1. Outside

Released September 25, 1995 via Virgin in the US, with RCA and Arista handling Europe, 1. Outside is David Bowie's twentieth album and his first concept record since Diamond Dogs. He and Eno reconnected at Bowie's wedding reception in Florence in 1992 and swapped mini manifestos about what they would and would not do. In January 1994 they visited the Gugging psychiatric hospital outside Vienna and its colony of outsider artists, which gave the album its title, and that March they spent ten days at Mountain Studios in Montreux with nothing written. Eno handed each musician a flash-card with a character to play (Bowie's read soothsayer and town crier), nobody was allowed to tell the others what key they were in, and Bowie sat in his own corner with canvas and charcoal, painting portraits of the band and joining in, Eno said, "if it became interesting." At least thirty-five hours of tape came out of it, cut into songs and later reshaped with new material at The Hit Factory in New York, with David Richards co-producing.

Twin Peaks and the Gugging artists fed the story. Detective Nathan Adler investigates the murder of fourteen-year-old Baby Grace Blue in Oxford Town, New Jersey, a world where art crimes and concept muggings are part of daily life, and spoken segues voiced by Bowie's characters stitch the songs together. Reeves Gabrels carries the guitars, Mike Garson returns on piano, and Erdal Kızılçay, whom Garson called "a one-man jazz-rock fusion ensemble," holds the middle. It sounds like jittery paranoia: industrial clank, jungle rhythms, ambient drift and art rock folded into one dense, uneasy song cycle. In the cyber-drenched 1990s Bowie was ahead of the game again, and Outside is a monumental collage of techno-war coldness, pulling pieces of every earlier persona into a single dark storyline.

"The Hearts Filthy Lesson" went out as the lead single and played over the end credits of Se7en, "Hallo Spaceboy," remixed with the Pet Shop Boys in 1996, reached No. 12 in the UK, and "Strangers When We Meet" closes the album. It peaked at No. 8 in the UK and No. 21 in the US, and Nine Inch Nails opened the American leg of the tour, sharing the stage with Bowie every night. Bowie called it "the best thing I've ever made." Divisive on release, it now reads as the start of his late-period run.

Rhino reissue on two black LPs, carrying the full nineteen-track album with every segue. The original 1995 vinyl, Excerpts From 1. Outside, dropped "No Control," "Wishful Beginnings," "Thru' These Architects Eyes," "Strangers When We Meet" and two segues.