Brian Eno / David Byrne

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A1  America Is Waiting

    Arranged By – Brian Eno, David Byrne, David Van Tieghem, Tim Wright (2)Arranged By, Bass – Bill LaswellBass [Click] – Tim Wright (2)Drums, Percussion – David Van TieghemOther [Vocal Sample Source] – Unidentified Indignant Radio Host, San Francisco, April 1980

3:36
A2  Mea Culpa

    Drums [Bodhran] – Dennis KeeleyOther [Vocal Sample Source] – Inflamed Caller And Smooth Politician Replying, Both Unidentified. Radio Call-In Show, New York, July 1979

3:35
A3  Regiment

    Arranged By – Brian Eno, Busta Jones, Chris Frantz, David Byrne, Robert FrippBass – Busta JonesDrums – Chris Frantz, David Van TieghemOther [Vocal Sample Source] – Dunya Yusin, Lebanese Mountain Singer. (From 'The Human Voice In The World Of Islam' Tangent Records Tgs 131)Percussion – David Van Tieghem

3:56
A4  Help Me Somebody

    Congas, Percussion [Metals] – Steve ScalesDrums – John CookseyOther [Vocal Sample Source] – Reverend Paul Morton, Broadcast Sermon, New Orleans, June 1980.

4:18
A5  The Jezebel Spirit

    Drums [Bass Drum], Percussion [Can] – Prairie PrinceDrums [Bata], Percussion [Sticks] – Mingo LewisOther [Vocal Sample Source] – Unidentified Exorcist, New York, September 1980.

4:55
B1  Qu'Ran

    Drums – John CookseyOther [Vocal Sample Source] – Algerian Muslims Chanting Qu'Ran. (Same Source As A3)

3:46
B2  Moonlight In Glory

    Congas, Percussion [Agong-gong] – Jose RossyOther [Vocal Sample Source] – Moving Star Hall Singers, Sea Islands, Georgia. (From 'The Moving Star Hall Singers' Folways Fs 3841)., The

4:19
B3  The Carrier

    Drums [Bass Drum], Percussion [Can] – Prairie PrinceDrums [Bata], Percussion [Sticks] – Mingo LewisOther [Vocal Sample Source] – Dunya Yusin. (See A3)

3:30
B4  A Secret Life

    Other [Vocal Sample Source] – Samira Tewfik, Egyptian Popular Singer. (From 'Les Plus Grandes Artistes Du Monde Arabe' Emi Records)

2:30
B5  Come With Us

    Other [Vocal Sample Source] – Unidentified Radio Evangelist, San Francisco, April 1980.

2:38
B6  Mountain Of Needles  2:35
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I absolutely cannot listen to this record. I hate it. I hate it a lot. It is horrifying. But there's a reason I'm giving it this rating. At the time of writing this review, I've just finished listening to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in the dark with nice fat headphones. The experience is unlike anything else. No other piece of music makes me feel this way. Basically, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the scariest thing I've ever heard. Listened to during daylight, it sounds like some interesting, but average, experiment. In the dark however, those sampled voices become somehow horrifying. There's something sinister behind their random babbling. Mea Culpa has those never ending loops of some man claiming, I don't know, innocence? The build up perfectly instils a feeling of claustrophobia. After that,Regiment is just as terrifying. That arabic woman sounds like she is cursing you to an untimely death, her wavering, ethereal voice stabbing you in the heart. Later, the man in The Jezebel Spirit sounds like pure evil. The very black heart of evil. Throughout the entire record, the music holds up the fear. That tense, industrial funk keeps the tension high, and the washes of ambient sound sound just as sinister and evil as the voices. Up until this point I'd been keeping myself in check. But the horror, the sheer horror that is the trio of Moonlight in Glory, The Carrier and A Secret Life sent me through the roof. Moonlight in Glory has that worried-sounding man who makes you feel like something bad is about to happen. And it is. Somehow, the following three songs just made me feel like shitting myself on my bed. At this point in the record, I was freaking out. It felt like the walls were closing in on me and darkness was only getting darker (and no, I don't smoke weed). The end could not come soon enough. As soon as Mountain of Needles finished I shot out of my room, into the bright, safe lights. Thank God. I am safe
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There is something strangely enjoyable about listening to religious chants and sermons from various religions, backed by Talking Heads-ish polyrhythms and Brian Eno's ambient soundscapes. In one way it is strangely spiritual; in another way, it is somewhat comical. There are parts where I don't know whether I should bow my head and chant along, or dance to the funky beats. Either way, it is really a trip and an experience that should be felt and heard.

Some people will write this one off; do not listen to these people. Instead, listen to this album. Listen as you paint a room in your house, or listen while you spend time pulling weeds in your garden. Or better yet, listen while you touch yourself. Or even better, listen while touching someone else.

My favorite track may just be Qu'ran. The reason is somewhat petty on my end. It is because I have Qu'ran and you don't. Qu'ran, which features sacred readings from the Qu'ran, sang by an actual muslim cleric, offended the muslim community. Now, if you ever doubted the taste of Muslims, you now know better; clearly, they have very good taste in music. Because Brian Eno and David Byrne's collaborative release was certainly not a mainstream one. In other words, in order to GET offended by this song, they had to already be listening to this musical masterpiece. I can see it now-- someone getting ready for church while listening to this mysterious album, and then track six comes up and the person says "Oh WTF?!?!? Now Byrne and Eno have gone TOO FAR!"

Even though there are numerous religious chants and sermons found on this masterpiece-- including Christian and Hindu-- only the Muslim community petitioned and insisted that Byrne remove that track. And so, being the respectful sycophant that he is, Byrne decided to do as requested, and he replaced the song with something other. (I wouldn't know what since I have the real version.) But the thing is, very few people have heard Qu'ran because it was never put on CD. Not even the 25 year anniversary release which had an additional 7 bonus tracks/outtakes. Even that version didn't have the song.


Some people may wonder, "Would it be worth tracking down the vinyl so I can hear this song, and experience the album as it was originally intended?" Only if you want to out of some sort of principle. I will contend that it is a very strong musical track, but so is the rest of the album. And knowing the Byrne and Eno standard, I am sure they didn't replace it with something crappy. So the answer is no, unless you must have it based on artistic principle.


Anyway, long story short, the album rules. For all who haven't heard it-- it isn't ONLY religious chants. That just makes up a good amount of the album. And I would have it no other way.
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While I didn't feel compelled to jump up and turn this off, I was compelled to question a few things about this.  Is it art for art's sake?  Is it some random jam session turned popular cd?  Is there really something to get here or am I looking aimlessly?  At the end of it all I decided that It's really not bad, and not nearly as "experimental" as I had originally thought, and it actually makes a good companion piece to doing dishes.  The sampling used here is pretty amusing, really there is a bit of everything you never thought you'd ever hear put together and it does sound good.  Now that is a rather impressive feat, especially for even the variety each song seems to have, really a ton of work must have gone into making this.  I'm a little more of a straightforward song person most of the time, but this is a fun little album which I do ocasionally listen to, but heck when you consider how talented each of the artists involved is, it's no wonder why this turned out so well.
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A musical laboratory
Were the late '70s and early '80s an exciting time for rock or what? With Peter Gabriel, Television and the Talking Heads regularly cutting albums, it was a great time for innovation and experimentation. Since a lot of the musicians in the art rock world worked together, it was inevitable that two of its greatest minds, David Byrne and Brian Eno, would collaborate. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts could best be described as a collection of two- to four-minute experiments in combining real and synthetic soundscapes with vocal and spoken word samples. What really struck me about this album is how new it sounds despite being over thirty years old. I was also struck by how similar it sounds to other albums in this genre that came after. It would not surprise me at all if groups like Einsturzende Neubauten and the reunited King Crimson cited it as an influence. My favorite tracks are the funky, driving "Regiment" and the mystical, atmospheric "The Jezebel Spirit." As it is experiments in general, however, not all of them are entirely successful. Some of the tracks have a half-finished quality to them while others are only satisfying on a technical level. All the same, I enjoyed this album and I am very glad that I finally listened to it after all these years.
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An album about chaos in the jungle, if the jungle was New York City.
Highlights:
Regiment
Mountain Of Needles
America Is Waiting
Help Me Somebody
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The triumph of Remain In Light exhausted the Talking Heads, sending them apart for a little while to recoup. Though inactive as a band until 1983's Speaking in Tongues, it would actually prove a fruitful time. While Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz took a holiday and released a dance-pop album that's gone down in beloved dance music history, their band leader had something very different in mind. For his part Byrne had been a bit of an authoritarian asshole during the Remain in Light sessions (thus "what you gonna do when you get out of jail?" line in Genius of Love), but it's clear that must have extended mostly to his bandmates rather the other important person, Eno. No if anything the existence of Bush of Ghosts indicated that the big strides and innovations of Remain in Light were probably mostly from these two, so it shouldn't be odd that they used the time off to go work alone together. The oddest sides of Remain in Light all migrated over with them, resulting in this pretty darn experimental album, in it's time anyway. It's heavily invested in that very 80's of obsessions, the musical travelogue sort of vibe that Peter Gabriel and Sting would also embark on over the next ten years. The idea of leaving your familiar Anglo-American sounds and going around looking for some other flavors to use in the ol' kitchen. Pair that up with the real experiment, sampling. Ah yes, this is hugely famous for that. To my knowledge ALL the vocals heard here are sampled, some more obviously than others. Sampling was virtually an unknown quality at the time, something that hip-hop was only just starting to use let alone approach as it's own cut and paste art form. So in that sense there's a ton of innovation going on here that ought to be celebrated heavily. After all by the other end of the decade in 89', rap would drop two of it's great masterpieces of creative sampling with Three Feet High and Rising and Paul's Boutique. World's apart, but Bush of Ghosts is a good counter argument to samplings nay sayers who are too biased (read: scared) against hip-hop to even hear out examples from it. The actual musical construction of the album around the samples is a hodge podge of New Wave sounding elements, giving parts of the album a very cool hybrid sound between the quirky modern sounds of the normal Talking Heads and the (mostly) middle eastern inflected sounds of the rest. In all ways this is a hugely COOL record, it's hard not to be interested in it. I just at parts feel like it should be better than it is. As if with the lack of band with them, these two found it harder to get more structure. Which seems odd, but it sounds like that. It doesn't even mix with what Eno himself has shown himself capable of, but hey. The album is at it's best when it's sounding like a New Wave instrumental crazy fest of sampled voices, and at it's weakest when it just sort of sounds like....an ethnic snapshot of music you might hear in a National Geographic documentary. Mostly this is a divide between the halves, with the first one being more gonzo New Wave, and the second being more borderline generic "ethnic" music. If only they had focused on the former more, man this would truly live up to it's level of hype and critical acclaim. As is though? It's still a fascinating little thing with a strong strong vibe and a unique experience.
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When you put Brian Eno and David Byrne in the same studio, you know things will get weird. A lot of the sounds here are similar to those from Remain in Light: the drums beats (a lot of them remind me of my favorites ‘Heads song, “The Great Curve”), some interesting synthesizers (of course, adding Eno helped in this regard), and a lot of Arabic and African influences. These influences are the biggest change from the previous Talking Heads album to the Byrne collaboration.

Favorite tracks: Mea Cupla, Help Me Somebody, Moonlight in Glory, Mountain of Needles
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The Sin of Omission
Leaving aside the issue of originality, I do feel that My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was way ahead of its time. This was released in 1981, but feels like it was sent back in time from 2001. It has a troublesome, worrying quality, mirroring the state of our own time, where so many messages come shooting at us on a daily basis, that it’s hard to give any one of them your undivided attention. Back in the early 80’s, the threat of nuclear war was the thing most bands were busy addressing. The tense relationship between the secular and the religious on offer here would take more than a decade to really filter through into mainstream thought.

That, however, brings me to the reason why I refuse to rate this. As is well known, Byrne and Eno had the track “Qu-ran” replaced with “Very Very Hungry” very early on following objections from an Islamic organisation in London claiming that using chants from the Quran in this way was blasphemous.

This is another way in which the LP was ahead of its time (eight years ahead of The Satanic Verses), and it merely exaggerates my suspicions of Byrne in particular, as being a politically correct, middle class muddlehead, long before self-flagellant self-censorship became the norm in certain political circles.

I’m not a bigoted person (I think); as far as I’m concerned people can believe whatever they like. But, in a world in which there are constantly contradictory truth claims, what is not OK is for any group or persons to seek to curtail another’s right to free speech or artistic expression, however politely they do it.

25 years on, in an interview with Pitchfork, Byrne could be found defending self-censorship as “just the way human social interaction works”. And it does, often to facilitate social interaction and avoid fights. But there’s a pernicious side to it as well, which is that often self-censorship works not as a means of avoiding unnecessary confrontation, but because people (often correctly) believe they’d be ostracized if they came out with what they really believe. In theory we live in a society where free speech prevails, in practice we live in a world where regurgitated, received opinion is presented as the only sensible view, while it is often a clichéd, badly reasoned version of a small, media-savvy, middle class elite’s knee-jerk response to things.

What is even worse, is that many of those voices that scream for whatever offends them to be banned, censored, curtailed, whatever, are voices whose own privileged position is founded on the historical battle for free speech. Worse still is when the same habit is found in minority communities. The fact is that many of those who moved to the West from Muslim countries, did so because of a lack of freedom and opportunity in their native lands. What has historically made western countries attractive, is precisely the freedom (including free speech) that enables opportunity. That a piece of music offends your religious sensibilities is not a valid reason to request self-censorship on the part of the artist involved, it’s a challenge to tolerate that with which you vigorously disagree. By all means protest, if you want to, but the removal of “Qu’ran” is a complete disgrace, on all sides.

Besides (and I can’t believe I’m complaining about a proggy notion like this), it’s perfectly obvious that the removal of “Qu’ran” upsets the conceptual integrity of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Byrne and Eno didn’t just engage in an act of self-censorship, they engaged in an act of wanton mutilation of their own creation.
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Regiment has got to be one of my favourite tracks hands down, the drum track alone would do it but that vocal and bass line and and and. Fantastic.

Such a shame i've only come to this relatively recently after getting most of the TH back catalogue. My dad had it but I think it was a bit wierd from me as a bairn.

Not an easy listen playing to the family, but it's not only good for its influence etc, it's just an exciting knockout piece of music. If only there was more like this Mr Eno & Byrne (your second album definitely wasn't it).

One of 20 x 5 star releases from my 2460 ratings, so it must be good.
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A complete anomaly in the 80s. Remain In Light era Talking Heads meets producer/recorder/composer/I don't what I'm doing Eno for a forward thinking, sample heavy, electronic dirturbo-funk album. Eno and Byrne create a busy mash of samples and groove instrumentation here. Never properly acknowledged as a pioneering electronic album. A  unique and influential experiment that holds up very well.
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This excellent companion piece to Remain In Light - having been recorded at around the same time - finds Eno and Byrne indulging their passions for wild, layered rhythms as pioneered on I Zimbra on Talking Heads' Fear of Music. The deft use of sampled voices and snippets aids the creation of fascinating, murky atmospheres - such as the exorcism sequence on The Jezebel Spirit - which would later be picked up by post-rock acts such as Godspeed You Black Emperor or A Silver Mt. Zion. At times spiritual, at other times sinister and apocalyptic, this is one album which proves that "groove-laden and danceable" and "experimental and progressive" are far from incompatible.
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