Low
Long Division

THE REVIEW

The renewal of Rock found some of its greatest architects in Low, a trio from Duluth, who shook its structures by assimilating the most innovative achievements of avant-music into popular music.

> Rejecting the slo-core label, Low does not sing of annihilation, the degradation of their condition; their music seems to emerge from nothingness, Alan Sparhawk's guitar anthropomorphizes that nothingness with desperately alert worlds accompanied by the rustles of Mimi Parker, sowing entities, being in the vastness of human senselessness. It is not superficially silence music or spiritually trendy ideas but rather, much more consciously, their work is organized around the pauses or rather studies the persistence of sounds in human perception, the duration of the sound phenomenon that biologically finds its way through the psyche altered by urban alienation. No rock trio had ever reached such heights of sound experimentation, Low stitches together the minimalism of La Monte Young, ambient, classical music, and rock by penetrating and welding their statutes.

Semibreves, very long minim notes weave Long Division, the voices chase the unison at different octaves, the bass permeates the atmospheres with organic beats, the guitar creates, like those 3D children's books that you open and rise into palaces and houses, it constructs new spaces for the experience, adds to the human mind traits of unconsciousness buried under heaps of prohibitions, psychological removals. It is music so intimate that Low absorbs everything without distorting the subject; similar introspection touches the inviolable areas of the self where constraints and resistances, if they exploded, would lead to self-loss. Not whispers, therefore, but a recording of the deepest moments of human ontological activity, Long Division hides within icy appearances its propositional character, its vitality, abandoning the visionary psychedelia of the debut for a sound that is almost cruel in its realism.