Low

Saturday, June 15 2013. Within the grounds of the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis’ premier modern art gallery, the annual Rock The Garden festival is underway.

An hour earlier, a forbidding thunderstorm forced Dan Deacon’s festival-opening performance underground into the gallery car-park, his mess of looped-noise, FX-strafed pop, Konono No.1 vamps and corny crowd-participation hi-jinx leaving the audience chaotically ecstatic. Later on, as the weather breaks, crowd-pleasers Bob Mould, Silversun Pickups and Metric will please the crowd until 10pm.     

Right now, however, it’s 4.30pm, and Low have just walked onto the festival’s open-air main-stage, as a little sunshine breaks through the clouds. Stage left stands bassist Steve Garrington, looking to drummer Mimi Parker (centre stage) and her husband, guitarist Alan Sparhawk (stage right) for a signal, for the show to begin.

With Parker and Sparhawk having grown up in Duluth, a city neighbouring the mighty Lake Superior, two and a half hours’ drive from Minneapolis, Rock The Garden is pretty much a hometown show for Low. Their performance is being broadcast by local radio station 89.3 The Current, which has been spinning tracks from the group’s tenth studio album, The Invisible Way, since before its release that March. Later, many ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ on the internet will remark that Low’s slot at the festival had been the perfect opportunity for a ‘greatest hits’ set, maybe winning fresh ears to their cause, and expanding their loyal fanbase after twenty years of comfortable existence under the radar.

That isn’t the set that Low deliver.

Sparhawk begins gently strumming his guitar with his thumb, as Parker, stood behind her minimal kit of two cymbals and a snare, rubs a stiff brush around the circumference of one of those cymbals, and Garrington tickles the strings of his bass with his index finger. A stillness prevails; watch the performance on YouTube, and you’ll be forgiven for thinking you’ve clicked your browser on one of those looping .gifs where everything within the frame is entirely stationary, save for a solitary element left in motion.

Unlike .gifs, however, this performance is anything but silent, the trembling strings and cymbal shimmer hovering around three aching notes, a stream of sound which, though wordless, aches with meaning, with an unspecified weight and sadness. Like a holding pattern, they chase this sound for four minutes, waves of noise lapping at the edges, before it ebbs away, and Sparhawk edges to the microphone, his movements minimal, taut, like iceberg peaks hinting at the at-least-7/8ths he’s holding beneath the surface. Sparhawk takes a breath before, perfectly shadowed by Parker, he begins to sigh the opening words to Do You Know How To Waltz?

The penultimate track to their third album, 1996’s The Curtain Hits The Cast, the studio version of this funereal lament lasts 14 minutes and 37 seconds. On One More Reason To Forget – a live album Low, recorded at The Church Of St Philip Neri in Louisville Kentucky, which takes its title from a line in the song – Do You Know How To Waltz? stretches on for 17 minutes and 17 seconds. A version of the song recorded with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor while on tour in the late 90s, recordings of which have changed hands within tape-trading circles ever since, edges past the 25 minute mark.

This afternoon, Do You Know How To Waltz? lasts over 28 minutes of symphonic, minimal char, swinging slowly between the song’s dulcet creep and passages of potent speaker hum, rising from pregnant whisper to palpitating wall-of-noise before falling back and beginning the process again. A performance purposefully bled dry of any pyrotechnics, any kind of flash, in favour of a subtler substance.

At the song’s end, Sparhawk steps back from Parker’s drum-kit – where he and Garrington had, moments before, been scouring their strings as Mimi pummelled her cymbals – unplugs his guitar and leaves it on the floor and, before leaving the stage, utters, like a parent scolding an insolent child: “Drone, not drones.”

If Low had intended their performance at Rock The Garden to provoke controversy, it certainly succeeded. Minnesota’s Star-Tribune described the show as “unsettling and audacious”, noting that “a good chunk of the crowd was indifferent. Some were genuinely angry and disgusted. Others, mostly long-time fans, were nothing short of thrilled. Everyone was baffled.” To the Minnesota Daily, it was an “alienating performance”, one which 89.3 The Current’s DJ “awkwardly christened… as ‘art’”. On the radio station’s own website, Low’s set was contentious enough to provoke a blog entitled ‘The Audacity Of Low: What Does A Band ‘Owe’ Us When We Pay To See Them Perform?’, while on Twitter adverse reaction to the set found voice via the @fu_low account, which loftily opined, “Fuck you @lowtheband such assholes u made me make an account to give you a big fuck you!!!!!”

“It seems like it’s just normal now, with Twitter, to tell someone ‘You suck!’ or ‘Fuck you!’, to send that energy out there,” sighs Alan Sparhawk, down a transatlantic phone-line from his home in Duluth. Its several months later and there’s still something about that afternoon that bothers him, registering in the tiny, tense knot at the back of his gentle burr, in the frustration shadowing his carefully chosen words.

Humble by nature, Sparhawk’s reluctant to aggrandise the afternoon, the gesture, the performance, though similarly reluctant to write off its purpose. “It’s probably the biggest local show we’ve ever played,” he continues. “We wanted to do something interesting, a little variety from all the other bands that were gonna hack away the rest of the night. I half-joked about trying to contact Prince and get him to come down and play a tune. Then the idea of playing Do You Know How To Waltz? came up… it just seemed perfect. We were on the fence, right up until we went on. But it seemed like the right thing to do.

“I could definitely tell, when we got done, that there were people who were really… not into it,” he adds. “I was picking up my gear and could hear people yelling at me.” Sparhawk’s not surprised at the reaction, but it still bothers him. “Something’s creeping into American culture… I guess it’s afterbirth from the last several elections just being so hateful… Like, ‘I don’t like this, therefore it sucks.’ No. It does not ‘suck’. It’s just that you don’t like it. You’re going to be just fine in half an hour.

“People were, like, ‘How dare you bring politics into a music concert?’” Sparhawk laughs, mirthlessly. “Like, do you even know the history of music in this country? A lot of people took it like we were trying to stick it to them, like ‘Fuck you’. But we weren’t. I wanted to say something at the end that I thought was significant. We have a platform, and I’m not gonna waste it. When I’m an old man, and nobody gives a shit about what I’m doing, I’m still gonna give a shit about the fact that this country is killing people, but I’m not gonna have the chance to say ‘This is wrong’ and have people listen anymore.

“So yeah, I said ‘Drone, not drones’. Because I think drones are wrong, and I think that’s the kind of shit that needs to be said from a stage. And if people are offended by that, then I guess we know what side they’re on. If this generation’s just gonna turn into a bunch of…” He trails off, sounding a little bit like Breaking Bad’s Walter White, another decent man, faced down by all that’s indecent beyond his control but unwilling to relinquish his decency. “If they’re just gonna separate music away from the joys and frustrations of their life, then we’re definitely gonna lose something.”

Low have never really made a habit of such simple polemical sloganeering. Their new album The Invisible Way begins with the kind of minimal, luminous strum they’ve made their own for two decades now, a song called Plastic Cup, opening in tight close-up on a kid getting high with his friends before, in a couple of elegant, economical lines, the kid’s future gets fouled up into a defeated cycle of drug tests and Sparhawk’s narrative speeds on, past our civilisation’s demise and on to another subsequent civilisation picking over our detritus and imagining the polystyrene cup the kid had to piss in as some King’s chalice – a twist of black humour that seems to double as an oblique, withering glance towards the ‘War On Drugs’.

“I don’t know how consciously I moved the song from the drug war to archaeology, it just sort of flowed that way,” Sparhawk says. “I’m never intentional. I’ve never sat down thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to sit down and write a song about *that.’ When I write, a lot of stuff just falls out, and the pattern comes later. The trick is having your eyes open, being able to see the song arrive, to grab onto it, without bogging it down too much with your ego. Over time, I’ve learned that you can trust the voice you think you don’t have control over to be a lot more honest than you would be, consciously. The trick is to get your brain in shape, get it used to letting those things out. That’s the rigorous part of writing: working your brain to where it’s okay with letting those things out, okay with crossing those lines between your subconscious and your conscious.”

Does it get any easier with time, reaching that honesty?

“It’s always hard,” he answers. “It’s always difficult. Every time you go to write, you’re always looking at the same blank wall. And it’s daunting. The only thing age does is just give you subtle reminders, like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember. This is how it is.’ You remember, you feel like nothing in the beginning. You’re gonna feel empty, like there’s nothing left. You’ll question everything. And then at some point, everything will come together. Longevity only gives you reassurance that, yeah, it’s still frustrating and hard, but it is productive if you just dive in and do it.”

If it’s so hard, what motivates you to keep putting yourself through it?

“I’m driven by a desire to be understood,” he says. “As much as I talk – and I could jibber-jabber all day – being able to transfer ideas into words, to make myself understood, has always frustrated me, ever since I was a kid. But for some reason, when I’m writing a song, there’s this permission… to not have to explain it all, not have to tell the thing perfectly. And so, somehow, I’m able to communicate perfectly. I think anybody who writes, or has ever been creative, has found that edge, where they felt like, without understanding necessarily what they were doing, they were actually communicating better than they would otherwise.

“It’s an effort to be understood. Whether it’s ‘I hate you, and I want you to know how much I hate you’, or ‘I love you’, or ‘Here’s something I’ve gone through, and it’s my only way to explain it, and if it somehow resonates with you, then we have something here.’ I think that drives everybody, even the most kind of contrary, ‘I don’t care what people think’ kind of artist… Even Michael Gira of Swans is trying to be understood. He has something very intense to say, and whether you want to listen or not, he’s making a valiant, Biblical-level effort to say it. And I think, personally, the way he says it is really important and powerful and vital.”

While Low have never really explored the outer reaches of volume like Gira’s Swans, that’s certainly the direction taken by the other essential album Sparhawk appears on this year, Retribution Gospel Choir’s 3. Always a more vigorous, more explicitly ‘rock’ proposition than Low, their third album sees Sparhawk’s side-project abandon their familiar song-based aesthetic for two long, inspired pieces: Can’t Walk Out, a molasses-slow and tungsten-weighted blues, Sparhawk’s doomy, colossal guitar ringing out leaden, crackling, slithering riffs, sounding like Neil Young and Crazy Horse playing space-rock on Dylan Carlson’s gear; and Seven, where honeyed, harmony-wreathed choruses glide in and out of cloudbursts of potent scree, like CSNY on a celestial bummer, Sparhawk in heavy karmic conversation with venerated underground guitar-hero and Wilco sideman, Nels Cline.

“Retribution Gospel Choir had recorded two albums that sort of had typical ‘songs’,” says Sparhawk. “We toured a lot, and live, it was getting more ‘out’. We’re a pretty improvisational band, and at some point it was getting really ‘out’. We had this residency down in Minneapolis for a month, and each week we worked on these songs, and each week they seemed to get longer and longer. I thought, we’ve got to record these, see if we can fit them on two sides of vinyl. Like, ‘Wow, if I were in the audience I would think this was awesome! And if I had this on record, I’d think it was awesome.’ Nels Cline was coming through with Wilco, and we were able to kidnap him for an hour and play. He came in and we said, ‘Here’s the song, it’s in A Minor, we’ll just start playing it.’ And we played it for just under an hour, straight through, and the track that’s on the record is the first twenty minutes, essentially.”

There’s a great power to longer, more exploratory music, something Low have explored on their glowering meander through Neil Young’s Cowgirl In The Sand in the company of the Dirty Three, or the Rock The Garden performance.

“I’ve always loved long, building music,” says Sparhawk. “I keep coming back to Michael Gira – we just did a couple of shows with Swans – but I was just dumbfounded by how advanced and how sophisticated he is with that stuff, being able to build something for fifteen minutes from essentially just one chord, and yet give it these stages, these orchestrated, refined arrangements of when things come in, what they’re doing… There are some really amazing, possibilities when you open up music and let it be as big as it can be.”

‘Big’ isn’t necessarily a game The Invisible Way plays. While their work with Dave Fridmann, on 2005’s The Great Destroyer and its 2008 follow-up, Drums & Guns, rewrote the ‘slow and low’ blueprint Low had explored in their earlier days – the sound saw them pigeonholed reluctantly as ‘slow-core’ – on The Invisible Way, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy just lets Low be Low, to do what they do best.

The result is their best album yet, their strongest brace of songs. Clarence White is purposeful chamber pop the equal of Automatic-era REM, its chorus of “I know I shouldn’t be afraid” ringing and anthemic. Amethyst is a prickly, slow-moving brood, and Sparhawk sings sweet and lilting on the bewitching Mother, while there’s a warm, hopeful joy to his elegiac On My Own, the album’s building, blissful epic. Parker’s own contributions are highlights: the rousing, keening, piano-led rumble of So Blue; the lonesome strum of Holy Ghost, as close as Mimi’s gotten yet to Patsy Cline’s mellifluous melancholy; and Just Make It Stop, as perfect a song as they’ve ever cut, Mimi harmonising with herself and articulating a desperation that’s sad, urgent, succinct and erudite. On the prairie lullaby of Waiting, the couple share sleepy-eyed harmonies that could soothe the jagged nerves of a speed-freak.

Sparhawk says he can’t remember exactly when he first sang with Parker. “I knew her family was musical, a little bit, and that she sang a little bit, so when she opened her mouth it wasn’t like a big surprise to me; it was more like, ‘Sweet! I’ve got her to do it.’ [laughs] So I knew it was there… It was probably when we were 18 or 19, hanging around the house, I was probably strumming Heart Of Gold by Neil Young, or something like that. Singing some songs. I remember, when I was still a teenager, going over their house, and her mother would take out the accordion. As soon as she knew I knew how to play guitar, she told me to bring the guitar so she could play the accordion, playing through The Old Ragged Cross, and old country gospel songs, her repertoire, the tunes she grew up on and loved. I feel privileged to have been able to, for want of a better word, ‘jam’ with her family.

“Later, when we started Low, there’s just a couple of songs on that first record where there’s harmonies. I specifically remember writing a song called Words, vividly remember our old apartment, where I was standing, how pissed off I was, all this stuff... And I remember going into that chorus, just strumming it, and she came in on the harmony and… I don’t know… It was like putting a spirit into a body, for me, when that happened, when she first puts that harmony on there… Like taking something that’s two-dimensional and making it three dimensional.”

Was Low your first project together?

“Yeah.”

Did she need much encouragement?

“She needed a little encouragement, yeah. [laughs] I had been in some bands and dabbled around here and there. When we started Low, I coaxed her first with, ‘Oh, it’ll be simple, just one cymbal and one drum.’ She’d played percussion in high school, but I was trying to get her to be the drummer. So we started real simple, and she hasn’t really expanded too much since then. She was a little reluctant. Even to this day, she really, of anybody I know… It’s partially nerves, and partially she’s just not that kind of person – she’s really not terribly interested in being in front of people. She’s very shy, I don’t know, its part of her family culture … I’m still a stuttering fourteen year old boy with his guitar. I’m as bright-eyed and wondrous about it as ever, unfortunately. She’s a good balance. I think my erratic psyche and her very in-control, very reserved nature have pretty much saved each other, over the years.

“We’ve been really lucky,” Sparhawk says, finally. “I don’t know… I remember when Mim and I were younger, when we first got married… We used to talk about how we’d love to do something in life together, be in business together or work together. To just be together. Music ended up being that thing, I guess. It’s good to have her there. She is the essence that makes us able to do what we do, I think.”