out the Doors didn't use bass. except for a band I actually care about lol

― Vinnie, Sunday, October 3, 2021 6:12 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Nah they used killer session guys on the records, Larry Knetchel from the Wrecking Crew, Harvey Brooks (Dylan,Miles Davis), Jerry Scheff (Elvis), Lonnie Mack and some others

If you watch the Instagram video Alan posted of his pedal chain on "More" it's pretty amazing how he's able to come up with much of the noise and randomness without too much studio trickery. One of his pedals iirc was kind of a boutique harmonizer with all these randomizer attributes, which really helps fill in the space but also, and more importantly, accents and emphasizes all these overtones brought out by the distortion pedals. That's one reason I was surprised there were no synths on the record (though I guess in the video Alan *is* using a guitar synth pedal). Various drones and notes sort of appear and hover mysteriously in the background, but what I just figured were keyboard drones were actually the decay and delay of the guitar attack being randomly held, modulated and mutated.

Yeah, I just watched that video and it’s amazing how clean the melody is at first before he turns on the synth and metal(?) pedals. Goes from sounding by the books Low to a riff that could’ve been on a Deftones album.

Trust came out nineteen years ago today, and so I've been listening while withstanding an absolutely slammed day at work. Stealing away from my current task to say that this record remains one of my favorites of theirs, particularly in terms of lyrical content— there's a sinister quality to the lyrics here that is comparatively unrivalled, if sometimes approached, by other albums.

I also think that my first experiences of this record are a perfect way to encounter it— listening to it on repeat on long bike rides on lonely roads past flat Ohio cornfields.

going to start the poll next week if anyone wants to start thinking about it