How Bowie Rebuilt His Experimental Instincts in the 1990s

The conventional Bowie canon stops around 1980. The records that followed, Tin Machine included, are usually filed as a detour or a decline, an assessment that has aged poorly. What the decade after Scary Monsters actually documents is a working method rebuilt from the ground up.

Mark Plati was close to that process. Co-producer on Earthling, he arrived as engineer, mixer and programmer and ended up credited as writer and producer as well. “I wasn’t even a bass player or guitar player on Earthling, which is what I really am,” he said. “It just fell out of the sky and I ran with it.”

The sequence around it matters. Black Tie White Noise and the Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack pulled Bowie back toward stranger textures in 1993. 1.Outside, his 1995 collaboration with Brian Eno, was conceptually dense and produced almost no radio material beyond the Pet Shop Boys remix of Hallo Spaceboy. Earthling, two years later, was read as a jungle record off the back of Little Wonder, though it was a more progressive piece of work than that label allows.

Plati’s account of the sessions describes something closer to collage than composition. He and guitarist Reeves Gabrels pooled demos and fragments, while Bowie brought in riff ideas that weren’t yet worked out. “He and Reeves had asked me to come up with some tracks to play with,” Plati recalled. “The best part was that I got to really watch the writing process, and be involved in it.”

That is a more useful account of the period than the sales figures that once defined it.