Réne Peraza has been commenting here for a few years now. He’s a busy artist with art direction and design, acting, and music keeping him firing on all cylinders. He writes and records a single every now and then and as a gent who has the twin artistic stars of Bowie and Ferry to follow with his aesthetic astrolabe, we find the results of his efforts most delightful here at PPM.

While he usually records a single for streaming and download sales, this one was kept non commercial and strictly for online video only. He’s previously adapted other artists’ songs to the Spanish language before, but he had never considered covering Davie Bowie until now. In the 45th year of “Ashes To Ashes,” the impetus presented itself. He was planning on using an existing new arrangement of the song but the synchronization rights proved to be challenging to obtain, so he did something even better and fully took the creative reins in his own hands.

He enlisted his guitarist brother, Jose Luis Peraza, who contributed a fantastic solo on René’s 2023 single “The Siren [Aye Aye],” to create an acoustic arrangement on nylon and steel string guitar and made that the template for his linguistic revision. The song was now rendered in a gentle, pensive arrangement that skirted close to Flamenco at times and had just the barest touch of synth at his own hand to add the sustained chords for an undercurrent of tension that the song always needs. He kept the spoken word backing vocals on a beat delay from the original but I especially liked the varispeed vocals in the song’s coda. Those were a knowing callback to Bowie’s penchant for using them strategically [“Fame,” “After All, ” “The Bewlay Brothers”] as well as not so strategically [“The Laughing Gnome”] throughout his career.

And with the song in the can, René shot and edited the clip as seen above. Originally, René sent me the link and since it was not a commercial piece, I simply enjoyed it and passed it along to friends, but this version is now gaining notice and I thought we’d mention it here for all of the Bowie-conscious who collect here like butterflies on an azalea.

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