David Bowie
The Buddha of Suburbia

THE REVIEW

Classified as the soundtrack of the BBC fiction based on a novel by Harif Kureishi, this record is an album by Bowie in every sense: its limited distribution (it has been recently reissued) and its insignificant impact on the charts at the time make it a true hidden gem, and it is absolutely worth seeking out.

In 1993, Bowie, having closed the not-so-thrilling experience with Tin Machine, which allowed him to recharge and get out of the creative stagnation of the '80s, had just released a new album (Black Tie White Noise), which, although not memorable, is proof of newfound enthusiasm, vitality, and the desire to keep shuffling the cards and contaminating genres. In the midst of promotion, he was approached by the producers of the series, who asked him to draw from his old catalog for the soundtrack: convinced of the project's worth, Bowie enthusiastically decided to write new material, in an atmosphere of spontaneity and creative freedom that he perhaps hadn't experienced since the Berlin trilogy years.

The rich liner notes mention the sources of inspiration (among others Eno, Tangerine Dream, Can, Kraftwerk) and explain the creative process: the themes written for the series are arbitrarily extended and fragmented into bars onto which instrumental improvisations are grafted, recordings are played backward, texts are chopped and reassembled in random order. All with a production and mixing work that doesn't compromise the spontaneity of the approach and doesn't alter the original idea, conceived and realized in a couple of weeks (no exhausting overdub sessions, few guests, Bowie plays everything with Turkish multi-instrumentalist Erdal Zizilcay).

The result is remarkable: avant-garde, art rock, pop, jazz, and new age blend beautifully to give life to songs and instrumental compositions finally worthy of the author's name: the title track is a splendid ballad that tastefully references Space Oddity and All The Madmen; South Horizon is a hypnotic jazz base that a rediscovered Mike Garson enriches with his typical gems of piano improvisation; The Mysteries seems to come directly from the second side of Low; Strangers When we Meet puts the electronic nightmares of V2-Schneider (from Heroes) in service of a great singer-songwriter piece.

For someone who has made changing genres and styles their expressive hallmark, citationism is always risky, but in this record, you never feel gratuitous self-referentiality; rather, you sense the feeling of a happy synthesis, and you wonder why a work of such high caliber did not receive broader recognition.

On the other hand, the choice not to promote the album and to "forget" it is perfectly consistent with the renewed creativity of '90s Bowie: a few weeks after the album's release, the Duke found himself with Brian Eno to sketch (literally: in the first sessions, Bowie painted while the musicians rehearsed) what would become the monumental Outside.