"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