From ignorant farmers to making one of 2018’s most revered records, Low and producer Kramer talk to The Quietus’s Daniel Dylan Wray about the making of ‘I Could Live In Hope’, the album that started it all off.
“‘We feel like we’re on borrowed time,’ jokes Low’s Alan Sparhawk, sitting in a BBC 6 Music studio in Salford, moments before they will turn the room into reverential silence with a tender yet quietly furious live session for Marc Riley. ‘We’ve been living with the concept of how long we’ve been going for a while. It’s weird and we didn’t expect to be around this long.’
“He’s reflecting on a quarter century of Low, who on February 18, 1994 released their debut album I Could Live in Hope, a record that managed to cut through the post-Nirvana alt-rock and grunge noise by turning themselves down – way down. They combined the interweaving husband and wife vocals of Sparhawk and Mimi Parker – both forcefully beautiful in their own way, and always poised and poignantly restrained – with drums that whispered as much as they banged and guitars that shimmered with watery reverb.
“The term slowcore was thrown at them jokingly by a friend but it stuck. When they appeared on the front cover of The Wire magazine in 2018, the tag ‘godfathers of slowcore’ accompanied the feature. ‘Everyone wants to be the genesis of something original,’ says Parker. ‘So it’s flattering whether or not it’s true.'”
Stream Low’s ‘I Could Live in Hope’ below and catch them live at Rewire 2019 onSaturday, 30 March. Learn more at Low.
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→ https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/61dByu8oBt4qdym9Rkz39w
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