Last month, I travelled over to Duluth, Minnesota to interview Low for the issue of Uncut that comes out later this week. While I was there, I emailed a couple of questions about the band to Nels Cline (via Wilco’s publicist), who guests on the wonderful new Low album, “C’Mon”. A few days later, I received a very long response from Nels; too long, unfortunately, for me to publish in full in the mag. An edited version runs alongside my feature, but I’m very pleased to reproduce the whole thing here; a really thoughtful and insightful piece which manages to articulate the specific greatness of Low as well as anything I can recall reading. Here it is: “I don't remember when I first heard Low play 'live' - maybe it was at The Troubadour in West Hollywood. But I certainly remember when I first heard them because it was when The Geraldine Fibbers (Carla Bozulich's band) were setting up in Hollywood to record "Butch" in December of 1996. Steve Fisk and John Goodmanson were making that record with us and had just finished recording and mixing "When The Curtain Hits The Cast", the second Low record. Steve Fisk put it on in the control room - pretty loud - to reference the playback system. I think everyone in The Fibbers was already aware of them except for me, the "new guy" (I had officially joined The Fibbers the month before). I was so blown away by the beauty and poignance of the songs and sound, and that feeling of admiration, identification, and awe has never left me. Since then, Carla and I, as Scarnella, did a couple of shows with Low in New York City and Hoboken, and I have heard them 'live' many times. They have seen changes in the bass chair, have even gotten loud. When I joined Wilco in 2004, I was asked which artists I would like to see open for future shows, and Low was on that shortlist. It took a while to happen, but when it did I was asked to sit in with them on a song or two, playing lap steel. What a thrill! Truth be known, I am rather obsessed with Low's sound and style because I hear it as possessing a kind of musical and lyrical economy that is so beautifully voiced sonically and which also has a scalpel-like ability to cut into one's psyche, an incisiveness, sometimes without my understanding why or how this is happening. Sometimes I think it has something to do with my Nordic DNA or something. But I see the subject matter of Low songs - mendacity, doubt, grief, ambivalence, familial love, bitterness, spirituality, your take here - as universal, ultimately. I suppose my favourite Low records are the aforementioned "Curtain", "Trust", "Things We Lost In The Fire", and I feel I must add this new record, "C'mon", to that list. Low records are my travelling companions. Like favourite movies or other works of art, I check in with them occasionally, or they check back in with me, and the texture and timbre of my life is again measured or assessed. The beauty of their music haunts me, at times crushing me with its knife-like acumen, at other times making me drift away on clouds of wistfulness. Fuck, these words are clunky, and I apologise... For anyone interested in Low at all, besides listening to their records, I highly recommend the documentary about them from a couple of years ago. I lent it to someone a while ago after I watched it, but I think it's called "Murderer" (after one of Low's most hauntingly beautiful and leading songs). It is amazingly revealing. Like Low's music, it traverses a region between lush and stark with a deft hand. Since my becoming aware of Low, I have watched as Alan has started other projects, both of which seemed to address a burning need to "rock out", to make a racket, be immersed in a mushroom cloud of rhythm and guitar, to really cut loose. I actually have sat in briefly with both The Black-Eyed Snakes and with The Retribution Gospel Choir and witnessed/felt the music, watched Alan go for it, heard his beautiful guitar sound in modes both subtle and strangulated. With records like "The Great Destroyer", Low had surges of volume on brilliant songs like "Pissing" and "When I Go Deaf". That aesthetic, minus the Dave Fridmann compressed layers of distortion, is evident on this new record, "C'mon", but is more like a Phil Spector "Wall Of Sound". I believe Alan said they recorded "C'mon" in the church they often play in (where they did "Trust" with Tchad Blake), and it sounds deep and beautiful. Producer Matt Beckley has made this record sound appropriately dramatic, and the big tom-tom explosions (heard in another guise on the last RGC album - Alan likes big booms!), strings, and layered voices make "C'mon" , again, both lush and stark. Classic Low, yet new/expanded Low. Growth! Just listen to "You See Everything", with the lilting 6/8 and amazing harmonies and you'll hear some very new Low sounds... The combination of Alan and Mimi's voices - each individually beautiful in its own right - is one of the great sounds in music, to my mind. Always beautifully voiced and usually subtly expressive/restrained, their voices are like light to me, shining on some very (at times) dark matters. At their best, transcendent.... I was asked in the 11th hour to overdub some guitar on 2 songs ("Done" and "Nothing But Heart") while Alan and Matt Beckley were mixing in Matt's apartment in Studio City, CA. It was one of those amazing scheduling miracles; I happened to be in L.A. for 4 days, and could just squeeze in the session. Alan seemed truly pleased with what they had achieved, and as I listened to tracks I was really blown away by the huge sound. There was chuckling about the reaction of "slow core" diehards. But now that I have heard the whole album, I would have to say that I think it fits right into the trajectory of the band and consequently should not be shocking or dauntingly different. The music is more "band'-sounding than "Drums & Guns", as varied as their later albums. As stringent, too. But what was once an almost claustrophobia-inducing use of distortion/compression here gives way to something symphonic. I do not mean to be reviewing the record! I am just ruminating... Tracking my lap steel, slide, and "lead" guitar took maybe two hours. Half the "session" was taken up with eating splendid Mexican food and (for me) drinking Mexican Coca-Cola. For bottleneck on "Nothing But Heart", I used some guitar of Matt's because my Jazzmaster's action was too low from being bashed around on the road. I was a bit amused by this song: one basic lyric followed by an endlessly repeated chorus, not in some ways unlike "Hey Jude" with its building repetition and direct simplicity. Upon listening to the results, I am amazed how loud I am in the mixes! And I am so pleased - not to be mixed loud, but to be on a Low record. They are, to me, one of the greatest sounds in the universe.”

It may be a touch rash to suggest that Oneohtrix Point Never are challenging, say, Lady Gaga for influence and ubiquity all of a sudden. Nevertheless, more and more psychedelic records I’m sent seem to follow levitational synth patterns rather than more rockist jams, and there’s even been a few weird instances of PRs dropping the Oneohtrix name as an eyecatching influence, when the actual music sounds nothing like him (last week: a very lame pop-dubstep thing with faint ethereal trim). There are worse trends, of course, and a fair bit of the new kosmische music that comes this way is good: the new Rene Hell album, “The Terminal Symphony”, is a pretty nice case in point which arrived last week, and I note with interest there’s some Mego/Emeralds activity with a new Mark McGuire comp and a spin-off label that looks intriguing. One thing that bugs me, though, is how relatively little love Mountains seem to receive in the midst of all this, when I sometimes think that the records they’ve been making these past few years – the last ‘proper’ album, “Choral”, the brilliant “Etching” jam and, most recently, Koen Holtkamp’s solo “Gravity/Bees” – have been as good as anything from this apparent scene. And certainly, as a track like “Thousand Square” or “Sequel” starts up on this new Mountains album, “Air Museum”, you can easily draw certain cosmic affinities. As they progress, however, the very specific pleasures of Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg’s music become more and more pronounced. In the pieces linked above about their previous work (and especially in this live review from a 2009 Club Uncut show), I’ve touched on the way their soundscapes are constructed out of acoustic loops and samples, as well as electronic work, giving their music a more organic feel than the glistening ‘80s futurism affected by some of their contemporaries (perhaps this improvising, textured approach deters some synth puritans?) . That’s the case on “Air Museums”; warm, expansive, exquisitely micro-detailed, and developed now to such a point of confidence and artfulness that the usual ‘70s German reference points I’ve rolled out in the past seem much less salient – though it’s mighty hard not to drop an obligatory Cluster one when the bobbling “Backwards Crossover” hoves into view. The folksy acoustic guitars which have picked their way through some of Mountains’ music in the past don’t appear this time, at least overtly. There’s a lot of talk in the press release about the duo’s methodology, and about how “Air Museum” was made without computers, using, let me quote, “a variety of pedals, modular synths, and other analog techniques.” There are plenty of acoustic instruments on here, it continues, including cellos and accordions as well as pianos and guitars, but the processing is so intense that it’s hard to pick out specific sounds amidst a staticky wash like “Newsprint” or the final concert extract, “Live At The Triple Door”. On the new Tim Hecker album, “Ravedeath 72”, you can often identify the central instrument as a pipe organ amidst all the swirl and blurring. Here, though, the organic vibes come through via ambience and implied detail, to create a fastidiously crafted and immersive music, and one that reveals new layers every time I play it. Mention of Club Uncut earlier reminds me, by the way, that a couple of Mountains’ labelmates are playing for us this Thursday (March 21) in London. Arbouretum and Alexander Tucker are playing the Borderline, and tickets are still available here. Please come down if you’re in town.

Finding it a bit hard to pay much attention to music beyond the new White Denim album these past couple of days (I’ll write about that next week). Nevertheless, it seems like a good time to flag up a few things I’ve neglected to blog on over the past few weeks. There are a bunch of really nice reissues and comps in the pipeline that I’ve been enjoying a lot, tapping into certain strains of Americana that I maybe don’t cover so much here. Yesterday brought a couple of winners: Sir Douglas Quintet’s “The Mono Singles ’68-‘72” on Sundazed, which flip-flops appealingly between Texas and California to draw on inspiration; and “Delta Swamp Rock: Songs From The South: At The Crossroads Of Rock, Country And Soul”. The latter doesn’t rock quite as much as the title promises, the presence of Lynrd Skynrd and Area Code 415’s hairy old Whistle Test theme notwithstanding. As ever with Soul Jazz comps, though, it’s a beautifully-constructed mix of familiar and unfamiliar, which will probably result in me digging out some old Bobbi Gentry things this weekend, and encourage a further tentative investigation of Leon Russell. Liking Billy Vera’s “I’m Leaving Here Tomorrow, Mama” very much, too. Somewhat embarrassingly, I first became aware of Mickey Newbury when Robert Forster covered “Frisco Depot” on “I Had A New York Girlfriend”. Slackly, though, I never followed him up properly, which means the riches of the “American Trilogy” boxset – containing “Looks Like Rain”, “’Frisco Mabel Joy” and “Heaven Help The Child” – have been a revelation these past few weeks. I guess, if anything, these records (especially the first two) have a kind of spectral quality that removes them to some degree from the hardworn male angst I was generally expecting. Great songs, delivered with a lot of space and restraint rather than grandstanding poignancy. The next issue of Uncut features a piece on Peter Bellamy, one of the less-remembered stalwarts of the ‘60s folk revival (I can thoroughly recommend the first two Young Tradition albums, at the very least). Not coincidentally, there’s an impressive tribute album called “Oak Ash Thorn” on Folk Police, on which a well-chosen cadre of newish folk artists tackle Bellamy’s Rudyard Kipling-derived songs from the early ‘70s. The opening salvo from John Boden isn’t much to my taste, but what follows directly after – from a new name to me, Olivia Chaney, and an American interloper, Charlie Parr – is tremendous. There’s fine stuff from Cath & Phil Tyler (whose “Dumb Supper” is getting a deserved reissue, by the way), tracks from The Unthanks and Trembling Bells that are better than most of the stuff on their - to my mind slightly disappointing – new albums, and the whole thing hangs together in a much more satisfying way than these comps often do. Special mention to Sam Lee – another artist I’m entirely ignorant of – whose take on “Puck’s Song” builds out of vintage recordings to become an incantatory drone.