Bowie by Mick Rock
David Bowie, in the guise of space alien rock star Ziggy Stardust, opened our eyes to a cosmos of self-expression, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy, masculinity and femininity, pop music and theatrical performance. His unparalleled artistry challenged norms and revolutionized the landscape of music, fashion, and culture forever. There was nothing alien about the humanity and hope engendered by this change agent who transformed a culture through the sheer force of his originality, imagination and fearlessness.
"Bowie by Mick Rock" was an exhibition at the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle featuring the work of legendary rock-and-roll photographer Mick Rock and his collaboration with music icon David Bowie. Mick Rock, "the man who shot the seventies" served as Bowie's official photographer from 1972-1973, cataloging Bowie’s culture changing Ziggy Stardust period.
SCOPE OF WORK: The Bowie estate gave our team access to original session tracks from Spacde Oddity, and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. With those invaluable assets in hand, we created an immersive, soundtrack featuring reimagined versions of three Bowie songs, Space Oddity, Five Years and Hang Onto Yourself. Each track was acoustically targeted to specific areas of the exhibit. Additionally, we produced Transformers, a three minute immersive video .
MUSIC STRATEGY: Underpinning the main gallery experience, we created new instrumental arrangements of the songs 5 Years, Space Oddity & Hang Onto Yourself. An immersive “outer space” guided our sonic approach to curating Bowie’s music for this exhibit. Music and sound were presented over a twenty channel speaker array, deconstructed and extrapolated from Bowie’s Ziggy era music.Vintage space & ancient strings.
Hang Onto Yourself was conceived as a tribute to the late Mick Ronson, Bowie’s invaluable musical lieutenant across five epic albums. Ronson’s creative guitar sound, string arrangements, keyboards and overall studio prowess greatly shaped Bowie’s sound and music, helping to catapult his career into the stratosphere.
Hang Onto Yourself
Five Years the opening track on Bowie’s seminal,The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars, was deconstructed into a haunting a capella, accompanied only by a faint Mellotron. The sound emanates from far above. Bowie speaking to us from heaven.
Five Years
The Space Oddity arrangement was conceived as a "dub" abstraction of the original, with new layers of vintage mellotron added to embellish the beautiful motifs. Sonically, both tracks ebb & flow through immersive playback technology, creating a dynamic sense of movement & space.
Space Oddity
Immersive Exit Hallway
THE HALL OF ZIGGY:
When glam rock space invader Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie) fell to earth in 1972, he found a safe landing site in downtown Manhattan where Lou Reed and his creative catalyst Andy Warhol were busily reshaping popular culture from the inside out. Warhol’s artistic alchemy extended into music with his discovery of Reed’s Velvet Underground. That development caught the attention of a young David Bowie, currently in the guise of Ziggy Stardust. The creativity & cultural weight of this downtown alliance was explosive. Suddenly, the most outrageous aspects of film, dance, theatre & fashion were woven into the realm of popular music, paving the way for the the rapid rise of Glam, Glitter, Punk, Disco & Hip-Hop. Transformers indeed.