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
