Warszawa, written by Bowie / Eno
Recorded : September 1976, Château d’Hérouville
Brian Eno – piano, Minimoog, EMS Synthi, Chamberlin
Warszawa begins the second side of Low, the splitting up of which was carefully chosen by Bowie. The first side contains strange but nevertheless rock songs, while the second side is purely instrumental. The division and lack of integration of the two sides of the album also mimic Bowie’s own split mentalities.
For Warszawa, Brian Eno must get all the recognition he justly deserves. While Bowie had to leave the studio to go to Paris and discuss his divorce from Angie with his lawyers, he instructed Eno that he wanted an “emotive, almost religious” track for the album. Eno composed Warszawa, after Tony Visconti’s son kept repeating three notes “A, B, C” on the piano. The track also doesn’t follow any regular ¾, 4/4 structure, but is only composed of clicks repeated at regular intervals. This allowed the composition space to breathe and develop at its own natural pace without being rushed. Eno’s ambient pieces or “musical landscapes” as he called them, often lacked some sort of structure usually present in more traditional songs. Although Eno composed the melody of Warszawa and was a big inspiration for Bowie, it was Bowie’s influence on Eno that gave Warszawa it’s orderly structure.
When Bowie returned from Paris, Eno played him what he had composed. According to Eno, “As soon as David heard it he said, ‘Get me a mike’. He’s very fast when he gets going, really a brilliant singer – I don’t think people realise how finely he can tune his singing, in terms of picking a particular emotional pitch: it’s very scientific the way he does it, very interesting. He’ll say, ‘I think that’s slightly too theatrical there, it should be more withdrawn and introspective’ – and he’ll go in and sing it again, and you’ll hear this point-four of a degree shift which makes all the difference… He picks up the mood of a musical landscape, such as the type I might make, and he can really bring it to a sharp focus, both with the words he uses and the style of singing he chooses.”
Bowie wrote the words for Warszawa in 10 minutes. To make Bowie’s voice sound as a boys’ choir, Visconti slowed down the tape while recording the vocals, and then played it normally. The words are in an invented language, inspired by a record of a boy’s choir Bowie bought during his travels through Eastern Europe. The invented language has a certain Dadaist quality to it, and was later copied by many other artists. The final effect creates a disturbing feeling of watching a movie in a foreign language, without comprehending the plot but sensing the emotions behind the words. The general atmosphere created by Warszawa is a melancholic one, and there are no traces of suicidal and nihilistic tendencies that were so present on the first side of the album.
The end of Warszawa has no fade-out or proper ending, but it just stops. Bowie gave the name Warszawa to the track due to the impression he got from the city during the Isolar / White Light Tour. Although he only had a couple of hours between trains, he saw a city that was had been struggling to get on its feet for a long time. Whether it was the people he saw, the atmosphere of Warsaw or the link between the city’s and his own struggle for survival, Bowie chose to use the track he created with Eno to capture this memory.
Bowie himself described the second side of Low as something that he “couldn’t express in words”. It is with Warszawa that the “nothing to say” from Sound And Vision found its true meaning.
Bibliography: http://www.hauptstrasse155.tumblr.com/bibliography
Remark : Sorry for the rather poor quality of the sound relative to the other tracks I’ve uploaded. I couldn’t put up the good stuff as usual, since it was too big.
