Interviewed autumn 1996 at American Hotel in Amsterdam.

Low is a threesome from Duluth a small place close to the Canadian border, reasonably warm in summer, arctic conditions in winter, quiet all year round. Just like Low: Mimi, singing drummer, and Alan, singing guitarist, have known each other since they were nine years old and are now married. Mimi: “It seemed the most natural thing to do.” Alan met Zak, the bassplayer and the least quiet of the three, when he was still in high school. The three of them started Low seven years ago.

Although Low has been around for some time, only recently they got noticed because they did a cover of ‘Transmission’ for the Joy Division tribute album ‘The End’ late 1995. This was by far the slowest rendition of a song that originally is so fast and energetic. Although slow, it retained the same impact and maybe even added more. Alan: “We were very honored to do that. We were already playing the song live and the guy who did the compilation saw us in New York and wanted to have us on the record. It’s kind of ironic the way we play it because it’s one of Joy Division’s most uptempo, almost punk songs. I don’t think we would have been able to do something else like ‘the eternal’, it would have been too typical. Like: ‘Oh Low, they are probably going to play ‘here are the young men’.”

It’s strange Low are noticed now because of one excellent cover, their work until now has been amazingly, how shall I say it, well.. slow. Alan: “When we first started. We thought: ‘oh nobody is going to like this, and it would really be anoying to people’. So we thought that would be fun, we were just going to play and see what happens. Sometimes it does, people get anoyed, and it’s fun because people can get very angry at us because we’re so quiet. We play music to people who really like music. I don’t know, it would be the music I’d like to listen to.” And now with the third album ‘Curtain hits the cast’ they have mastered the art. Alan: “It’s a challenge to play this slow. It’s fun to try and pull it off. When you’re playing slower. You hear things that you don’t when playing fast. Your mind listens to the music differently when you play slow.” His wife Mimi continues: “It’s quite difficult. It’s because everything is so quiet and slow, and when you stand on stage you feel almost naked in a way. You don’t have the loud wall of music.” Alan: “When you make a mistake and things aren’t going well, you have nothing to cover it up. But when it’s going really well, you can feel good.” Mimi: “It’s the best when it’s probably the most terrifying up there.”

Listening to the album you can get so engulfed by it that as soon as it stops it seems like you’ve been listening to it for hours. Are Low experimenting with time? Alan: “Well like with playing slow. The mind keeps track time of time in a different way. Someone was telling me that he was experimenting with how people perceive things, when a pace has been set and you get a certain time to absorb something you go about it completely different then when you know it’s going to be fast. When it’s going slow, you know it’s going to be slow your mind thinks about it differently. When you go slow you put more emphasize on events and little things that are there. You get a lot more detail, and that is what I’m interested in. The perception of time. How our mind perceives music in time.” One song on the album is a particular example of perception altering, it starts by building and layering a ringing guitar, suddenly a few phrases of song and then on the word ‘forget’ the song goes back again to the abstract layering and it goes on for ten minutes, but it seems like hours. Alan: “I like a lot of the minimalistic sound stuff. But I don’t think we could be anything like that. Not like Spectrum or Main. We like to write songs. A song like ‘Do you know how to waltz’ is an exception. I don’t think we’ll ever do a record with twenty minute songs on it. We still like writing pop songs. We consider ourselves pop. That song was an experiment. We don’t want to be labeled as ‘the band who play that long song without any structure’. But we enjoy all that stuff.” It might be impossible to go any slower from here on. Isn’t it maybe time to bring in other instruments? Alan: “Well I don’t know. Maybe some of that. Although there could be one thing that would be cool.” All of a sudden talking to both his bandmates: “Just drums and two synths.” Mimi: “What?” Zak: “Drums and two synths? Like a drum, an SK-1 and a Moog? Ah.. We’re moving into the synth age!”