My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (album)

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (album)
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Studio album by David Byrne and Brian Eno
Released February 1981
(See release history)
Recorded August 4, 1979 – October 1980, RPM Studios, New York City, New York; Blue Rock Studios, New York; Eldorado, Los Angeles; Different Fur, San Francisco; Sigma, New York
Genre Experimental, art rock
Length 39:40
Language English, Arabic ("Qu'ran")
Label Sire
Producer David Byrne and Brian Eno
David Byrne and Brian Eno chronology
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
(1981)		 Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
(2008)
David Byrne chronology
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
(1981)		 The Catherine Wheel
(1981)
Brian Eno chronology
Ambient 3: Day of Radiance
(1980)		 My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
(1981)		 Ambient 4: On Land
(1982)
2006 Re-issue Cover
Singles from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
  1. "America Is Waiting"
    Released: 1981
  2. "The Jezebel Spirit"
    Released: 1981
Professional ratings
Review scores
Source Rating
Allmusic 5/5 stars[1]
Robert Christgau C+[2]
Rolling Stone 4/5 stars[3]
Drowned in Sound (2006 re-issue) 4/5 stars[4]
The Guardian (2006 re-issue) 5/5 stars[5]
The Independent (2006 re-issue) 5/5 stars[6]
The Observer (2006 re-issue) 4/5 stars[7]
Pitchfork Media (2006 re-issue) 8.5/10[8]
The Times (2006 re-issue) 5/5 stars[9]
Uncut (2006 re-issue) 4.5/5 stars[10]

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 re-released 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.[11] In a 1985 interview, singer Kate Bush remarked that the album "left a very big mark on popular music,"[12] while critic John Bush describes it as a "pioneering work for countless styles connected to electronics, ambience, and Third World music."[13] The extensive use of sampling on My Life is widely considered ground-breaking—it was one of the first albums to do so—but its actual influence on the sample-based music genres that later emerged continues to be debated.[14][15]

Contents

Recording details

Eno and Byrne first worked together while collaborating on More Songs About Buildings and Food, the 1978 album by Byrne's band Talking Heads. My Life was primarily recorded during a break between touring for Fear of Music (1979) and the recording of Remain in Light (1980), subsequent Talking Heads albums also produced by Eno, but the release was delayed while legal rights were sought for the large number of samples used throughout the album.[16]

Drawing on funk and world music (particularly the multi-layered 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.

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 disc jockeys, and an exorcist. Musicians had previously used similar sampling techniques, but critic Dave Simpson[17] declares it had never before been used "to such cataclysmic effect" as on My Life.

In 2001, Q magazine asked Eno whether he and Byrne had invented sampling. His response was:

“ No, there was already a history of it. People such as Holger Czukay had made experiments using IBM Dictaphones and short-wave radios and so on. The difference was, I suppose, that I decided to make it the lead vocal on the album My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts[18] ”

The album 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. when the material was recorded. 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.

25th anniversary re-release

The album was reissued on March 27, 2006 in the UK and April 11, 2006 in the US, remastered and with seven extra tracks. To mark the reissue, two songs were 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.[19] ”

While discussing the re-release in 2006, the two began collaborating again on a new project that became the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, which was independently released in 2008. Byrne toured to promote his collaborations with Eno in 2008 and 2009, resulting in the release of the live EP Everything That Happens Will Happen on This Tour – David Byrne on Tour: Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno featuring a performance of "Help Me Somebody" in 2008.

Differences in mastering and mixing

The original songs were dynamically compressed to make them louder for the remaster. 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.

Packaging

Original package design was created by 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[20] - regarding the original cover ”

For the re-release, the new artwork was designed by Peter Buchanan-Smith, with booklet cover images and studio photography by Hugh Brown.

Track listing

Original LP (1981)

All tracks written by Eno/Byrne except as indicated. Notes below indicated the voices sampled, from the liner notes:

Side one
  1. "America Is Waiting" (arr. Eno, Byrne, Bill Laswell, Tim Wright, David Van Tieghem) – 3:36
  2. "Mea Culpa" – 3:35
    • Inflamed caller and smooth politician replying, both unidentified. Radio call-in show, New York, July 1979.
  3. "Regiment" (Eno, Byrne, Michael "Busta Cherry" Jones) – 3:56
    • Dunya Yusin, Lebanese mountain singer. (from The Human Voice in the World of Islam, Tangent Records TGS131)
  4. "Help Me Somebody" – 4:18
    • Reverend Paul Morton, broadcast sermon, New Orleans, June 1980.
  5. "The Jezebel Spirit" – 4:55
    • Unidentified exorcist, New York, September 1980.
Side two
  1. "Qu'ran" [21] – 3:46
    • Algerian Muslims chanting the Qur'an. (same source as track 3)
  2. "Moonlight in Glory" – 4:19
    • The Moving Star Hall Singers, Sea Islands, Georgia. (From The Moving Star Hall Singers, Folkways FS 3841). Produced by Guy Carawan.
  3. "The Carrier" – 3:30
    • Dunya Yusin. (same source as track 3)
  4. "A Secret Life" – 2:30
    • Samira Tewfik, Egyptian popular singer. (from Les Plus Grandes Artistes du Monde Arabe, EMI)
  5. "Come with Us" – 2:38
    • Unidentified radio evangelist, San Francisco, April 1980
  6. "Mountain of Needles" – 2:35

In the 1982 second edition, the track "Qu'ran"—which features samples of Qur'anic recital—was removed at the request of the Islamic Council of Great Britain. In its place "Very, Very Hungry" (the B-side of "The Jezebel Spirit" 12" EP)[22] was substituted. The first edition of the CD (1986) included both tracks, with "Very, Very Hungry" as a bonus track. Later editions (1990 and later) followed the revised LP track order without "Qu'ran."

Ghosts

A widely-circulated bootleg of outtakes was released in 1992 as Klondyke Records KR 21. Sound quality is nearly equal to the original CD release.

  1. "Interview" – 3:03 (excerpt from Brian's February 2, 1980 KPFA-FM interview, where he discusses recording the album)
  2. "Mea Culpa" – 4:56
  3. "Into the Spirit Womb" [sic](actual title as spoken on the track is "Into the Spirit World") – 6:07 ("The Jezebel Spirit" with the original Kathryn Kuhlman vocals, which her estate refused to license)
  4. "Regiment" – 4:13
  5. "The Friends of Amos Tutuola" – 2:01 ("Two Against Three" in the official 2006 re-release)
  6. "America Is Waiting" – 3:42
  7. "The Carrier" – 4:22
  8. "Very Very Hungry" – 3:25
  9. "On the Way to Zagora" – 2:43 ("Pitch to Voltage" in the official 2006 re-release)
  10. "Les Hommes Ne Le Sauront Jamais" – 3:33 ("Number 8 Mix" in the official 2006 re-release)
  11. "A Secret Life" – 2:34
  12. "Come with Us" – 2:42
  13. "Mountain of Needles" – 2:31

Except as noted, the tracks are the same mix as originally released.

2006 re-release

Remastered, with bonus tracks

  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
  12. "Pitch to Voltage" – 2:38
  13. "Two Against Three" – 1:55
  14. "Vocal Outtakes" – 0:36
  15. "New Feet" – 2:26
  16. "Defiant" – 3:41
  17. "Number 8 Mix" – 3:30
  18. "Solo Guitar with Tin Foil" – 3:00

Personnel

Main

Additional

  • John Cooksey – drums on "Help Me Somebody" and "Qu'ran"
  • Chris Frantz – drums on "Regiment"
  • Busta Jones – bass guitar on "Regiment"
  • Dennis Keeley – bodhran on "Mea Culpa"
  • Bill Laswell – bass guitar on "America Is Waiting"
  • Mingo Lewis – bata, sticks on "The Jezebel Spirit" and "The Carrier"
  • Prairie Prince – can, bass drum on "The Jezebel Spirit" and "The Carrier"
  • Jose Rossy – congas, agong-gong on "Moonlight in Glory"
  • Steve Scales – congas, metals on "Help Me Somebody"
  • David van Tieghem – drums, percussion on "America Is Waiting" and "Regiment"
  • Tim Wright – click bass on "America Is Waiting"
  • Rooks on "Help Me Somebody" courtesy of April Potts, recorded at Eglingham Hall

Release history

Region Date Label Format Catalog
Worldwide 1980 Sire LP 6093
CD 60932
1981 E'G 48
1988 Sire 2-6093
Cassette tape M5S-6093
1990 CD 45374
1991 LP 6093
Cassette tape 45374
1999 EMI CD 86473
45374
2006 Nonesuch 79894

Chart performance

Chart (1981) Peak
position
UK Albums Chart 29
New Zealand Albums Chart [23] 8
US Albums Chart 44
Chart (2006) Peak
position
Belgian (Flanders) Albums Chart [24] 62

References

  1. ^ Bush, John. David Byrne: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts > Review at Allmusic. Retrieved 15 June 2011.
  2. ^ "Robert Christgau: CG: Brian Eno/David Byrne". 1981. http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?id=1904&name=Brian+Eno%2FDavid+Byrne. Retrieved 2011-06-15. 
  3. ^ "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno". 1981-04-02. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/my-life-in-the-bush-of-ghosts-19810402. Retrieved 2011-06-15. 
  4. ^ http://drownedinsound.com/releases/7281/reviews/726927
  5. ^ http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,1737896,00.html
  6. ^ http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article353167.ece
  7. ^ http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1729901,00.html
  8. ^ http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/15791/Brian_Eno_David_Byrne_My_Life_in_the_Bush_of_Ghosts
  9. ^ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22875-2096198,00.html
  10. ^ p.119, Apr 2006
  11. ^ Brian Eno + David Byrne: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts : Reviews
  12. ^ Gaffaweb - Kate Bush - REACHING OUT - MTV - Unedited
  13. ^ Bush, John. "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts". Allmusic. http://www.allmusic.com/album/r3079/review. 
  14. ^ Fact Magazine: "The Essential... Brian Eno - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts"
  15. ^ Popmatters Review: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (2006 Reissue)
  16. ^ Bush of Ghosts- Making Of Essay by David Byrne, 2005.
  17. ^ Brian Eno and David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts | | guardian.co.uk Arts
  18. ^ Sheppard, David (July 2001). "Cash for Questions". Q magazine. 
  19. ^ Dahlen, Chris (2006-07-17). "Interview: David Byrne". Pitchfork Media. http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/37176/Interview_Interview_David_Byrne. 
  20. ^ album and video web page
  21. ^ http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?release=27566
  22. ^ Brian Eno Discography (official)
  23. ^ "charts.org.nz - Brian Eno & David Byrne - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts". Recording Industry Association of New Zealand. http://charts.org.nz/showitem.asp?interpret=Brian+Eno+%26+David+Byrne&titel=My+Life+In+The+Bush+Of+Ghosts&cat=a. Retrieved 2010-07-08. 
  24. ^ "ultratop.be - Brian Eno & David Byrne - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts". Ultratop. http://www.ultratop.be/nl/showitem.asp?interpret=Brian+Eno+%26+David+Byrne&titel=My+Life+In+The+Bush+Of+Ghosts&cat=a. Retrieved 2010-07-08. 

External links

v · d · eDavid Byrne
Studio albums
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts · Rei Momo · The Forest · Uh-Oh · David Byrne · Feelings · Look into the Eyeball · Grown Backwards · Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
Live albums
David Byrne Live at Union Chapel · Live from Austin, Texas · Everything That Happens Will Happen on This Tour – David Byrne on Tour: Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno
Soundtracks
The Catherine Wheel · Music for "The Knee Plays" · Sounds from True Stories · The Last Emperor · The Visible Man · In Spite of Wishing and Wanting · Lead Us Not into Temptation · The Knee Plays · Big Love: Hymnal · Here Lies Love
Singles
"America Is Waiting" · "The Jezebel Spirit" · "Make Believe Mambo" · "Dirty Old Town" · "The Forestry" · "Hanging Upside Down" · "She's Mad" · "Girls on My Mind" · "Angels" · "Back in the Box" · "Miss America" · "Like Humans Do" · "U.B. Jesus" · "Strange Overtones" · "One Fine Day" · "Toe Jam" · "Please Don't"
Related articles
Discography · Todo Mundo · Talking Heads · Brian Eno · Between the Teeth · Your Action World · E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) · Ride, Rise, Roar · Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno Tour · "Dude, Where's My Ranch?" · Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps · Luaka Bop
Quotes · Images
v · d · eBrian Eno
Solo albums
With Roxy Music
With Robert Fripp
With 801
801 Live · Listen Now · 801 Live at Manchester University
With Cluster
Cluster & Eno · After the Heat (Eno, Moebius, Roedelius)
With David Bowie
Low · "Heroes" · Lodger · Outside
With Talking Heads / David Byrne
With Harold Budd
With Jon Hassell
Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics · Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two
With Daniel Lanois
Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks · Hybrid · Music for Films III
With U2
With J. Peter Schwalm
With Coldplay
Other collaborations
June 1, 1974 · Hybrid · Music for Films III · Wrong Way Up · Spinner · Small Craft on a Milk Sea · Drums Between the Bells
Other productions
Compilations
Publications
Related

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