Brian Eno + David Byrne - My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

Few albums have cast a longer or more consequential shadow. Released on February 25, 1981, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is the first collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne, recorded primarily during a break between the Talking Heads albums Fear of Music and Remain In Light, both of which Eno produced. What the two men created together in studios across New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco between 1979 and 1980 was nothing less than a new way of making music, one whose reverberations are still being felt today.

The album's central innovation was the use of found vocals as lead instruments. Radio call-in show hosts, Lebanese mountain singers, evangelical preachers, an exorcism ceremony, Egyptian pop, and Muslim chanting were woven into the fabric of the record alongside the funked-up rhythms, African and Middle Eastern influences, and thick electronic textures contributed by Eno, Byrne, and a remarkable cast of musicians including Bill Laswell, Busta Jones, Chris Frantz, David van Tieghem, and Steve Scales. At the time there were no digital samplers, so every found voice was inserted into the music by hand, through painstaking trial and error. As Eno described it, "It's almost collage music, like grafting a piece of one culture onto a piece of another onto a piece of another, and trying to make them work as a coherent musical idea, and also trying to make something you can dance to."

The influence has been seismic and wide. Hank Shocklee of the Bomb Squad cited it directly as a foundational influence on his sample-driven production work for Public Enemy. Kate Bush said it left a very big mark on popular music. Pink Floyd's Richard Wright recalled it knocking him sideways. Its DNA runs through hip-hop, world music, electronica, and alternative rock with equal force. Rolling Stone called it an undeniably awesome feat of tape editing and rhythmic ingenuity. The album's title was taken from Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola's 1954 novel, though by Byrne's own admission neither he nor Eno had read it. They simply felt it encapsulated what the record was about.

This expanded double LP edition includes several tracks that were considered for but never made the original album, a smart and informative historical and critical essay by author, musicologist, and recording artist David Toop, and various drum, vocal, and ambient multitracks on Side 4. The definitive edition of one of the most visionary and influential albums of the 20th century.