Tech and the Bowie Canon

The technology surrounding us now is not only the world Bowie had predicted, but about which he had written throughout his career

Technology and music have gone hand in hand since man first whistled through a blade of grass. It might not have been given that name, but much as a pencil was an early form of communication technology, that blade of grass was a first instrument.

In time came the piano, and then the recording studio. The challenge now was not simply how to record that which could be heard live, though that was very welcome. It was how to ensure that the recorded sound became a lasting work of art in itself.

Sound engineers and record producers started to get on board by using recording studios as new instruments in themselves, with George Martin guiding the world, via The Beatles, in a sonic adventure throughout the 1960s.

Come the 1970s, one New Yorker named Tony Visconti reframed the live sounds of first Marc Bolan and then David Bowie into something dramatic, romantic and electrifying: without naming it thus, he had invented the artistic iteration of glam rock. As keyboardist and ‘Enossifier’ for Roxy Music, Brian Eno was nearby, and soon set off on his own adventure in sound.

In the late 70s Visconti’s sense of drama, Eno’s fearlessness and Bowie’s open-minded lyricism/cultural magpie tendencies came together in the Berlin Trilogy of the albums Low, Heroes and Lodger.

Recorded at La Chateau d’Herouville near Paris and the Hansa Studios by the Wall in Berlin, the so-called ‘krautrock’ sound structures of Kraftwerk, Neu! Amon Duul II and Tangerine Dream were used as a backdrop to Bowie’s songs of post-addiction life, cultural tension and loneliness, but with his dominant baritone foregrounded as always. Tech was now being used as a part of the creative process, the medium becoming part of the message.

Bowie went through every new instrument and new recording technique, from his scattershot early career in the 1960s up until his last four albums in the first two decades of the 21st century. Sometimes he would write at home on piano or acoustic guitar, then show the songs to the producer in the studio, and sometimes, as in the Berlin trilogy, he would come along Tabla Rasa, and create everything there and then, in the space.

Into the 1980s, he admitted he gave away a lot of control of the production process to the producers and marketing teams around him — he had signed very expensive deals, so the stakes were high — but the lack of spontaneity tended to show in the results. The more money and voices came his way, the less daring the work became, and the less hungry he sounded.

Drum machines used on Black Tie, White Noise and Earthling in the 90s stripped away another layer of connection with the listener, as the days of the sprightly Woody Woodmansey (from The Spiders from Mars) felt a very long time ago. Still, much like (near) contemporaries Madonna and Elton John, Bowie wasn’t just not interested in resting on his laurels; he seemed pathologically averse to it.

In the 21st century, the Internet very much replaced music press-invented pop music movements (punk, rave, grunge etc.) with its own new brand of cultural politics. Bowie had turned his back even on interacting with his own BowieNet quite soon after starting it up (and releasing Telling Lies as the first internet only single in the late 1990s).

He had always made highly stylised, en vogue videos for his singles, and this was one of the most striking things about his final album Blackstar, in 2016. The videos, drenched with holy imagery, folk mythology and surreal visual metaphors, were arguably the finest he had ever made.

The technology that was the ecosystem that sci-fi-writer-Bowie envisioned had become the all-enveloping simulacra of the early 21st century. The actual use of tech in his music production however had reached an artistic peak in the Berlin trilogy, these returns dwindling following this as the technological requirements of the music industry sped up.

In 2023, seven years after his death, tech is now an embedded feature in the majority of people’s lives — screens in every room, as director Nic Roeg had hinted at in Bowie’s most acclaimed film The Man Who Fell To Earth in 1975. The technology surrounding us now is not only the world Bowie had predicted, but about which he had written throughout his career.

States of Independence: From Pop Art to Art Rock and Beyond available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0B45DXC98/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i7