African Night Flight

The Berlin Trilogy concludes with Lodger, the strangest and most restless of the three records Bowie made with Brian Eno between 1977 and 1979. Where Low and "Heroes" had cold, architectural beauty, Lodger is more mobile, more uncomfortable, more willing to be ugly.

African Night Flight opens side two with a disorienting rush: drums sounding like they're in another room, guitar figures that cut and restart, Bowie's voice multitracked into something between exhilaration and anxiety. African and world music rhythms are present but filtered through the Eno-Bowie studio process into something genuinely alien.

Lodger has long been the overlooked Berlin record, critically reassessed upward in recent decades. African Night Flight is one of the reasons why.