On the heels of our birthday tribute to David Bowie comes the most extraordinary and rather unexpected news: He has gone back into the recording studio and will be releasing this March his first new album of all original material in ten years.

The album, entitled The Next Day and being released through Iso/Columbia Records, has already gotten a single and a video for the song “Where Are We Now?” The video can be viewed here below; the single can be purchased exclusively through iTunes (album, single) starting today, and will see a wide release in March.

This marks Bowie’s 30th album, and it comes like a bat out of hell, totally from left field, and how touching and piquant that it’s all done on the man’s birthday.

Happy 66th birthday today to the one and only musically sonic alchemist David Bowie, the artistic pantologist who kept reinventing himself, taking music and genres to levels untold, using and utilizing his influences, inventing and shaping existing modes and expressions, and ultimately acting as a broad influence and factotum to those who followed him.

Other than jazz maverick Miles Davis and The Beatles, it would be difficult to try and find another artist/or artists who kept changing like a chameleon in all facets of his art the way David Bowie did, nurturing and producing A-list and struggling musicians along the way who also became well-known and revered; in essence Bowie became the number one artist to look at as a bonafide concrete example of creating a new identity again and again. Most musicians and artists are usually, while extremely successful at it, mired in their own personal skins and hardly ever deviate from it. If one listens to records by the mighty Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Doors, or even Black Sabbath, the sound is instantly recognizable, their styles are immediate to the listener, upon first note and physical posturing.

Space Oddity, the debut album by the rock and roll spaceman David Bowie, (pictured here above with its 1972 reissue cover) is now available on MP3 format from Amazon this month for only $5.

On this album, released in 1969 and Bowie’s second with his pseudonym last name (he was born David Jones and had recorded a few songs and albums with that name and a back up band called The Lower Third prior to Space Oddity), Bowie takes some of the musical cues left over in the metaphoric bargain bins from 1967’s Summer of Love and does his best Donovan meets Syd Barrett style post-post psychedelic musings. The title track of course was an international hit and is still one of the highlights of Bowie’s greatest hits albums and in the top five of his all time songs for many fans of his.

Raw Power by The Stooges, one of the prototype records for punk music, with its snarling and frighteningly rough aural attitudes, is now available on MP3 format from Amazon this month for only $5.

The Stooges had already released two albums prior to 1973’s Raw Power, (The Stooges and Funhouse), each also dazzlingly original and sonically foreboding and ominous, lean and tough, like a bottle slash across the face, elements which became fully realized by the time Raw Power was released. Produced originally by David Bowie and led by the pint-sized man full of moxie Iggy Pop and with the sonic rumblings and grumblings of guitarist James Williamson and the rhythm section of former guitar player Ron Asheton moved over to bass and his brother Scotty still playing the drums as he always had, Raw Power finds the quartet taking Thor-style hammers in a musical sense to glass and then picking up the shards and handing them over to Iggy who proceeds to self-mutilate himself by way of his full admission and vocal nakedness on the record. He offers no apologies and takes no prisoners; he stands alone on his fucked up summit and that’s just the way he likes it.

Today’s the last day to get the 40th Anniversary Edition of the classic David Bowie album The Rise and Fall Of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars for only $5 in MP3 format.

The album is also available on CD and limited edition vinyl.

We’ve written about David Bowie and this amazing album several times here at Geeks Of Doom, so be sure to check out our write-up of the 40th anniversary edition.

Browse all 100 albums on sale this month for only $5 each, as well as several albums on sale this week for only $2.99.