David Bowie‘s upcoming album, The Next Day, is now streaming for free on iTunes! The album, a diverse mix of a collage of archetypical Bowie sounds with a foot firmly planted in his expected eclectic personality types, will be released on March 12, 2013. (The streaming version of the album can be accessed through the iTunes app; details are below.)

Back on January 8, we gave a birthday tribute to Bowie and then came the most extraordinary and rather unexpected news: that he had gone back into the recording studio to record his first new album of all original material in over ten years.

The Next Day, being released through Iso/Columbia Records, has already released singles and videos for the tracks “Where Are We Now” and “The Stars (Are Out Tonight).” The video for “Where are we Now” can be viewed here below; the single can be purchased exclusively through iTunes (album, single).

Scary Monsters, the record which acted as the verve-filled sonic bridge between the 1970s and 1980s that David Bowie treaded upon, is now available on MP3 format this month for only $5.00, as part of the Amazon’s $5 MP3 Deals.

Originally released in 1980, Bowie tips his many hats goodbye to the stellar career he had in the 1970s and ushers in the embryonic fragments of sounds he would shape more and more like a sculptor with a ball peen hammer and a tin sheet as the 1980s began. With Scary Monsters and its wall of iron and metal and glass sound, treble quaking with guitars by musicians as diverse as Robert Fripp from King Crimson, Carlos Alomar, and even guest appearances by Pete Townshend and long-time Bowie collaborator and producer Tony Visconti, and containing a bottom end which still expands on his more white boy R&B measures, the album takes all the influence Bowie used as colors before and smashes it in one fell swoop and lets the sonic pieces fall where they may.

This week marks the 36th anniversary of the David Bowie single “Sound and Vision,” the delectable slice of synthesized, bass-heavy power pop, which appeared on Bowie’s Low album and remains a fan and critic favorite in the expansive Bowie catalog.

Since its release, there have been various cover versions of the song. Its latest one comes from eclectic singer/songwriter Beck, who reimagines the tune in a full-on, orchestrated and rather over the top amplified version as part of his Lincoln Now 360 Experience. Check out that video here below.

A new biopic is in the early stages right now which will visually showcase the collaboration between the musical men-about-town punk/post punk/psycho and ambient rock monarchs, Iggy Pop and David Bowie.

Entitled Lust For Life (which was first the name of a 1956 film starring Anthony Quinn about the tortured genius painter Vincent Van Gogh, but in later years became more associated with Iggy Pop as the title track from his seminal 1977 release produced by Bowie and created in Berlin), the film will focus on the trials, trails, and artistic roads the two men walked down during their jaunt to West Berlin in the mid-1970s. The decision to go there was influenced heavily by the writings of Christopher Isherwood, the late British writer whose novels The Berlin Stories and Goodbye To Berlin became literary catalysts that (even though they were set in wartime Germany in decay) still painted a wondrous idyllic Berlin, which became a sort of of artistic avant-garde Disneyland for many budding and established painters, musicians, and artists alike who took its cues and ventured there in hopes of finding their inner muses, Iggy Pop and David Bowie among them. Bowie and Berlin was also the focus of some headline controversy at the time when Bowie reportedly did a few “Hitler salutes” for the burgeoning crowd when he was in the city; fans, townspeople, and press photographers among those around him when he supposedly did it. It is unclear if that or any controversial matter will wind up in the upcoming biopic.

Fans of classic rock and roll and David Bowie and Genesis in particular, are going to have reasons to rejoice. It appears that the film taken of The Atomic Sunrise Festival, which took place in London’s famed Roundhouse Club during March 1970, has been unearthed. The Festival has pretty much been all but forgotten about in the shadows of a music fan’s recall as larger festivals during that time like Woodstock and Isle of Wight are more firmly planted in one’s consciousness. Until now.

What’s even more mindblowing about this film are the guises David Bowie and Genesis are in during that time. Bowie was just making the switch from being a poor man’s Donovan/Syd Barrett with his records in which his musical style was decidedly pagan and folksy, and decided to amp things up a little bit more with the addition of a new guitarist he just was able to corral at the time, the late Mick Ronson, who turned out to be a key figure in the birth of glam music and the glam sounds in particular. With Bowie and even Tony Visconti, the American producer who also gave a perfect amount of musical shellac as the producer of Bowie’s subsequent releases after this gig and T-Rex and many others, the lineup, called The Hype, probably sounds like anything but, as will now be evidenced when the film is released. If anything, the band should act as an on-ramp to the glam land Bowie wound up residing in for the next couple of years, propelling his way to superstardom.