My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (album)

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My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts cover
Studio album by Brian Eno & David Byrne
Released February 1981
Recorded RPM Studios, NY
Blue Rock Studios, NY
Eldorado, LA
Different Fur, San Fran.
Sigma, NY
Aug. 4, 1979 — Oct. 1980
Genre Art Rock
Length 39:40
Label Sire Records
Producer Brian Eno & David Byrne
Professional reviews
Brian Eno chronology
Ambient #3: Day of Radiance
(1980)		 My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
(1981)		 Ambient #4: On Land
(1982)
David Byrne chronology
Remain in Light
(1980)		 My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
(1981)		 The Catherine Wheel
(1981)
Alternative cover
Cover of the 2006 re-issue
Cover of the 2006 re-issue

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a 1981 album by Brian Eno and David Byrne, titled after Amos Tutuola's 1954 novel of the same name. The album was rereleased in expanded form in 2006.

Receiving strong reviews upon its release, My Life is now regarded as a high point in the discographies of Eno and Byrne.[1] In a 1985 interview, singer Kate Bush[2] stated it "left a very big mark on popular music," while critic John Bush describes the album as "[a] pioneering work for countless styles connected to electronics, ambience, and Third World music."[3]

Contents

[edit] Recording details

Eno had collaborated with Byrne's group Talking Heads on Fear of Music (1979), and My Life was recorded mostly in a break between touring for that album, and the recording of Talking Heads' Remain in Light (1980).

Drawing on funk and world music (particularly the multilayered percussion of African music), My Life is similar to Talking Heads' music of the same era. The "found objects" credited to Eno and Byrne were common objects used mostly as percussion. In the notes for the 2006 expanded edition of the album, Byrne writes that they would often use a normal drum kit, but with a cardboard box replacing the bass drum, or a frying pan replacing the snare drum; this would blend the familiar drum sound with unusual percussive noises.

However, rather than featuring conventional pop or rock singing, most of the vocals are sampled from other sources, such as commercial recordings of Arabic singers, radio disk jockeys and an exorcist. Musicians had previously used similarly sampling techniques, but critic Dave Simpson[4] declares it had never before been used "to such cataclysmic effect" as on My Life.

My Life In The Bush of Ghosts was recorded entirely with analogue technology, before the advent of digital sequencing and MIDI. The sampled voices were synchronized with the instrumental tracks via trial and error, a practice that was often frustrating, but which also produced several happy accidents.

Also according to Byrne's 2006 notes, neither he nor Eno had read Tutuola's novel before the album was recorded. Both were familiar with Tutuola's earlier The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), but his My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was not easily obtained in the U.S. in the late-1970s/early-1980s. Even without reading the book, Eno and Byrne thought the title reflected their interest in African music, and also had an evocative, vaguely sinister quality that also referenced the voices sampled for the album: the vocalists were recorded sometimes several decades before being re-appropriated by Eno and Byrne, and the voices often seemed to take on unanticipated qualities when placed in the new context.

[edit] Original track listing

All tracks written by Eno/Byrne except as indicated.

Side One:

  1. "America Is Waiting" (arr. Eno, Byrne, Bill Laswell, Tim Wright, & David Van Tieghem) [3:36]
  2. "Mea Culpa" [3:35]
  3. "Regiment" (Eno/Byrne/Busta Jones) [3:56]
  4. "Help Me Somebody" [4:18]
  5. "The Jezebel Spirit" [4:55]

Side Two:

  1. "Qu'ran" [3:46]
  2. "Moonlight In Glory" [4:19]
  3. "The Carrier" [3:30]
  4. "A Secret Life" [2:30]
  5. "Come With Us" [2:38]
  6. "Mountain of Needles" [2:35]

The track "Qu'ran", which features samples of Qur'anic recital, was replaced by "Very, Very Hungry" in some later releases. On some early editions of the record, "Very, Very Hungry" was included along with "Qu'ran" as a non-cassette and non-LP CD only release.

The times for the tracks are from the 1981 Sire Records LP release.

[edit] Voices (by track)

Side One:

  1. "Unidentified indignant radio host, San Francisco, April 1980."
  2. "Inflamed caller and smooth politician replying, both unidentified. Radio call-in show, New York, July 1979."
  3. "Dunya Yusin, Lebanese mountain singer. (From The Human Voice in the World of Islam, Tangent Records TGS131)"
  4. "Reverend Paul Morton, broadcast sermon, New Orleans, June 1980."
  5. "Unidentified exorcist, New York, September 1980."

Side Two:

  1. "Algerian Muslims chanting Qu'ran. (Same source as 3 (Tangent Records, above))"
  2. "The Moving Star Hall Singers, Sea Islands, Georgia. (From The Moving Star Hall Singers, Folkways FS 3841). Produced by Guy Carawan."
  3. "Dunya Yusin. (See 3 (Tangent Records, above))"
  4. "Samira Tewfik, Egyptian popular singer. (From Les Plus Grandes Artistes du Monde Arabe, EMI)."
  5. "Unidentified radio evangelist, San Francisco, April 1980."

[edit] 25th anniversary re-release

The album was reissued on 27 March 2006 in the UK and 11 April 2006 in the US, remastered and with seven extra tracks. To mark the reissue, two songs will be made available to download online, consisting of the entire multitracks. Under the Creative Commons License, members of the public are able to download the multitracks, and use them for their own remixes.

The track "Qu'ran" was excluded from this release without comment. However, in an interview for Pitchfork Media about the 2006 reissue, Byrne said:

"Way back when the record first came out, in 1981, it might have been '82, we got a request from an Islamic organization in London, and they said, 'We consider this blasphemy that you put grooves to the chanting of the Holy Book.' And we thought, 'Okay, in deference to somebody's religion, we'll take it off.' You could probably argue for and against monkeying with something like that. But I think we were certainly feeling very cautious about this whole thing. We made a big effort to try and clear all the voices, and make sure everybody was okay with everything. Because we thought, 'We're going to get accused of all kinds of things, and so we want to cover our asses as best we can.' So I think in that sense we reacted maybe with more caution than we had to. But that's the way it was."[5]

[edit] Updated material and extra tracks on 2006 re-release

  1. "America Is Waiting" [3:38]
  2. "Mea Culpa" [4:57]
  3. "Regiment" [4:11]
  4. "Help Me Somebody" [4:17]
  5. "The Jezebel Spirit" [4:56]
  6. "Very, Very Hungry" [3:21]
  7. "Moonlight in Glory" [4:30]
  8. "The Carrier" [4:19]
  9. "A Secret Life" [2:31]
  10. "Come With Us" [2:42]
  11. "Mountain of Needles" [2:39]

[edit] Extra Tracks

  1. "Pitch To Voltage" [2:38]
  2. "Two Against Three" [1:55]
  3. "Vocal Outtakes" [0:36]
  4. "New Feet" [2:26]
  5. "Defiant" [3:41]
  6. "Number 8 Mix" [3:30]
  7. "Solo Guitar With Tin Foil" [3:00]

Many of the original songs were remastered with higher gain and are slightly faster. Other changes include:

  • Mea Culpa has 35 seconds of additional "I... uh..." stuttering and "mea culpa" speech at about 1:48, right before the synths begin to play the bell-like "melody". It also has about 35 more seconds of the instrumental bell-like synth line added at about 3:10, right before the reintroduction of the "mea culpa" speech. The original only has about 20 seconds of that melody before the speech returns.
  • Regiment has about 15 seconds of extra rhythm before the singing begins, starting at about 0:41.
  • Moonlight in Glory fades out 10 seconds later, which results in about 10 extra seconds of stuttering at the end of the song.
  • The instrumental introduction to The Carrier has been extended by about 50 seconds and includes the addition of the central instrumental section of the original piece. An additional spoken vocal part, a voice speaking quickly in Arabic(?) has been added to the central instrumental section.
  • An additional 10 seconds has been added to the end of Come With Us. Additional reverb and other treatment of the material has changed slightly. For example, at about 2:00, three percussion hits are heard. The remastered version uses backwards reverb to build up to the sound, whereas in the original the hits are clearly heard.

[edit] Personnel

  • David Byrne and Brian Eno - guitars, basses, synthesizers, drums, percussion, found objects
  • John Cooksey - drums
  • Chris Frantz - drums
  • Dennis Keeley - bodhran
  • Mingo Lewis - bata, sticks
  • Prairie Prince - can, bass drum
  • Jose Rossy - congas, agong-gong
  • Steve Scales - congas, metals
  • David van Tieghem - drums, percussion
  • Busta Jones - bass
  • Bill Laswell - bass
  • Tim Wright - click bass
  • Rooks on "Help Me Somebody" courtesy April Potts, Eglingham Hall

[edit] Album Cover

CD package design: Peter Buchanan-Smith

Booklet cover image, studio photography: Hugh Brown

Original package design: Peter Saville

"Having tried a few different directions for LP cover art, we decided to incorporate the video monitor as a painting tool, as Brian and others were doing here and there. By pointing the camera at the monitor and generating video feedback a few little cutout humanoid shapes pasted on the screen would be infinitely multiplied. And by fussing with the color setting on the backs of the TV sets one could saturate and skew the color quite a bit. I also took some pictures of just skewed vortexes and whorls of color, and then we did some images where we skewed the color on pictures that had been taken of ourselves and then took polaroids of the results. 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." [6]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Brian Eno + David Byrne: My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts [2006 Version] (2006): Reviews
  2. ^ Gaffaweb - Kate Bush - REACHING OUT - MTV - Unedited
  3. ^ Bush, John. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Allmusic.
  4. ^ Brian Eno and David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts | | guardian.co.uk Arts
  5. ^ Dahlen, Chris (2006-07-17). Interview: David Byrne. Pitchfork Media.
  6. ^ [1]| album and video web page]

[edit] External links


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