1. OUTSIDE

Bowie and Eno get back together and fiddle about with a Nine Inch Nails aesthetic applied to an electronic dance-rock presentation that takes the experiments of Black Tie White Noise and The Buddha of Suburbia into dark new territory.

On paper, the idea of 1. Outside - and the two proposed sequels that never appeared, 2. Contamination and 3. Afrikaan - sounds amazing. A trilogy, just like the Berlin albums, only this time they're linked narrative concept albums. Not only that, but a murder mystery too! And not just a murder mystery, but a post-modern post-cyberpunk New Weird tale about a detective tracking down a serial killer murdering people in the name of art in a world where such brutality has become so cliche there are entire police departments devoted to investigating such crimes! And Bowie uses different voices for all the characters! And it's all improvised in the studio!

Well, yeah, there's the problem. Bowie and Eno had an ambitious plan for these albums, but didn't really back it up with sufficient compositional planning; instead, the music here is cobbled together from hours and hours of improv sessions. This attempt to create developed songs from recontextualised improvisations isn't unprecedented in Eno's own work - and indeed Frank Zappa did it a lot with his "xenochrony" technique - but in this case the results don't quite hit the level of the classic Berlin trilogy. You could get one good album out of this stuff - Outside itself - but the fact that Contamination and Afrikaan were never completed says it all.

On top of that, the attempt to latch onto a modern industrial rock sound can feel half-hearted if you are expecting this to be the sort of Bowie take on Nine Inch Nails which the aesthetic presentation suggests. It's somewhat less jarring if you have digested the Bowie albums led up to it, though, which it is a fairly impressive development of.

Still, the fact is that the best song on here, I'm Deranged, works much better in the context of NIN main man Trent Reznor's soundtrack selection for the David Lynch movie Lost Highway, in which judicious editing transforms it into a powerful bookending piece.