Low – Pioneers of Slowcore.

Low in concert tonight – recorded at All Tomorrow’s Parties and introduced by none other than John Peel and broadcast by The BBC on April 19, 2002.

Low had a major impact on American Indie since their inception in 1993 until disbanding after the untimely death of co-founder/drummer/vocalist Mimi Parker in 2022.

Low were known for their live performances. Rock club audiences sometimes watched the band while seated on the floor. During their early career, the band often faced unsympathetic and inattentive audiences in bars and clubs, to which they responded by bucking rock protocol and turning their volume down. The dynamic range of their early music made it susceptible to background noise and chatter, since many of their songs were very quiet. A performance in 1996 at the South by Southwest festival was overpowered when a Scandinavian hardcore band was booked downstairs. The Trust album marked a turning point, and Low’s music developed a more emphatic sound.

Their shows often featured drastically reinterpreted cover versions of famous songs by Joy Division and The Smiths, in addition to their own original material. In performance, Low showed off a sense of humor not necessarily found on their recordings; a tour in early 2004 featured a cover of OutKast‘s hit song “Hey Ya!“. At a gig in Los Angeles on Halloween 1998, the band took the stage as a Misfits tribute act, complete with corpse paint and black clothing.

At the 2008 End of the Road Festival in Dorset, England, Sparhawk abruptly ended the band’s performance by ripping the strings and lead out of his guitar, throwing it to the ground and then hurling it into the crowd before exiting the stage. He had earlier informed the audience that it had been a “crappy day”. In 2010 they performed The Great Destroyer at the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona. On Friday July 13, 2012, Low gave a candlelit concert at Halifax Minster in England.

Low’s performance at the 2013 Rock the Garden concert in Minneapolis consisted of a slowed and lengthened version of their drone rock song “Do You Know How to Waltz?” followed by Alan saying, “Drone, not drones,” a reference to an anti-drone sticker made by Minneapolis’s Luke Heiken; the performance resulted in mass audience confusion and divisive online discussion. The performance lasted half an hour and was broadcast live on radio station KCMP, which had been playing cuts of their recent album. Low had performed a more traditional show for KCMP at the Fitzgerald Theater earlier in the year.

Low played at the 2022 Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, which would end up becoming one of their final sets. They notably covered Napalm Death‘s “You Suffer“, and the festival uploaded the band’s entire performance to YouTube.

On September 4, 2022, at what proved to be the band’s final performance, Low took the stage at the Water Is Life Festival in Duluth.

The music of Low was characterized by slow tempos and minimalist arrangements, and has been described as “atmospheric songs marked by long, unsettling silences.” Jason Ankeny of AllMusic described the band’s sound as “delicate, austere, and hypnotic.” He assessed: “The trio’s formative music rarely rose above a whisper, divining its dramatic tension in the unsettling open spaces created by the absence of sound.” Early descriptions sometimes referred to the band’s style as a rock subgenre called “slowcore“, and Low were often compared to the band Bedhead, who also occasionally performed in the style in the 1990s. However, Low ultimately disapproved of the term.

Parker and Sparhawk’s vocal harmonies represented perhaps the group’s most distinctive element; critic Denise Sullivan writes that their shared vocals are “as chilling as anything Gram [Parsons] and Emmylou [Harris] ever conspired on—though that’s not to say it’s country-tinged, just straight from the heart.” Low’s style became increasingly experimental and adherent to post-rock over time, gradually incorporating elements of electronica and glitch music on later releases while retaining their minimalist approach.

Influences on Parker and Sparhawk as Low included R.E.M., Siouxsie and the Banshees, Simon & Garfunkel, Big Star, OMD, Young Marble Giants and the Velvet Underground. Sparhawk also cited Nick Cave as his all-time favorite artist, and abstract painter Mark Rothko as his “oddest musical inspiration”.

Take it away.