David Bowie - Low

The first of the famous Berlin trilogy (followed by Heroes and Lodger), Low sails across an icy sea of electronics and experimentalism, simultaneously setting the post punk agenda and redefining Bowie’s artistic persona.

Bowie had already started moving in a new direction on his previous album, Station to Station. Burned out, paranoid and wracked by the delusions which would culminate in his infamous Nazi salute at Victoria station, Bowie left the narcotic netherworld of LA and relocated to Berlin. He gave up the coke, sobered up and re-energised his muse, with a little help from Brian Eno and his oblique strategies.

Eno provided much of the impetus for Low’s sparse, glacial synthesiser textures, but his experimental working methods were an equal inspiration to Bowie, who would eventually be credited as playing 12 different instruments in addition to his vocals.

The opening tracks mine a vein of dense, robotic funk. The sprightly Sound and Vision contrasts its shimmering keyboard cascades and danceable beat with Bowie’s deadpan vocals, and its extended intro confounds DJs to this day. Always Crashing in the Same Car welds heavily treated guitars and whooshing synthesisers to a gloomy chord sequence and an anguished vocal about a life going nowhere.

The second half of the album displays Eno’s influence to its fullest, foregoing songs altogether for dark swathes of instrumental ambient unease. Warzawa perfectly captures the bleak Eastern Bloc feeling of that ill fated city, which Bowie had visited in 1976. Art Decade is less intense, but no less interesting, and clearly shows the influence of Kraftwerk. Low would later be recast by composer Philip Glass into an orchestral work, and there certainly is something of a glacial grandeur about the closing instrumentals.

Low was a brave move away from the mainstream, showing Bowie had lost none of his facility to anticipate trends. Its marriage of cold synthesisers, doom laden vocals and stark, angular electronic noise would prove enormously influential on the post punk movement, not least Joy Division, whose first incarnation, Warsaw, took its name from the Low track. Bowie is currently undergoing one of his occasional critical renaissances, but his Berlin trilogy remains, for many, his last period of truly satisfying work.