Features Dylan Howe He’s spent years simultaneously developing his jazz drumming concept and accompanying a lively selection of rock artists. Now he’s found a unique way to marry both aesthetics by Ken Micallef In 1976, rock chameleon David Bowie escaped the public eye by moving into a small apartment in West Berlin. Peering out the window of the nearby recording studio where he worked, Bowie could see the infamous Berlin Wall, its armed sentries and barbed wire reflecting Cold War animosities. When not writing or recording, the singer spent his days listening to such nascent German acts as Neu!, Cluster, and Harmonia, groups then in the vanguard of analog synthesizer technology that channeled the country’s violent past into space-rock sounds. Often referred to as Bowie’s “Berlin trilogy,” the resulting albums, Low, Heroes, and Lodger, have proven vastly influential. Consisting of churning rock and darkly ambient, synth-drenched minimalism, the trilogy is […]

August 2015 Issue