Page "David Bowie" Paragraph 30

Before the end of 1976, Bowie's interest in the burgeoning German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to West Berlin to clean up and revitalise his career.

Working with Brian Eno while sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with Iggy Pop, he began to focus on minimalist, ambient music for the first of three albums, co-produced with Tony Visconti, that would become known as his Berlin Trilogy.

During the same period, Iggy Pop, with Bowie as a co-writer and musician, completed his solo album debut, The Idiot, and its follow-up, Lust for Life, touring the UK, Europe, and the US in March and April 1977.

Low ( 1977 ), partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu !, evidenced a move away from narration in Bowie's songwriting to a more abstract musical form in which lyrics were sporadic and optional.

It received considerable negative criticism upon its release — a release which RCA, anxious to maintain the established commercial momentum, did not welcome, and which Bowie's ex-manager, Tony Defries, who still maintained a significant financial interest in the singer's affairs, tried to prevent.

Despite these forebodings, Low yielded the UK number three single " Sound and Vision ", and its own performance surpassed that of Station to Station in the UK chart, where it reached number two.

Leading contemporary composer Philip Glass described Low as " a work of genius " in 1992, when he used it as the basis for his Symphony No. 1 " Low "; subsequently, Glass used Bowie's next album as the basis for his 1996 Symphony No. 4 " Heroes ".

Glass has praised Bowie's gift for creating " fairly complex pieces of music, masquerading as simple pieces ".