Amazon.co.uk Review
Originally conceived as "a series of recordings based on an imaginary culture",
My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts finds Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and studio egghead Brian Eno marking time between 1979’s
Fear Of Music and the following year’s
Remain In Light with a machetes-out excursion into the dense, unexplored ethnic wilderness. Recorded with a cast of virtuoso players that includes bassist Bill Laswell and New York percussionist David Van Tieghem, it’s an album that blurs the boundaries between African rhythms and the electronic avant-garde, a feat made possible thanks to Eno’s cutting-edge studio tool – the sampler. It’s this equipment that provides the "voice" of the record. A series of disembodied voices, in fact - Arabian singers, raging US talk-show hosts, Christian preacher men, field recordings – not just dropped into the music but immersed in it, until it’s impossible to sense the join. Stiffly funky and reliant on electronics, it’s a defiantly modern record, which paradoxically, dates it somewhat next to Byrne’s next work, Talking Heads’ immortal
Remain In Light. It remains a fascinating milestone in experimentation, however, its foundation loosing a tremor that can still be heard in everything from Moby’s
Play to the teeming ranks of modern hip-hop.--
Louis Pattison
CD Description
Eno was a key figure in the development of Talking Heads, producing some of their most innovative albums. This collaboration with head Head Byrne built on the sonic ground the twohad already broken together via their well established working relationship. The pair couldn't have known how influential MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS would be in the next two decades. Deconstructing the avant-funk of the Heads' REMAIN INLIGHT, Byrne and Eno recorded polyrhythmic backing tracks similar to that effort. Instead of creating lyrics or melodies to lay over them, the duo turned to "found sounds" and voices, looping everything from radio talk show conversations to Muslim chants atop the rhythm bed, before anyone even knewwhat a sampler was. The subsequent impact on everything, from electronica to World music to whatever Bill Laswell is doing this week, was inestimable. The most important thing is that all this high-minded studio wizardry works on a very immediately satisfying level.
![Fear of Music [CD + DVDA]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Nfs5PjuWL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
