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.