Music / My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

"Learn the truth."

"I've often eulogised Eno's musical abilities, but alongside his talent he's also a very nice guy. Sickening, isn't it? This knocked me sideways when I first heard it— full of drum loops, samples and soundscapes, stuff that we really take for granted now, but which was unheard of in all but the most progressive musical circles at the time."

—Richard Wright

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, released in 1981 through EG Records & Polydor Records in the UK and Sire Records in the US, is the debut collaborative album between English ambient musician Brian Eno and Scottish-American Post-Punk musician David Byrne. Marking Byrne's first project outside of his work with Talking Heads, the album was put together in 1979-1980 shortly after the release of the latter's Fear of Music, and in hindsight acts as the direct prototype for Remain in Light later in 1980, right down to featuring several of the backing musicians who would appear on that album and its supporting tour. Seeking to experiment with the avant-funk approach that Talking Heads were increasingly leaning into, Byrne and Eno created a collage of looped, trancelike sounds that would form what the latter dubbed their "vision of a psychedelic Africa."

To deconstruct the idea of vocals in music, the pair opted not to record any of their own vocal tracks, but rather splice in found recordings of other people from various sources, inspired by Holger Czukay's prior experiments with dictation machines and shortwave radios. This approach to sampling was unprecedented: while it was nothing new in music, nobody had ever made sampling such a crucial and omnipresent element of an album before, and indeed it wasn't an easy task to achieve. The album was delayed by two years as Byrne and Eno sought to clear the samples used with the original rightsholders and reconfigure tracks whose samples couldn't be greenlit. As such, even though it was made before Remain in Light as a prelude, it released the year after the Talking Heads album and became an accidental coda to it.

The radical approach on this album was a massive risk, and indeed it didn't seem to pay off at first: it just barely failed to clear the Top 40 on the Billboard 200 at a No. 44 peak. It was a marginally bigger success in the UK at No. 29, but became a surprise hit in New Zealand, where it charted at No. 8. Creative Differences between Byrne and Eno over the album's approach would also contribute to Eno cutting ties with Talking Heads, combined with the tense production of Remain in Light, and he wouldn't collaborate with Byrne again until Everything That Happens Will Happen Today 27 years later.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was supported by two singles: "Regiment" and "The Jezebel Spirit".

Tracklist:

Side One

1. "America Is Waiting" (3:36)
2. "Mea Culpa" (3:35)
3. "Regiment" (3:56)
4. "Help Me Somebody" (4:18)
5. "The Jezebel Spirit" (4:55)

Side Two

1. "Qu'ran" (3:46)^note Replaced with the former B-Side "Very Very Hungry" (3:31) on most later copies
2. "Moonlight in Glory" (4:19)
3. "The Carrier" (3:30)
4. "A Secret Life" (2:20)
5. "Come With Us" (2:38)
6. "Mountain of Needles" (2:35)

It was come dark, it troped and they were very tired:

• Alternate Album Cover: Two album covers for the album exist. The first one, pictured above, is a photograph of a TV displaying a feedback loop, intercut with taped-on paper cutouts in humanoid shapes. The second, used for the 2006 release, is an indistinct horizontal blur based on the original cover's color scheme.
• As the Good Book Says...: Christianity and Islam feature heavily in the album, and as such there are a number of instances where the audio samples feature references to scripture for artistic effect.
  • In the sermon of his sampled on "Help Me Somebody", Reverend Paul Morton paraphrases Psalms 139:7-8:
    Psalms 139: "Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there."
    Morton: "There's no escape from Him. He's so hiiiigh you can't get over Him. He's so loooooow you can't get under Him. He's so wiiide you can't get around Him! If you make your bed in Heaven, He's there! If you make your bed in Hell, He's there! He's everywhere!"
  • "The Jezebel Spirit" is named after and invokes the Israeli queen who attempted to ban Judaism from Israel; in the song, the exorcist describes his patient as being possessed by Jezebel and attempts to drive her out.
  • "Moonlight in Glory" samples a member of the Moving Star Hall Singers retelling the story of Noah's Ark.
  • "Qu'ran", as the name implies, samples audio of Algerian Muslims reciting from the titular holy book.
• Broken Record: "Mea Culpa" repeats the samples from the inflamed caller and smooth politician on a loop throughout its runtime. Similarly, "Help Me Somebody" loops Reverend Paul Morton shouting "aaaaaah, I know!" ad infinitum throughout its second half.
• Design Student's Orgasm: The album cover, designed by Factory Records collaborator Peter Saville, is an elaborate howlaround photo made by cutting out humanoid shapes from construction paper, taping them to a TV monitor hooked up to a camera, then producing a feedback loop by pointing the camera and TV at each other. Byrne admired the result because it visually resonated with how the album's music was composed; Saville would produce similar photos for the album's singles.
  David Byrne: "Somehow, despite it being very techie, these techniques also seemed analogous to what we were doing on the record. It was funky as well as being techie. Extremely lo-tech, actually, and not what you were supposed to do with a TV set."
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The album is much different than Byrne's later studio albums outside of Talking Heads, with its mixture of ambient and Avant-Garde Music and use of sampled dialogue in place of traditional vocals bringing it more in line with collaborator Brian Eno's material. Byrne's following albums (including his next collaborative album with Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today) would instead be World Music-infused Alternative Rock that built off of Byrne's work with Talking Heads.
• Epileptic Flashing Lights: The music video for "Mea Culpa" frequently features rapid white strobe lights throughout its runtime.
• Everything Is an Instrument: In addition to the found audio sampled on the album, Byrne & Eno frequently made use of found objects as percussion, including a tissue box as a makeshift kick drum and a biscuit tin for a snare.
• Hollywood Exorcism: "The Jezebel Spirit" includes an audio excerpt of a real priest performing a real exorcism, from 1980, something that garnered a good deal of criticism at the time.
• Literary Allusion Title: The album was named after a 1954 novel by Amos Tutuola. Eno and Byrne hadn't read the novel at the time, but they were already fans of Tutuola's other writing.
• Minimalistic Cover Art: The 2006 release, whose cover art consists of a simple horizontal blur.
• The Omnipresent: Reverend Paul Morton, sampled in "Help Me Somebody", describes God as this, quoting a passage from the Bible that describes God as such.
• Orientalism: Implicitly criticized throughout the album, which presents Eno's psychedelic Africa through applying common exoticizing techniques on American and wider western culture. The end result is an unusually alien portrait of the society that Byrne and Eno lived in, with a particular focus on the undiscussed strangeness of religious ceremony.
• Re-Cut:
  • After receiving a complaint from the Islamic Council of Great Britain surrounding the sampling of Qu'ranic recitals on "Qu'ran" (as the way the album used them was considered offensive to the Muslim faith), later LP copies swapped out the track in favor of "Very Very Hungry", originally featured as a B-side on the 12" release of "The Jezebel Spirit".
  • The initial CD release in 1986 used the original LP tracklist with "Qu'ran", but added in "Very Very Hungry" at the end as a bonus track. Starting in 1990, CD copies would switch to the "Qu'ran"-free version.
• Sampling: An invaluable contributor to the technique's development in popular music, being the very first album to center around it as a primary element. Byrne & Eno excerpted dialogue from radio interviews, field recordings, and TV broadcasts, and set them to looped instrumental tracks (some funky and syncopated, others ambient). The specific samples used are as follows:
  • "America is Waiting" - 1980 aircheck by Ray Taliaferro of KGO Newstalk AM 810 in San Francisco
  • "Mea Culpa" - inflamed caller and smooth politician replying, 1979
  • "Regiment" - "Abu Zeluf" by Dunya Yunis, from Music in the World of Islam, Volume One: The Human Voice (1976)
  • "Help Me Somebody" - 1980 broadcasted sermon by Reverend Paul Morton
  • "The Jezebel Spirit" - 1980 exorcism ceremony
  • "Qu'ran" - "Recitation of Verses of the Qu'ran" by a group of Algerian Muslims, from Music in the World of Islam, Volume One: The Human Voice (1976)
  • "Moonlight in Glory" - "See God's Ark A'Moving" and "Moonlight in Glory" by the Moving Star Hall Singers, from Sea Island Folk Festival (1965)
  • "The Carrier" - "Abu Zeluf" by Dunya Yunis, from Music in the World of Islam, Volume One: The Human Voice (1976)
  • "A Secret Life" - "Hobbak Morr" by Samira Tewfik, from Les Plus Grands Artistes du Monde Arabe (1976)
  • "Come With Us" - 1980 evangelist broadcast
• Speaking Simlish: The smooth politician sampled in "Mea Culpa" has their audio chopped up and rearranged to the point where it's just a rapid-fire collection of indecipherable vowel sounds.
• Special Guest:
  • "America is Waiting" features bass guitar parts by prolific avant-garde guitarist Bill Laswell and click bass by former Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright.
  • "Regiment" features drum parts by Talking Heads bandmate Chris Franz and Frippertronics by former King Crimson guitarist/bandleader (and prior Talking Heads collaborator) Robert Fripp. Incidentally, Fripp would start working on an album with what would become the first revival of King Crimson shortly after this record released.
  • Prairie Prince, drummer for the Tubes and future Jefferson Starship member, plays can and bass drum on "The Jezebel Spirit" and "The Carrier".
• Stock Footage: The music videos for "America is Waiting" and "Mea Culpa", both directed by Bruce Conner, consist of repurposed vintage advertisements, military footage, and (in the latter) educational physics animations, tying in with the audio collage approach of the album itself.
• Textless Album Cover: The 2006 re-release only features text on a shrinkwrap sticker, which when removed leaves behind a textless blur.
• Updated Re-release: In 2006, the album was given an expanded reissue for its 25th anniversary, featuring several outtakes from the original sessions appended to the "Qu'ran"-free version of the tracklist, plus the music video for "Mea Culpa" as an Enhanced CD video file.
• Voice Clip Song: The Ur-Example, with many tracks featuring sampled recordings of radio DJs, preachers, religious musicians, and politicians— including a few well-known figures at the time— set to avant-funk backing tracks. Unlike later examples of this trope, the clips aren't edited to match a melody, but nonetheless it sets the precedent years before it became an identifiable phenomenon.
• The X of Y: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, "Mountain of Needles"

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