The Loss of Low: Vale Mimi Parker (1968-2022)

My age is showing. It feels like all my heros are dying. James Ballard was the first one, when I was introduced to the cold feeling when you know there will be no new work from them. Then Roland S. Howard, Scott Walker, Ennio Morricone: no new music, new albums, concerts. Nothing, just memories and pale imitations, some of them by me.

But when Mimi Parker of Low died, this is someone I had met, and of a very similar age. This is someone whose contributions to every live Low concert I had seen (about 5?) and album released (every one) filled me with the most incredible feelings, which, as with all the best music, are impossible to describe. Because, well - music, not words. Those feelings will be there with those recordings, they may fade a little, but there will be no new ones. This was my favourite band of all time.

The last Low album, ‘Hey What’ (2021) came out in the pandemic like a glimmer of joy. I would listen to it on headphones as I walked around my suburb. This was the best Low album EVER, which meant that the ones to follow would be mind blowing. But there will be no more to follow. The clues were in that album, but I didn’t want to hear them.

When my friend Kim Williams introduced me to Low in the late 1990’s, I would listen to the 1994 debut album ‘I Could Live in Hope’ on a cassette tape he’d made for me, in my apartment. These were difficult times for me - living alone with my young daughter back in Perth, Western Australia after a messy intercontinental break up. I would later wear that tape down in Giovanni Ferrario’s Volvo, driving around the streets on Etna, Sicily, when I was able to return.

This and the albums that followed completely shaped the band I had at that time, Gata Negra (1997-2004). I found Low albums at once dark and empowering, poetic, sparse, cold yet somehow extremely penetrable for me. Inspirational. The sparse lyrics, empty spaces, guitar colours, brushes. I wanted to be like them. I asked our drummer Pete Guazzelli to get the bass drum up off the ground, and reduce the kit size. I copied the over the top reverb on the early albums in the production of the Gata Negra albums. As a classically trained musician, I loved how in tune the vocal harmonies were. Gata Negra band member Tim Evans pointed out to me once that this quality was likely linked to thier Mormon faith. Their Perth show at the Perth Festival in the early 2000’s was the first time I bravely went backstage with the courage to hand over the recent Gata Negra CD, ‘Saint Dymphnae’. It was a kind of homage, they would know, I thought. Alan was kind enough to write me his kind thoughts on the album later, he knew.

I loved how more involved Parker became on the albums as the years went on - as a voice in singing and writing, as well as drums that were much more than that. Her percussion playing didn’t keep the beat, it caressed it. It was an orchestral way of playing, not a drumming method. Parker’s playing made, and filled, space at what seemed magically the right times. Her voice was at once fragile and grounded - something not many singers have been able to pull off.

Each new Low album was a special moment, something new, unexpected, yet familiar. My journey with them has been an intensley personal one, with the albums ‘Long Division’ [1995] and ‘The Curtain Hits The Cast’ [1996] the soundtracks to the birth of my second child. The midwife thought they were sad, she didn’t understand at all. I loved the songs they wrote about their own children, especially Parker’s ‘In Metal’ [Things We Lost in the Fire (2001)], where you can hear one of her babies on the recording, like I had done with my daughter on the album, ‘Cage of Stars’ [1998]. This song was loving and dark at the same time: perfect. Then there was the humour - that also appealed to me, like in ‘Canada’ [from ‘Trust’(2002)]. My son (maybe 12 at the time?) loved ‘Plastic Cup’ [The Invisible Way (2012)] when we drove in the car together. There was something at once past regal and real now about that song, I understood why that was the one.

I eventually got brave enough to do Low covers - a solo voice and bass rendition of the track ‘Murderer’ [Drums and Guns, (2007)] at an obscure solo gig in Mojos. Fremantle - I can’t remember when. This was followed by my new music group Decibel doing a cover of ‘Do You Know How to Waltz?’ [ The Curtain Hits the Cast] with a string section in 2012, in an arrangement I made with Stuart James. I loved the long, long “endings” of these songs, and other ones like it, such as ‘Born By the Wires’ [Songs For A Dead Pilot (1997)], where the opening sounds of the other Low member and husband of Mimi Parker, Alan Sparhawk, sounds like Parker herself is singing. They are intertwined, of course.

My deepest condolences to Alan and their family.