Reading David Bowie's "1. Outside": Extra Edition - Short Segues and Long Nightmares: Another "Outside" Revealed Through The Leon Suites

This is an extra edition that deviates slightly from the reading of the main "1. Outside" album.
However, there are things that can only be seen by deviating.

Looking at The Leon Suites, which existed behind the finished album, reveals that the short segues of "Outside" were originally longer, more tangled fragments of a nightmare.

First, as a supplement, this Leon material is not merely a curiosity outside of "1. Outside".

In 1994, Bowie teamed up with Brian Eno again to record the core of his new work at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland.

There, Eno's Oblique Strategies approach and improvisational methods where performers embodied characters were used, and production proceeded toward establishing a worldview and characters before traditional "songwriting."

In existing classifications, the Leon recordings of this period are considered to be a vast collection of material that Reeves Gabrels called a "three-hour improvised opus," divided into three suites:
"I Am with Name",
"The Enemy Is Fragile", and
"Leon Takes Us Outside"
. The finished "1. Outside" was born as a result of breaking down this unorganized, non-commercial material and reconstructing it into short segues (connecting pieces) and independent songs.

The strength of the finished "1. Outside" lies first in the brevity of its narrative.
The characters—Baby Grace, Algeria Touchshriek, Ramona A. Stone, and Nathan Adler—none of them speak for long.

They leave after only a few lines of self-introduction or disturbing fragments. For example, Baby Grace says only
"Grace is my name"
and
"something is going to be horrid"
. As for Touchshriek, his decadence and loneliness are established with just the short introduction of

"My name is Mr Touchshriek" and

"He is a broken man. I am also a broken man.".

The segues in the finished version are the shortest distance for impression, not explanation. Moreover, looking at the official 19-track structure, they are strictly adjusted to a length that does not break the flow of the music and are placed to maintain the album's momentum.

It could be said that the strangeness of the finished "1. Outside" is built upon not explaining things at length.

However, when you listen to the Leon Suites, this impression is shaken from its foundation.
This is because the narrative that was organized into short segments in the finished version continues much longer and remains much more broken in the Leon Suites.

The part corresponding to Baby Grace contains not only the catchphrases that remained in the finished version, but also longer tremors such as
"it was that photo, a fading photograph"
,
"Ramona put me on these interest drugs"
, and
"I can still hear some popular musics and aftershocks"
.

What is important here is that the finished version left behind the skeleton, while what remains in the Leon Suites is the time that clung to that skeleton.

While the dialogue functions as "information" in the finished version, the same words exist as "duration" in the Leon Suites. There, the narrative is not an explanation, but the outflow of a broken consciousness itself.

Touchshriek also appears completely different in the finished version compared to the Leon Suites.
In the finished version, he appears as a "strange and decadent character." But in the long narrative of the Leon Suites, he is more than a character; he becomes the voice of a diseased city.

"A small shop on the corner is really no more than a dark spiral with no end"

"Some of the houses still have inhabitants in them. I’m not sure if they’re from this country or not."

The finished version left behind the outline of the character Touchshriek.
However, what remains in the Leon Suites is the thickness of the damp urban space behind that outline. Here, the way the character is broken and the decay of the city are not separated.

Touchshriek is not just a character, but an existence as if the city itself is speaking through a person's mouth.

The difference is even clearer in the treatment of Ramona A. Stone and Nathan Adler.
In the finished version, Ramona's narrative and Adler's narrative, even if strange, can be followed as separate things to some extent. But in the Leon Suites, the boundary is surprisingly ambiguous.

For example, phrases that seem to belong to Ramona, such as
"we creep together"
,
"under a bloodless chrome sky"
, and
"we just have small friends"
, are repeated, while at the same time, Adler-like explanatory tones are mixed in, such as

"Ramona and Leon just spiral down",

"who loses a name feels anxiety descending", and

"I’m getting ahead of myself".

In the final version, the characters are organized.
In the Leon Suites, the characters have not yet fully become characters.
What exists here is an anxiety that precedes roles.

In the final version of '1. Outside,' the roles of Ramona, I Am With Name, and Nathan Adler are each assigned, but at the stage of the Leon Suites, they are merely a bundle of voices crossed in the same nightmare.

I believe there is an eeriness here that is absent from the final version. If '1. Outside' is a work that places characters, the Leon Suites is material that retains the very anxiety from before characters were established.

The 1990s-style neurosis that clings to Adler's narration is also more exposed in the Leon Suites.
While vocabulary reminiscent of the information society remains in the final version, it continues longer and more persistently in the Leon Suites.

“super highway of information”
— “super highway of information”
“packet sniffers”
— “packet sniffers”
“a sort of nerve internet”
— “a sort of nerve internet”

In the final version, this vocabulary functions as Nathan Adler's peculiar phrasing. However, in the Leon Suites, because it is repeated sluggishly, it approaches not just character setting, but the very anxieties of the 90s: networks, surveillance, authentication, and names.

While '1. Outside' is often read as a future crime story, the Leon Suites was, before that, a hypersensitive reaction to the contemporary information society.

When listening again from this perspective, “Leon Takes Us Outside” also changes in meaning. In the final version, this track is a short prelude to the album. However, in the Leon Suites, there is a much longer naming scene there.

“Oxford Town”
— “Oxford Town”

In addition to the persistent repetition of,
“The very stars are calling. Your name is Leon. Leon is your name.”
— “The very stars are calling. Your name is Leon. Leon is your name.”
—a passage that feels almost like a ritual also appears in the second half.

The final version discarded most of this long narration, leaving only the opening music as an entrance.
In other words, what we are hearing at the beginning of the album is the wreckage of what was originally a much larger summoning scene. What appears as a prelude in '1. Outside' is a ritual that simultaneously establishes characters, a city, and a world in the Leon Suites. I think this difference is extremely significant.

At this point, one might want to say that the Leon Suites is richer and that the final version was edited too much.
However, I do not think it is that simple. '1. Outside' should rather be seen as a triumph of editing.

The Leon Suites is too long. Too ambiguous. Too wordy.
As it was, it was too unorganized as material to be distributed as a single album. It was only because the core of the characters was extracted, divided into short segues, and rearranged alongside independent tracks that '1. Outside' was established as a work.

And in the process of that editing, some of the fragments that could not fit into the main work were released in other forms, such as “Nothing To Be Desired”. This is one of the few examples derived from Leon that was officially released, and that fact itself tells us that the final version of 'Outside' was a 'selected version' rather than the 'whole thing'.

Therefore, I think it is appropriate to place this story in an extra edition rather than the main text.
The Leon Suites is not a substitute for the final version. It is material that exists outside the final version and is used to illuminate it in reverse. Only after seeing that can one understand that the short segues of '1. Outside' were originally fragments of a longer nightmare.

We can see that what looked like character introductions were actually the crossed wires from before the characters were established. And we can also see that what remained in the final version was the 'core,' while what was cut was the 'time'.

In other words, '1. Outside' is an organized nightmare.
The Leon Suites is the long, murky, and unfinished nightmare that existed before that organization.
The strength of the final version lies in turning that nightmare into a single album.
The charm of the Leon Suites lies in the fact that the nightmare remains a nightmare.

Sometimes the true danger of a work resides more strongly in the raw material of its pre-completion stage than in its finished form.
I believe the Leon Suites is exactly that raw material.

Sources
・David Bowie Official Store “1. Outside (The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper Cycle) [2021 Remaster]”
・The Bowie Bible “1. Outside”, “Leon Takes Us Outside”
・Wikipedia “Outside (David Bowie album)”
※ The English fragments of the Leon Suites in this text are based on listening to and transcribing unofficially distributed audio sources, and therefore contain variations in hearing.