Low quietly take over the world - V29 May/June 2004

LOW quietly takes over the world

When Marc Gartman went to Duluth, Minnesota to shoot footage of the band Low, he could have hardly anticipated that the project in question-a short documentary on the somewhat elusive band-would eventually encompass more than a year of his life, resulting in not only a feature-length documentary but a deeply personal music collaboration as well. The band, a trio comprised of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker (the soft-spoken and sweetly religious married couple), and Zak Sally (the equally quiet comic book artist) had already been making some of the slowest and most beautifully ethereal music in existence for nearly a decade by the time Gartman came calling. Grounded by the harmonies of husband and wife, Low's sound is one based on an austere minimalism. With a bare bones setup of guitar, bass, and simple drum set, the group's music is often so quiet as to be barely there at all, but has more recently grown into a sound that is something akin to a slow building roar. And just as the band's music has grown in decibels, their popularity has steadily grown as well, taking them from their humble home in sleepy Duluth to points all around the globe, scoring films and commercials, even opening for Radiohead at Madison Square Garden. The delicate balance existing within the group, as well as the balance between their private lives and their increasing notoriety, is smartly explored in Gartman's resulting documentary, Closer Than That. The film, nearly two years in the making, is part of a soon to be released box set that chronicles the slow evolution of one of America's most intimate bands. Alan Sparhawk and Marc Gartman discuss.

T COLE RACHEL: So, how did the documentary come to be?

MARC GARTMAN: I just contacted them through their website, back in like, 1999, and asked if I could film them. Eventually Alan emailed me back saying, "the rest of the band says no, but I don't want to say no... yet."

ALAN SPARHAWK: And then he weaseled his way into hanging out with us.

TCR: Did you just hop on a plane and go to Duluth?

MG: Oh no, not at first...

AS: He came to shows and visited with us, and then over the next year or two he toured with us a little, and by then we knew him and were comfortable enough to have him come out to Duluth and stay. And by then there was some stuff going on that he could be a part of, so he wasn't just sitting around the house.

TCR: From the band's point of view, how weird was it to have him around filming you? You seem like such private people.

AS: It was a slow process. He filmed shows at first, then toured in the van with us, then stayed with us. If he had just come out and stayed with us right away, it wouldn't have gone well.

TCR: How does it feel to look at the film now?

AS: It's weird. But anytime you're forced to look at yourself from a different angle than you're used to, it's... it's like listening to your own voice on an answering machine, or looking at an old picture of yourself. It's great sometimes, to see yourself communicating in a certain way, or seeing that there are parts of your personality that you always hoped actually did exist, and you can see that they do, but then you see yourself coming across in ways that are...hard to watch. But the film wouldn't be any good if that weren't the case.

TCR: What was the impetus for doing this? What were you trying to say about the band, or about yourselves as people?

AS: We weren't interested at first, but we got interested later.

MG: I remember listening to the "Songs for a Dead Pilot" EP and really wanting to figure out who these people were. Whenever I think about the way listening to that record made me feel, it completely freaked me out. But in a good way. I just couldn't understand what kinds of minds were making this stuff. This weird, disturbing beautiful music.

TCR: And how long did this project take?

AS: Oh, a long time. . .

MG: All told, about two and a half years

TCR: So, this thing totally took on a life of it's own. Marc, did you ever think you'd end up becoming good friends with the band, you even ended up playing on their last record.

MG: Yeah, I played the banjo on Trust. It was nice. I just wanted to do a good job for them. And they wouldn't let me sing, so...

TCR: This film will be a part of your upcoming box set, what else will that involve?

AS: It's three full discs of music - b sides and compilation tracks, unreleased stuff - then a DVD with Marc's film, all the videos we've ever made, and a book of pictures. It's a lot of stuff.

TCR: This sort of caps your first decade as a band. Is it hard to believe that you've been doing this for so long?

AS: It's only strange when you really start to think back on it and try to account for exactly what you were doing all that time. But yeah, ten years is a long time, and there aren't a lot of bands who do that. Even famous bands. Were the Beatles making music for ten years? Not that I'm comparing us to them or anything.

TCR: Do you feel distanced from a lot of the older material?

AS: It's interesting. You can see how we progressed, and it definitely follows the evolution of the band. There are a couple of songs that are demos we made after having only played one show, and there's stuff where you can tell that we are recording ourselves. Those pieces, interestingly enough, contain some nice little accidents, even if they evidence that we didn't know what we were doing. In some ways, it's the unreleased stuff that tells the true story of the band.

TCR: As for the story of Low, how exactly did you guys come together?

AS: We just kind of got together, you know? We had this idea for doing something different, which mostly had to do with minimalism and playing really quiet and slow. We wanted to touch on some things that other bands were doing that we thought could be taken much further and experimented with. I'd had been in a regular rock band for a while and had grown tired of that. I wanted to do something that would be more challenging to listeners, and something that could involve Mim, my wife. I knew she was a talented singer, but we needed to figure out a band that she could thrive in.

TCR: It's hard enough to negotiate the internal politics of being in a band, but how do you manage that while also being married to a bandmate? Plus, like the film shows, you have a little girl who also goes out on the road with you. It's pretty intense.

AS: Yeah. I guess there's not a lot of people doing things the way we're doing it. Sometimes it's really hard, but most of the time it works out fine...when we're not touring we spend most of our time at home in Duluth, and it's cheap to live here. We have very simple lives, so we can do the band thing and live from it. It took a long time to get to that point though.

TCR: It's amazing that three people on stage with such minimal instruments can make music that's so spare but at times also so loud.

AS: Well, once you establish the template, the parameters, the success or failure of a show kind of depends on how you can manipulate those things. When we're playing loud, we're not actually playing loud or even very hard, it's just by comparison to our other songs that makes certain songs sound louder, but really...

MG: (jumps back in) You guys are like the David Blaine of rock. Illusionists!

AS: Yeah, the David Blaine of rock. It's always an illusion of something, and it's basically always an endurance test. Like, we were thinking it might be funny to play a show where we start at 4 in the afternoon and play every song we know at once, which would probably take 8 or 9 hours. So...maybe we won't do that.

The Low box set, A Lifetime of Temporary Relief, will be released through Chairkickers' Music/Secretly Canadian in May.
For information: www.chairkickers.com