David Bowie 1. Outside (The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper-cycle) 2LP

By 1994, Bowie and Eno were again collaborating in the studio. The result was the concept album Outside, released in 1995 as the first installment of a new deal with Virgin Records. The complex project explored the increasing obsession with the mutilation of the human body as art and the paganization of western society. With cut-and-paste lyrics drawing from the diary of fictional character Nathan Adler, a haunted sound of ruin soundtracking a non-linear storyline of art, murder and technology, Outside predated a new darker sensibility that would pervade not only music, but film, literature and the arts in general in the very near future. Appropriately, the album's first single, "The Hearts Filthy Lesson," showed up in the soundtrack of one of the darkest films to cross over into the mainstream of that year in David Fincher's Seven - while two years later, edits of deep cut "I'm Deranged" would bookend David Lynch's Lost Highway as both opening title and end credits music.

The Outside tour actually began a few weeks before the album's release, exacerbating the already confrontational scenario of playing with Nine Inch Nails; in addition to avoiding the monster hits that had been laid to rest five years earlier on Sound + Vision, the first few weeks saw Bowie and band playing sets dominated by an as-yet-unreleased album. Hardly unusual for Bowie, the tour is regarded in hindsight as bold and unprecedented, from the overlapping transition that meshed NIN and Bowie's performances to its unearthed treasures including "Joe the Lion" from "Heroes" and a radically rearranged "The Man Who Sold the World." 1995 also saw Bowie make one of many successful forays into the art world, with an acclaimed exhibition at London's Cork Street Gallery.