"Berlin has the strange ability to make you write only the important things. Anything else you don't mention....and in the end you produce Low."

David Bowie's 1977 album represented another image and sound shift for the famous chameleon. The songwriting was recognizably Bowie, but the songs were fused with avant-garde electronic stylings and highly treated guitars, prophesizing the direction music would take in the next decade. It's a rock record, but one with a huge debt to the ambient and Kraut-rock Bowie immersed himself in after arriving in Berlin. The first half consists of brief rockers, featuring guitars and dissonant electronics. The second half is virtually entirely ambient and synthesized. David Bowie:

"I think the biggest influence on that album is the work of Kraftwerk, prior to Autobahn. The new German sound was really appealing to me: Can, Edgar Froese's band Tangerine Dream... not that band so much, but Edgar's solo things were really, I thought, were very evocative. And there is this ambient thing that was happening. And I tried to apply some of the randomness on it, again because I associated with it immediately because of my interest in random sound amd what you could do with this random sound..."

Nate gives Eno a tad too much of the credit for Low's ambient works; he only truly shares writing credits with Bowie on one song, "Warszawa". While it's not exactly Cluster & Eno, Eno was however a huge influence and a valuable collaborator, and played a number of instruments (mostly electronic) on the album. Bowie would come up with the ideas, and filter them through Eno, who had the prerequisite knowledge to make the sounds Bowie was looking for. Eno, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and other electronic musicians of the 1970s would go on to reach a larger audience, mostly due to Bowie's bringing their music to the foreground on Low and the two albums which followed. All in all, Low was one of the most influential and creative albums of the late '70s.

  1. Speed Of Life
  2. Breaking Glass
  3. What In The World
  4. Sound And Vision
  5. Always Crashing In The Same Car
  6. Be My Wife
  7. A New Career In A New Town
  8. Warszawa
  9. Art Decade
  10. Weeping Wall
  11. Subterraneans

"Sometimes you get so lonely..."