It’s often said that music is just organized vibrations.
Most musicians achieve that purpose by using instruments to create those vibrations. But on Low’s Double Negative, it sounds like the group is manipulating the air directly, creating a dense, otherworldly sonic landscape that is as unsettling as it is transcendent.
Double Negative was probably created using conventional instruments—the liner notes credit the band members with guitar, bass, and drums. There’s even a bass flute. But they are indistinguishable in the aural fog. The drums are almost entirely replaced by subsonic pulses and clattering distortion. Coherent bass lines and guitar chords occasionally crest above the blanket of noise, like on the staggering “Fly,” but those moments are rare.
The vocals are just as obtuse, buried in effects and crowded by the buzz of the rest of the sounds. “Tempest” is the most indicative of this, obscuring the vocals behind a vocoder before crushing it under an overloaded tape that makes me fear for my stylus (it’s fine—it’s supposed to sound like that). Garbling the voices is an interesting choice considering that this is a protest album. But the unease and discontentment comes through loud and clear.
The production is almost entirely alien. Where most producers try to make the musicians’ statement as clear as possible, BJ Burton muddies the water as much as he can. Clipping, the enemy of most recording engineers, is used as an aesthetic device. Most of the record sounds like it’s playing on a damaged cassette tape through blown speakers. Only “Dancing and Fire” is free of the claustrophobic sonic smog, the instruments and voices recorded naturally. It could almost be considered lo-fi if the recording wasn’t so crisp.
The sonic world takes a while to get used to. Most recording engineers spend most of their time trying to get records to sound exactly not like this. But once your ears adjust and let yourself become enveloped in the haze, Double Negative is a bonafide masterpiece. It’s as revolutionary a statement as records like Slowdive’s Pygmalion, Flying Saucer Attack’s Further, or even the indelible Loveless by My Bloody Valentine. It is a singular statement that achieves aesthetic nirvana while challenging listeners at the same time.