いよいよ9月25日が近づいて来ましたねー

As J. Krishnamurti once asked an interviewer point-blank (not Leon Blank, but point...er...):

"So, what is an artist, Sir?"

And my answer to his enquiry is this:

David Bowie's 1. Outside LP

Or, rather, this is just one variation on/to an "answer" to this larger-than-life and impossible-to-answer question of literally an infinite number of "answers" (or responses).

But what is emblematic to me about this LP is as follows.

In 1994 David Bowie, Brian Eno as producer, and a group of musicians that included Erdal Kızılçay on bass, Mike Garson (jazz musician) on piano/keys, Sterling Campbell on drums, and Reeves Gabrels (who now plays for The Cure) on guitar, trekked over to Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland (the same place, by the bye, where the bulk of the "Lodger" LP had been recorded in 1979, though it is often misquoted as having been recorded in Berlin as part of the so-called "Berlin Triptych" of the late '70s) and, for several days, they created this incredible, mostly improvised, IndustrialMusicMeetsAlternativeMusicMeetsNoirFilmMeets (etc.) extremely non-commercial, no-holds-barred sequence of "suites" that, unsurprisingly, and even after being whittled down from five to three suites (i.e. in order to fit it onto a single CD rather than forcing the label to make it a double -- this was the '90s, OK?), was SUMMARILY REJECTED by the label.

The bad news was and is that "The Leon Suites" was never released to the public officially.

But there is some good news too.

The first thing is that the first three, or the "main three," at least, suites, the ones that had been rejected for the "single CD" version were eventually shared IN FULL via YouTube (by whom? possibly, some argue, by someone in the Bowie camp who may have been given the green light by the man himself, perhaps because he would have realized that his label was never going to release it at all by that point...), after circulating as MP3 downloads and bootleg CDs for several years in fragmentary/incomplete pieces (kind of the way that Baby Grace's body was strung up "on the mind filters," one may suppose)...

The second really, really great news was that, in 1995, David and the boys (I don't think Gail Ann was yet a part of his entourage, so I can say "the boys," right?) went BACK into the studio in New York to record additional "more commercial" material (except still rather uncommercial by the usual standards of "popular music(s)" [and aftershocks...]). This material was released on the OFFICIAL LP, which was called "1. Outside" (click on the link above to stream the album in its entirety, with a bonus track tagged on, too, the same one I'd heard when I bought it in Osaka in '95, since I had the 日本版 CD).

And "1. Outside" was released on, right: September 25, 1995.

That's 30 years ago come this Thursday.

Bowie had to shorten his "segues" for the LP from what had been much longer, more fleshed out spoken word bits he'd done for the "Leon" sessions (the suites can also be streamed at YouTube -- just type "Bowie Leon Suites," or try this version on for size: 2. Incide: Leon Suites Reordered), and he also cut some rather great stuff that might just as well have been included as separate five minute or so "songs," particularly "The Enemy Is Fragile," which did not appear on the LP, unfortunately.

Much in the same way, after submitting my tribute LP "There Is No Hell" to my distributor earlier this year, I was told that I would have to re-(en)title or pull my own "segue" in tribute to Bowie's version, because the title was not exactly the same, yet similar enough to be considered a "derivative," which meant, in legal terms, I would have to get written permission from the Bowie camp first before they would allow it to be published at Apple Music, et. al. Like Bowie did on "Outside," then, in a sense, I, too, had to make a (slight) compromise if I wanted to have my version published. And so, because I'd already put the original version(s) of the LP on both BandCamp and YouTube, I decided, in order to also have it published on Sept. 25th this year, since the 30th anniversary will only happen once EVER, right (?!), to pull my "Baby (Grace) Blue" segue, as well as a reworking I did of my own version of "Hallo Spaceboy" for the LP, as well as to reorder the tracks for a better flow (after yanking two tracks from it, the original running order no longer worked).

So, "What is an artist?"

An artist is someone who makes art.

And if and when "art" becomes a "crime," then we are all, societally, fucked.

That is the world of Big Brother, Brave New World, The Matrix, too.

Make art. Art is love.

Maybe we could even say, then, "make love," since love, too (and making love, too), is an art.

I want to make more art.

I want to make more love.

"Do you wanna be free?

Don't you wanna be free?"

xo

We miss you, Spaceboy. Come back.

Artists today must be warriors, shamans, visionaries... And they will inevitably be ignored, shunned, and/or, if too many people actually start paying attention, perhaps made to disappear...

Algorithms do not favor us. No one pats us on the back or tells us to keep it up. Instead, we are told to shut up and mind our own business, to stay out of it.

Unless one puts it in the context of a "populist" message: song, lyric, slogan...

Forget it.

Why is this so?

Because it takes too much effort for most to go beyond the surface of things and dig out what lies beneath. Because this is also "scary" for most. And because it can only be done alone, in solitude, ultimately.

In ancient times, kings would kill the bearers of bad news. They would do the same to entertainers whose entertainment did not suit them.

Humans have evolved technologically, but we have not evolved spiritually, have not gone beyond our basic psychology and physiology. We still seem to be stuck on our ego, to being "accepted" by others, to getting what we want when we want, or else to throwing some sort of tantrum, or to displacing our anger onto others around us... If not some person or persons, than onto some scapegoat: "It's the xxxx. They don't follow OUR rules," etc.

If only we could know ourselves and live joyfully without all of the BS, the world would be a fucking amazing, artistic, beautiful place.

Instead, we've created a monster.

Have a nice weekend.

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