Bowie Goes Alien and Ambient
Review of the Bloomsbury Academic 33 and 1/3 paperback (August 19, 2005), released simultaneously with the eBook.

Reading David Bowie's Low after reading Brian Eno's Another Green World (2007) was a natural as Eno joined Bowie in recording the album in 1976 while still very much under the influence of using his Oblique Strategies methods. The Oblique Strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas* (1975) are a set of offbeat texts printed on cue cards as assembled by Eno together with artist Peter Schmidt. They were used as a method of breaking out of an impasse or writer's block in an artist's work. Not all of Bowie's musicians were enthused about the process, but things still managed to resolve themselves.

Oblique Strategies certainly created tensions, as [guitarist] Carlos Alomar explained to Bowie biographer David Buckley: "Brian Eno had come in with all these cards that he had made and they were supposed to eliminate a block. Now, you've got to understand something. I'm a musician. I've studied music theory. I've studied counterpoint and I'm used to working with musicians who can read music. Here comes Brian Eno and he goes to a blackboard. He says: 'Here's the beat, and when I point to a chord, you play the chord.' So we get a random picking of chords. I finally had to say, 'This is bullshit, this sucks, this sounds stupid.'"
...
It may well have been the creative tension between that kind of traditionalist approach and Eno's experimentation that was more productive that the "planned accidents" themselves. As Eno himself has said. "The interesting place is not chaos, and it's not total coherence. It's somewhere on the cusp of those two." - excerpts from pgs. 67-68 in "David Bowie's Low."

See album cover at https://i.discogs.com/U3pqMqj3_qkfW3A7TSy0MJCOfaPuERLdNEWjjxgFjRs/rs:fit/g:sm/q:...
Album cover for Low by David Bowie from 1977. Image sourced from Discogs.

Hugo Wilcken's summary of Low's album tracks is preceded by a survey of Bowie's personal issues involving drug-induced paranoia while recording his album Station to Station the previous year, as well as the recording of Iggy Pop's The Idiot (released March 1977) in France during the sessions just before Low. Bowie and Pop had moved to Europe, initially to France and then to Berlin, in order to escape the LA drug culture. Wilcken's overview of this extended period was excellent and I very much enjoyed the story the beginning of Bowie's Berlin Trilogy (1976-1979) series of albums which is still the Bowie music that I most enjoy listening to almost 50 years later.

See book cover at https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1710959355...
The cover image for the movie tie-in edition of "The Man Who Fell to Earth" (1963) by Walter Tevis which adapts the image from the "Low" album cover. Image sourced from Goodreads.

Soundtrack
Listen to the full 11-track Low album via a YouTube playlist which starts here or on Spotify here.

Trivia and Links
David Bowie's Low is part of the Bloomsbury Academic 33 1/3 series of books surveying significant record albums, primarily in the rock and pop genres. The GR Listopia for the 33 1/3 series is incomplete with only 38 books listed as of May 2024. For an up-to-date list see Bloomsbury Publishing with 193 books listed as of May 2024.

Footnote
* I'm somewhat surprised that the NABers (i.e. Not A Bookers) have not found and deleted this one yet. But perhaps their activities have become more restrained since the NAB Wars of 2020-2021. ( )

Is the absolute best book about David Bowie that has ever been written and although it only covers a short period of time in his life I wish that it covered every part of his life maybe the author could be convinced to write another book? ( )

Low was a seminal album for me. I think I knew it at the time, but it somehow didn't really register for a year or two.

By the time I got to Low, I'd already gone through the Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs, and Young Americans albums, and thought I knew what I was getting into.

Then I heard the second side of Low. I didn't know what to think. I'd literally never heard anything like it before. Then, within a year of listening to that, I discovered Roxy Music and, more importantly, Japan's stunning Quiet Life album, and they both changed how I listened to music.

So, I really looked forward to this entry into the sometimes fascinating, sometimes dull 33 1/3 series. I loved that the author chose to really set the period, focusing almost as much on Bowie's Station To Station and Iggy Pop's The Idiot as much as the Low album.

He set the tone, made us understand the key players in Bowie, Brian Eno, and Tony Visconti, as well as the character of both Berlin and The Chateau where some of the album was recorded.

Great insight, great book. ( )

An extra half-star for inspiring me to listen to the album a couple of times while reading. Low was the first album I bought with my own money -- not as a shared investment with my sister. She hated it, but I played it over and again, dreaming of romantic artistic despair -- weltschmerz and sturm und drang. Wilcken's most successful argument is that this was Bowie leaving America, embracing Europe, and inventing the strange blend of artist and rock star which he inhabited for the rest of his career and life. ( )

I have read several of the books in this series and, to be honest, it's a pretty mixed bag. Hugo Wilcken's contribution, however, is one of the best yet. The author analyzes David Bowie's personal life in the mid-1970s - chaotic - and the circumstances in which the album was made. Each track is given a chapter of its own, and although Wilcken refers to other albums made around the same time (e.g. Station to Station; The Idiot) and the music that influenced Bowie (e.g. Kraftwerk; Neu!), it enhances rather than distracts from the creation of Low. Wilcken's writing is lucid and easy to understand for a non-musician like me, and I finished the book with an even greater appreciation of Bowie's masterpiece. ( )