- Music
- 21 Sep 02
As with cathedrals, the tremendous emptinesses in this music is what matters: the infinities of space are what make us stop and look, and become still and listen
Low have always been the most humble of bands, and tonight is no different: standing tinily under the darkened canopy of the vaulting transept of this cathedral, five small red-gold arches that mark the sub-altar breaking the inky darkness at their backs, dressed in sombre unfussy black like devout new postulants.
But humility is not the same as faint-heartedness: and the spare, slow, exceedingly precise, ineffably beautiful thrum and din that fills the huge space around us – seeming, like the darkness itself, to go upward forever - is as simple and startling and powerful as a handmade altar in the desert.
As with cathedrals, the tremendous emptinesses in this music – the famous minimalism, the heartstopping distances between timpani hits, the notes gently dampened before they’ve escaped, the tentative waver of a guesting musical saw (take a bow, Joss Moorkens) – is what matters: the infinities of space are what make us stop and look, and become still and listen.
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And we do, focusing on the twin harmony at the still centre of their secular spirituals, their voices always a consistently demure distance apart, like medieval singing companions, sombre and joyful: Alan’s voice yearning and wan, Mimi’s vibrato flickering quietly like a guttering candle.
A breathtaking, human-sized miracle for us, and an apt diversion for whatever gods might have been listening.