1995~2025: "The Music Is Outside" (30 years of Outside)

Minotaur Triptych @ Bandcamp

Triptych (alternately "The Minotaur Triptych") is a compilation of the three LPs I created between 2023 and 2025 in tribute both to David Bowie's 1995 LP 1. Outside (the first of a planned trilogy that, unfortunately, both began and ended with "1. Outside") and to the improvisatory "Leon Suites" that were part of the sessions which took place in Montreux, Switzerland the previous year (1994), reportedly for around two weeks

The first of my three LPs consisted of five tracks, the second of ten, and the third (and most recent) also of ten, for a total of 25 tracks and a running time of 2 hrs. and 33 minutes. Nothing has been either added or subtracted from this release; I have simply included the three LPs "in order” here, back-to-back.*

This series of LPs has taken some of the themes from Bowie's '94/'95 albums, borrowing characters from the "concept" created in real-time during the '94 sessions and then tidied up for the '95 LP via several “segues,” and in the liner notes - which appeared alongside the CD in a booklet featuring both text and images as the "Nathan Adler Diaries" (originally a piece commissioned for Q Magazine in '94). What the triptych also does is to both adapt and update many of the tropes present on the “Outside” LP for the present era

When Bowie was creating his Outside "hyper-cycle," as it was referred to in its extended subtitle, the Internet was still in its infancy, Bowie saw that people had begun (subconsciously) to replace the pagan and religious rituals of old with new, more “secular” ones (body piercings, tattoos, etc.), and art itself was going through a sort of Renaissance, except this time around (mid-‘90s) it was a lot harder to tell what should and shouldn't be considered as "art" - e.g. should the carcasses of dead animals in glass boxes really be displayed in an art museum, as in some of Daniel Hirst’s pieces?

The story of Outside, for those unfamiliar, is quite dark; it deals with the gruesome murder of a 14 year-old girl who gets caught up in a sort of cult; she is made to wear “brain patches” by those in the New Homelands, and then, it is implied, murdered, her body parts strung up in a perverse display outside of the “Museum of Modern Parts” in Oxford Town, NJ. (This “segue” is much more detailed in the ’94 version, where Baby Grace gives further details of the "Grand Visioner" and of the "soul brain patch" she has to wear all of the time whilst "watching a television" showing footage that is, presumably, pre-approved of by the cult.

Today, our situation “outside” is quite different from what it was in the ‘90s, indeed, yet I would also suggest that the kinds of things Bowie was seeing and writing about for the Outside sequence have eventually led to the terrifying, dystopian world we now live in, a world ruled by algorithms and AI, of disinformation, and of what has been termed a “technocracy” ruled by “oligarchs” such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.

And so, it can be said, fascism is not dead. In fact, it never really went away, as Bowie had been warning us all along, as far back at least as “The Man Who Sold the World” in 1970.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself...

***

The first track I ever did for part of this tribute project (but not included here) was entitled "Segue: Minotaur/Artist.” I recorded it in the summer of 2022, and the following year I used this as the basis for the longer "Minotaur's Lair" piece which appeared on the first of these LPs (the extended version appears here as track 3, just as it had on that LP). This original, 4 and 1/2 minute-long "segue,” published on a 2-track EP on January 8, 2023, established the themes that would continue throughout the triptych: Ramona's prediction that "World War III was upon us," the Minotaur's warning that "we are now living in the darkest of times," Elias Mouse (whose last name I this year changed the spelling of to "Mauss") and "all of his devious doings," which included requiring citizens to wear "brain patches,” and so on.

Last summer (’24) I continued creating pieces for the follow-up to “Lost In the Minotaur’s Lair,” eventually entitling it “Some Kind of Future 2.0," as it coincided with the U.S. elections and what was being referred to, via the media at the time, as “Trump 2.0.” As part of my two-part “The Enemy Within” improvisation — recorded while walking the streets/environs of my neighborhood in Tokyo with the backing music later added — the voice of Nathan Adler Jr. questions whether we would again be "trumped" in ’25 and what the future of the U.S./the world would be, suggesting that “…2025 will be more chaos” than 2024 was. 

Once again, Elias Mouse/Mauss is mentioned as part of the longer improvisation, and two new “segues” were also recorded separately. One was my interpretation of Ramona A. Stone c. 2025, who is now “Former Futurist” Ramona A.I., decrying Futurism as “dead” (much as Nietzsche once said of God) as we have, in essence, killed the future (“…there is not…has never been…any future.”). A second segue features an anonymous "Outsider" who had to leave his home because it was constructed of toxic materials (I created this after I myself had to move out of an apartment I’d just moved into due to toxic PVC flooring). 

Apart from the segues and the longer improvisations, the LP also includes some remixed versions of Outside-related covers I’d previously done, including two from all the way back in 2018, one of which was not from the Outside LP itself, but in fact hails from the original Outside sessions and was published in its earlier form on the "Showgirls" soundtrack of '95 — e.g. “I’m Afraid of Americans." I also recorded some hybrid things, such as “Nothing to Be Desired” (a fragmentary b-side, and part of one of the longer "Leon Suites" from '94), “What Were the Leon Sessions?" (featuring the voice of John Maggiore), and "(Thru' These) Minotaur's Eyes," all of which have their origins in material from the Outside LP proper and/or the Suites of '94.

And so then, at the beginning of this year ('25), I once again returned to the project, almost unwittingly… After one night sitting down to do a piano improvisation which ended up becoming a new, loosely-arranged version of the Outside LP track “A Small Plot of Land,” I thereafter had a sudden desire to cover the title track from the LP proper, "Outside," having first stumbled upon a terrifying AI-generated version on YouTube. The video presents an extremely bleak dystopia, with a creepy-looking Bowie figure interspersed with people rioting, fascist figures beating up citizens in the streets during the “They beat on the outside” line, and other dark imagery. All of this, for me, felt rather prescient, if not prophetic, what with the literal riots that had started taking place outside of the Capitol Building not long after Trump and DOGE had stepped in earlier this year to “slash federal spending” by gutting Social Security, firing employees, and stealing citizens’ private data… 

(Speaking of DOGE, Elias Mouse had by now become, to my mind, Elias MAUSS after his “Nazi-like salute” during the presidential inauguration, and all of the "predictions" that I (via The Minotaur figure) made in '22 on the original segue began to really come terrifyingly close to what was happening “now," the fiction and the reality merging into real-life dystopia. Those “brain patches” that had been mentioned by a character (an acquaintance of Nathan Adler Jr living in Tokyo, perhaps?) in ’22/’23, as well as Elias’s “devious doings,” society standing at the brink of a third world war, and the promise Nathan Adler Jr. had made whilst roaming the streets of Tokyo last year that more extreme chaos would surely follow in 2025… Indeed, indeed, all of this, and more, had and has begun to happen right in front of everyone’s eyes.)

"There Is No Hell," then, is the final installment, and it, like "Some Kind of Future 2.0," includes a long improvisation recorded whilst traipsing around outdoors (there are videos on my YouTube page for both, by the bye, in which the viewer can see that on both nights in '24/'25 there was a full moon hanging behind me/everything in the Tokyo night sky). This time the improv is split into three separate parts instead of two, and this time it includes vocal medleys of actual songs from the Outside LP, with music from a three-day session I did alone in the studio, playing various instruments including electric guitar, drums, and flutes. 

The final LP in this series also includes another newly-recorded "cover," the song "The Motel," from which the LP itself takes its title ("There is no hell / like an old hell..."). Minotaur's Lair 2.0, a sort of extended segue, brings the story of "Minotaur's Lair" and of the triptych entire, in a sense, up to the present moment, reiterating that we are *still* living in the darkest of times, a warning also echoed in Baby Blue's segue here, one she tells us is being broadcast "via satellite" from another realm (one may think of it as being a bit similar to the final section of Akutagawa Ryunosuke's "In a Grove," where the voice of the murdered man comes to us through a shamanic medium, except here technology is the receiver, rather than a spiritually-connected Outsider woman's mouth).

***

Bowie had once famously said that the future belonged to “those who listened.” The horrible ramifications of “all our violence” that were and are indeed “happening now / not tomorrow” have slowly, then increasingly more quickly, been revealing themselves over the last three or so years in various ways to anyone who has been paying any attention. Let this music serve, then, as a document of what it has felt like to this ex-pat, Tokyo-based Earthling to live as an Outsider in this post-Covidian, pre-AI (moving into "AI-centric"?) world. Let it serve, too, as a final warning (I am not the only one ringing the alarm bells here, OK? Nor is "The Minotaur" of this iteration/continuation of Bowie's hyper-cycle...)

I believe that, should anyone have the time to listen to this triptych in full AS a triptych, and therefore fully "in-context," rather than as piecemeal tracks or even "albums," keeping in mind when each LP was recorded and released (starting, in a sense, in the summer of '22 with the "Minotaur/Artist" segue and dialogue, which is also featured here on the much longer track "Minotaur's Lair" from '23, and moving right up through earlier this year with the material from the final LP of the trilogy), the entirety of the project should resonate a bit differently. That, anyway, was the impetus behind compiling it in this way.

In truth, I had not started the project in late September '23 (nor in '22 when recording the initial segue) with any intention of doing a trilogy; in this sense, it can be said that "my case" with this triptych is the precise opposite of what happened with "Outside"; David Bowie had planned on completing a trilogy with Brian Eno over the course of around 3~4 years (from around '96 to the end of '99) to document "What it felt like to be living at the end of the 20th century" (paraphrasing something Bowie had often said in interviews at the time), but was never able to see through. David had even mentioned that the second part (to have been entitled "2. Contamination") was to have been about 17th century Tibetan pirates, incurable diseases from the "Hot Zones" of Africa such as AIDS and Ebola, and also that it would have been even more "avant garde" than the first LP had been.

(Imagine the response of the baffled critics and "fans"!!! Also imagine how amazing that LP would have been, had it come to fruition during David's lifetime...)

Keep in mind that much as with Bowie's "1. Outside" and the Leon Suites, this sequence, too, is neither linear nor "conclusive" in any way (as the Minotaur warns us early on); also, as with Bowie’s "Leon” in ’94, much of the music and lyrics and/or spoken word is improvised and at times even abstract, lyrically as well as musically [Bowie used Burroughs' cut-up technique for lyrics via a program created for his Mac; in my case, everything was completely "off-the-cuff" during several long walks with the iPhone running, or alternately at home whilst sitting in front of the mic, without pause), with several "covers" (or reinterpretations) of songs from the LP proper peppering the other segues and longer improvs to hold it all together as a bona fide “1. Outside” tribute.

The music is still "outside” today, but it has become truly deafening and indecipherably distorted. Indeed, it may now at last be time for each of us to turn to the quiet voice "inside," and perhaps there to find out what really matters in life to and for each and every one of us individually.

"Tomorrow’s too late...”

May 15, 2025
Marc Lowe
Tokyo, Japan

* For an "alternate" single LP-length take on my 1. Outside tributes, see the following release, which focuses more on the songs/covers and shorter segues from the triptych, as well as some earlier cover/tributes that were not a part of it: 

marclowe.bandcamp.com/album/outside-in-a-tribute-to-1-outside-2018-2025-compilation   

credits

Released May 15, 2025

license

1. 

Some days are very hard.

Some days I feel I can no longer “go on.” Or, rather, that I do not want to.

This reminds me of Samuel Beckett.

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

2. 

The older I get, the longer I live in Tokyo (as a single man - currently 52 years old), the more I see what this world is actually made of, the less I feel that there is anything to do but to live, to create, and then to die.

3.

My health has always been an issue: allergies, digestion, skin, occasional vitamin deficiencies, thyroid issues, a tendency toward depression (though I am more aware of how to control it now than ever before), etc. etc. Add to this various forms of muscle and/or nerve pain, teeth clenching at night, etc., and one gets the picture… 

The body is a near-constant self-torture machine that requires much maintenance but does not repair easily or thoroughly most of the time.

4.

Lately, I think about death constantly.

Daily.

Every morning.

Every night.

War. Earthquake. Perhaps a sudden diagnosis of stomach cancer?

The End.

All one can do is just to live while one can.

5. 

Being single and alone is not particularly “lonely” anymore.

But don’t let those who tell you “solitude is not loneliness” (and vice-versa) convince you that solitude isn’t also at times “lonesome.”

“Lonesome” = “lone” + “some”

Only one.

Indeed, does one not…

sometimes desire a companion?

sometimes desire another to talk to?

sometimes desire someone to listen to?

sometimes desire someone to care for and/or be cared for (by)?

sometimes desire a warm body beside which to lie?

Solitude is nothing if not solitary.

This is not a judgment about whether it is “good” or “bad.”

Solitude is simply “alone.”

In this sense, it may not have anything to do with “loneliness.” But it is still alone.

Solitude is staring one’s own death squarely in the face daily and not flinching.

After a while, it becomes possible not to flinch too much. The thought even starts to seem rather logical, strangely comforting.

But is this state of being “happiness”? Is this “freedom,” as the Hindus and Buddhists would call it? release from one’s illusions about life/death, about ego and attachment and so on? Or is it simply a form of resignation, an acceptance of the reality of who and what one is and to where one is going?

To be continued...

"And if you’re looking for simple answers here

You shall be bitterly disappointed”

~ Minotaur/Artist (2022)

 

Outside-In: A Tribute to 1. Outside

This is a collection/selection of David Bowie's “1. Outside” (1995 LP) related rearranged covers and tributes. What it primarily elides from my recently-completed triptych * -- which was just as much influenced by the unreleased, highly-improvisational "Leon Suites" of the ’previous year (’94) as it was by the LP proper -- are the longer improvisations I did on respective moonlit nights in the summer of '24 and then, again, this past spring (’25). The first of these longer vocal improvisations appeared as "The Enemy Within,” split into two parts, on the LP "Some Kind of Future 2.0,” which I released this past January. The second is entitled "All Our Violence” and I broke it into three separate parts; this was included on my most recent “1. Outside” tribute LP, “There Is No Hell,” released right here at BandCamp last week, but not yet available via commercial streaming services. Further, the track “Minotaur’s Lair,” which runs for almost 18 minutes, as well as this year’s follow-up/conclusion, “Minotaur’s Lair 2.0,” have also been left out of this collection in favor of the much shorter “Segue: Minotaur/Artist,” which I will discuss in some detail below.

As a concept, I thought that instead of focusing on the longer aforementioned improvisations, I would instead create a single CD-length release focusing primarily on the shorter, somewhat more conventional song covers (or, to put it more accurately, what might be termed “interpretations of” or “tributes to” several such songs included on Bowie’s original “1. Outside” LP from ‘95), including some selections I took from outside (pun intended…?) of the “Minotaur Triptych” — as I’ve come to internally refer to it — itself, i.e. other “1. Outside” covers I had recorded and subsequently included on other, unrelated releases. But more on those tracks a bit later…

I decided, for this collection, to add the year in which each track was recorded, as opposed to the year it had been released. This is because several of the tracks that appeared on "Some Kind of Future 2.0" were in fact both arranged and recorded the previous year (’24), though they wouldn’t be released as part of the full LP until early January of ’25. Similarly, the initial "Minotaur/Artist" segue I’ve included here as the opener of the collection was recorded in the sweltering summer of '22, several months before it was released as part of a two-track EP entitled "1823" (the numbers stand for its release date: Jan. 8, 2023, which also marked what would have been David Bowie’s 75th birthday, had he still been alive at the time). 

On “Segue: Minotaur/Artist”:

At the time I had recorded the initial “segue,” I’d recorded it with the intention of (thereafter) expanding it into something similar to one (or more) of the “Leon Suites.” For those unfamiliar, these suites consisted of lengthy (20+ minutes, on average) improvisations that Bowie and his band members had done in the studio together, and they included character voices/monologues along with what might be considered full “songs” or otherwise song fragments. In any case, I had had the intention to do something “in this vein” at the time, though it was still just a general way of thinking about how I might approach the larger “Outside/Leon tribute” project I had wanted to do. 

However, as so often happens in life, things did not go quite as planned. Instead, as if fate had suddenly stepped in to say “Not yet, you won’t! You’ll need to wait a bit longer for this one…” my iMac (desktop) thereupon crashed, no more than perhaps a day or so after I’d recorded and arranged the five minute-long segue, leaving me without any way of immediately arranging or extending what I had intended essentially as a kind of “placeholder” for what I’d eventually planned on expanding into a much longer, more ambitious “suite” (or suites). Most fortunately, I had saved the LOGIC (DAW) file for the segue -- the same segue which appears at the opening of this collection and which can also be found on the “1823” two-track single (the second track, by the bye, is “It’s No Game 2023,” an acoustic arrangement of a song from Bowie’s 1980’s “Scary Monsters” with revised/updated lyrics) -- on my external HD, though I wouldn’t actually return to it to complete the 18 minute-long “Minotaur’s Lair” until September of ’23… But now I’m “gettin’ ahead of myself” (as Det. Adler would have said in his gruff New Joisey accent whilst puffing on a Marlboro Red…).

The segue itself, though just-under five minutes and, as already mentioned, initially intended as a kind of “sketch” or placeholder for what would eventually become a more ambitious improvisation to have included various character voices, themes, and so on, in fact ended up laying the groundwork for many of the themes that permeate what became each of the three releases which now make up the triptych; not only were parts of it used in the longer “Minotaur's Lair" composition — which constitutes the centerpiece of the "Lost In the Minotaur's Lair" LP (created post-haste so as to try and release it in time for the 28th anniversary of the “1. Outside” LP on September 25th of that year [I made it!] — it also established many of the themes I would come back to in late ’24, and then once again earlier this year: “brain-patches,” an impending world war, living in a time of utter and complete darkness…

The segue introduces — via my spoken word/voice, which I ran through an effector that makes it sound downright Faustian — my interpretation of the “Minotaur/Artist"** character who is mentioned in the “Nathan Adler Diaries,” though in Bowie’s version “he/it” neither has any speaking parts in any of the shorter segues found on the album, nor does the Minotaur speak within any of the three longer (not officially released, but otherwise available online) “Leon Suites.” The initial segue I created also introduced the character “Elias Mouse,” along with the idea that he (the “Grand Visioner”) required all denizens of his domain to wear (or to implant) “brain patches,"*** as well as that Ramona A. Stone (a character from the original LP who, on "Some Kind of Future 2.0" would become "Ramona A.I.” c. 2024) was "convinced that World War III was upon us.” This statement itself connects with what the Minotaur/Artist says at the beginning of the segue, both establishing and summing up the theme of the entire triptych (more than two years before it was conceived of or planned as a triptych) in a single sentence: "(For) we are now living in the darkest of times”…

And so, we once again return to “Outside-In”:

Though I have by now spent quite a bit time talking about the opening segue, let me now turn again to the current collection and say that what this collection represents (or what it might represent, though “to whom” and in what circumstances remains a question without any “simple answer”…) is rather another — or an alternative — version of my tribute to the "1. Outside" album; an alternative, that is, to the version or versions presented in the longer triptych (which I have lately been referring to as the “Minotaur Triptych” to myself). In this sense, it is an alternative-to-(an)-alternative version, the first “alternative” version being the three separate tribute LPs (or the “Minotaur Triptych”), and the current compilation LP being yet another variation on said “alternative version.” But, and again, were the three LPs created between 2023 and April of 2025 an alternative to “1. Outside” or to the “Leon Sessions”?

Ah…

Well…

Let’s just say that the present 16-track selection highlights what might perhaps represent a slightly less “opaque” (both musically and thematically) and/or a slightly less “experimental/avant garde” version of my tribute, that is as compared to the particular combination of tracks — including the longer improvs — found on the three LPs from the triptych spanning from ’23~’25. If each of those LPs were to be paired with each of the three 20-plus minute long tracks compiled as “The Leon Suites," then perhaps this single CD-length collection might be considered a closer cousin to the "1. Outside" LP itself, which, too, is more song-oriented than the suites and includes shorter “segues” in place of the longer monologues found within the sprawling improvs from the ’94 sessions themselves.

Does this make any sense to anyone other than me?? Hmm…

Special thanks to John Maggiore for interviewing me about the first two LPs right around the time I had released the second (“Some Kind of Future 2.0”) earlier this year and, more recently, also for doing a write-up on his blog about the most recent release, "There Is No Hell," (see the “+” mark for links to both the video and the write-up). His comments in his recent review were what, in fact, made me consider compiling this "alt. version” in the first place, a version that would focus not only on the Outside-related covers from the triptych itself, but one in which I might also add (i.e. as part of this compilation) some other covers or reinterpretations of songs from the Outside LP that do not appear on any of the LPs that make up the “Minotaur Triptych.” For example, there is the still-recent "Hallo Spaceboy” cover in two mixes (both hail from last year’s LP "The Tower,” where they are, in fact, bookends to the otherwise all-original [i.e. not a Bowie tribute] LP), the initial version/mix I did of "We Prick You,” also published in 2024 (though recorded in ’23), the vocal version of my original song, dedicated to David Bowie and which I think is also rather “Outside/Earthling-ish,” e.g. ”We Miss You, Spaceboy” ’24 (the song was originally written and recorded in a different arrangement back in ’18, but this is the more recent recording/version), as well as some of the older covers I’d done from “1. Outside” going back as far as 2018, e.g. "The Heart's Filthy Lesson" and "I'm Deranged,” as well as a short, original “segue” from 2020 I’d entitled “Nathan Adler Jr.”

And so, here it is. And so, the world, and life, goes on, despite the horrors occurring in the “New Homelands,” AI, brain patches, and all the rest of what goes on in the Matrix we call “life on planet earth”…

ML

April 23, 2025

Tokyo, Japan

* The triptych consists of "Lost In the Minotaur's Lair (official released on September 25, 2023), "Some Kind of Future 2.0," much of which was recorded in late '24 but released on January 11, 2025, and the latest LP, "There Is No Hell," released exclusively (at present) via BandCamp and as a video (audio + image/titles) on YouTube, but not yet available via streaming services. A release is tentatively planned for May or June of 2025.

** On Bowie's “Outside" LP, the name listed is “Artist/Minotaur,” but as mentioned in the body of the text, there is no segue for him; I inverted the name to "Minotaur/Artist" and then created the character’s monologue and voice as I saw/felt/intuited him for my album “Lost In the Minotaur’s Lair,” and then did the same, again, on this year’s “Minotaur’s Lair 2.0.”

*** The term “brain patch(es)” is quite eerily found on the original "Baby Grace Blue" extended segue from the unreleased Leon Suites, c. ’94. The "Grand Visioner," Baby says on her longer "horrid cassette” monologue from ’94, required all to wear "soul patches" -- which could be an ironic reference to the sort of goatee Bowie had donned during his spiky red hair "Earthling" period in '97, and also throughout much of '95/'96 in some form .Later in the monologue, and perhaps since Bowie was improvising/riffing as he went, “soul patches” becomes "brain patches.” Intentional? We will never know, but it sure is interesting!

+ Link to John's "Cover of the Week" write-up of "There Is No Hell."

https://maggioreonbowie.com/david-bowie-cover-of-the-week-marc-lowes-there-is-no-hell/

Link to our talk about the first two LPs:

https://youtu.be/-WgO1rYa7L4?si=3x-m-8lJIW2EyF35

David Bowie + Marc Lowe - "Leon Suites 2.0: A Breath-Filled Crowd"

This coming September (’25) will mark 30 years since the publication of David Bowie’s “1. Outside” LP (the U.S. release date of the LP was, by the bye, Sept. 25, 1995). Its lesser-known predecessor, oft-referred to by its fans/obsessive acolytes as “The Leon Suites,” was recorded one year prior and has never gotten an official release from any of Bowie’s commercial labels/copyright holders, not even now, a full 30 years on, despite MULTIPLE box-set releases, reissues of classic LPs with bonus tracks, live albums from various eras, videos, and silly (boy blue, but not Baby Grace Blue…) rehashes of his pre-“Space Oddity” ‘60s folk-rock material that he recorded well before he became a famous pop/rock icon in the U.K. with Ziggy Stardust in ’72 (followed the year after with Aladdin Sane, or, as David himself referred to his ’73 carrot-top, schizoid lightening bolt-faced alter ego, “Ziggy Goes to America”).

Why, then, has it not been released, either in physical formats, such as CD or vinyl, or via streaming services such as Spotify, Apple, or YouTube Music? 

Well, I have plenty of theories about it, but the number one reason, I believe, is because the “Suites” simply are not an attractive wager for the labels. To put this more bluntly: there’s no money to be made in releasing them. The uncommercial, “difficult,” highly-experimental and abstract suites, which have long, improvisatory instrumental sections and lengthy spoken word “interruptions” (those quotation marks should be written in bold text) would be a commercial “flop” and thereby result in the/any label losing money on the release.

Again, Kapitalizm Killz Art.

As it always does…

Indeed, who would buy an hour-plus of “The Leon Suites”? Who would invest more money in buying “The Leon Suites: Outtakes and Rarities from The Vaults”? Well, me, certainly. Perhaps some of you out there who are reading and listening to this. But certainly not the average, casual Bowie fan. Not the Bowie fan looking for more of his unreleased “rock/pop tunes.” And you can bet your bottom dollar that the labels well understand this, and so they are still sitting on hours and hours’ worth of unreleased “Leon Tapes” that no one, save a select few in Bowie’s inner circle, has ever heard.

Indeed, even today the “1. Outside” album of ’95 (still available via any major streaming service, as well as in physical formats, though CDs are basically now “dead”) is frequently given short-shrift, brushed off as one of his lesser “experiments,” something he needed to get out of his system before he could start recording “real/good” more accessible songs such as “I’m Afraid of Americans” (which actually, and ironically, was originally recorded during the “Outside” sessions with Eno, and then rerecorded for his 1997 “Earthling” LP in a different arrangement, later famously remixed by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails) or to complete his swan-song “Blackstar,” which, to these ears, anyway, owes a heck of a lot to this “Outside” era of experimentation (tracks such as “A Small Plot of Land,” by the bye, is very “free/acid jazz,” so much so that Donny McCaslin and co. later covered it in a jazzy version), even more so than the today (but not at the time!) highly-lauded “Berlin Triptych” Bowie completed in the late ‘70s (also, and again somewhat ironically, perhaps, with Brian Eno, who in fact produced 1995’s “1. Outside”).

Now, a bit about how I myself came to complete this project, hence the current mix/mixture of Bowie/Lowe versions you are currently zoning in to (or out to…?).

In late 2022, I recorded what would become the start of a two-part LP tribute both to the “1. Outside” album* and to the unreleased, more experimental/improvisational “Leon” sessions. That track was (and still is - it was published on a two-track EP in January ’23) called “Minotaur/Artist.” In this track, I not only referenced two of the major characters Bowie had done character voices for, both on the LP, in the shorter, less-complete “Segues,” and also as a part of the longer, more-complete suites — Detective/Professor Nathan Adler (head of“Art Crime” in Oxford Town, New Joisey) and Ramona A. Stone, a “Futurist” who runs a seedy shop on a seedy street where various unsavory activities occur behind closed doors, not to mention that s/he is also a sort of half-metal crone-in-chrome (in my version, recorded late last year and published last month, s/he, therefore, became Ramona A.I.)  — but, importantly, I also introduced a new character of my own making: Elias Mouse/Mauss.

EM, in my original segue from ’22/’23 (later used as part of my longer/extended “Minotaur’s Lair” piece), had forced people to use “brain patches,” just as, in the longer “Baby Grace Blue” segue on Bowie’s unreleased “Leon,” Baby Grace tells us that the leader of the “New Homelands” has “made wearing soul patches the law.” (Baby, in the longer version from ’94’s “Leon,” also refers to these devices as “soul-brain patches” and says she has “the shakers on” as she is wearing a brain patch “with neurotransmitters.” What does this sound like to YOU, dear reader/listener? Indeed, truth is often “stranger than fiction,” and we are today living through a sort of dystopia that, to me, anyway, seems to run parallel to the one Bowie created for his Outside “hypercycle”…)

When I created my alt. character in late ’22, I’d originally spelled it as Elias MOUSE — in my head, anyway, since I hadn’t had the need to spell it out anywhere else, having only spoken the name on the “segue.” However, after the inauguration of our current orange-tinged leader (of the oligarchs) earlier this year, when Mr. Musk did a salute reminiscent of Bowie’s “Duke” in ’76, I decided to change the spelling to MAUSS.

Another thing I realized about Bowie’s character Leon was this: 

His name (Leon) is an anagram of Elon.

So perhaps Elias Mouse/Mauss => Elon (Musk) => Leon (Blank)??

In Bowie’s “Outside” cycle, Leon is said to be in prison (in New Jersey, of all places) as penalty for the murder of Baby Grace Blue, who herself tells us in her “horrid cassette” (again, on the extended version from the Leon Suites, included here on this “bricolage”**) that she is trapped in some sort of cult, made to be quiet and to just “worship the lot,” that she is being given “interest drugs” by Ramona (Fentanyl, anyone? or perhaps Ketamine....), and also, as discussed above, Baby is forced to wear the aforementioned soul, or brain, patch, as it is “the law.”

Whether or not Leon is guilty is for the listener of Bowie’s “Non-linear gothic hypercycle” (as he calls it) to decide, but what is important here is that the full name, Leon BLANK — as John Maggiore of the “MaggioreOnBowie” blog led me to realize after our interview about my two tribute LPs — is basically open to being filled with anything, kind of like Kafka’s “K.” represents or may represent “Anyman.” And so, if one is encouraged to insert “Anyman’s” name into that “blank/Blank” slot then, by this logic, if Leon is (and it is, whether or not Bowie had intended it to be…) an anagram for Elon, then what goes in that “blank” could just as well be “Musk,” or “X,” or whatever…

As for the subtitle I gave to this bricolage — “A Breath-Filled Crowd” — do listen carefully to Bowie’s (dramatically-rendered!) voice at the beginning as the crowd screams behind him (where did this sample come from, exactly? I recall once having read something about it somewhere, but memory now fails me…). I think he (Bowie, or the character whose words he spoke) must have been saying “Leon, you’ve got a breath-filled crowd tonight...” but, no matter how many times I’ve played this back since Trump took office last month, all I can now hear is “Elon, you’ve got a…”

“And so… I sit here… thinking about… Elias Mauss.”

I pray that all that has been going on in the world and in the media circus dys-topia of dys-information (sic) is just a big game. I am waiting for someone to go, “Got ya! Hahaha. It was a joke. Let’s go grab a beer together and laugh it off.” However, I fear that it’s more like in Bowie’s 1980 song, “It’s No Game.”

“Silhouettes and shadows

Watch the revolution

No more free steps to heaven…”

Fight Fascism with Art.

February 11, 2025

Marc Lowe

In the (not-yet) “New Homelands” of Tokyo, Japan

*Note that the reason that Bowie-aficionados usually attach a “1.” to the title of “Outside,” rather than just calling it by that name alone, is because Bowie had planned on doing a trilogy to be completed by the “end of the millennium” with his then-partner in (art) crime, Brian Eno. The second part was to have been called “2. Contamination,” the third “3. Afrikaans,” but, sadly, this never came to pass. According to Brian Eno, Bowie had said to him that he wanted to revisit the project before he died, that he felt there was still more left to say” about it, both musically and, presumably, message-wise. I often wonder what Bowie would have had to say about Covid, or about our current state of collapse. The “Outside” frame has inspired me for years, and so this tribute bricolage (which I cannot publish officially due to copyright laws, obviously) and my two LP tributes (which are both officially published, as they only include my own original recordings) have been my way of continuing the project in the spirit of Bowie’s mid-‘90s work. His spirit, too, infuses them, I think, and has given me the inspiration to make this work. Thank you always, David. I hope it is more peaceful up there than it is now down here.

**”Bricolage” is a term I have used in recent years to describe lengthy musical tapestry/mixes I’ve made composed of various songs and longer compositions culled from own original material/catalog. The first ones I did were the “Glass Sun” suites (three), taken from material I’d recorded in my Fukuoka days (2017-19), and then I followed them with other “bricolages” since I liked how the first ones sounded. This is not a “mash-up,” mind you, but rather something different, something I don’t think there is any preexisting label for that can be conveniently slapped onto them, hence my coinage of this term in this context. Note, also, that the sections, both here and on my other bricolage compositions, consisting of layers of audio/songs stacked atop each other (and mixed accordingly, sometimes with fades or effectors, sometimes not) I make reference to as “palimpsest.” The two terms are therefore related, but also distinct.