My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

I'm tired of well-regarded shitty music.

a lot to absorb.

listen to how this carries over to talking heads stuff

Love these guys. There’s some interesting stuff here. Too bad it is instrumental only, some lyrics would have put it over the top to great.

i love this shit. great companion record to remain in light. name a better collaboration i bet you can't

Not for me at all

I have weirdly mixed feelings about this album. It's the kind of record that sounds great on paper. Remain in Light is one of my favorite records ever, and much of this album sounds like the rhythm tracks from Remain in Light. So that's nice. But I'm also ambivalent about the "sampling" that happens on this album -- it's mostly exoticized flavor (appropriation) sprinkled on top of the rhythm section. Byrne/Eno are not actually that skilled at putting together a sonic tapestry with pre-recorded audio, and certainly were leagues behind their hip-hop contemporaries. The result is something a bit too self-consciously postmodern and a bit too "worldly cosmopolitan" in a repellent bourgeois manner (think of that awful Sting album around the turn of the millennium).

It was boring and not particularly good.

First half outweighs the second before it gets a bit too spacey and ambient. Still great! Proto-‘Remain in Light’

While Eno's relevancy in this sort of exercise of labelling which are the most meaningful albums cannot be understated, and this album has the novelty of it being such as stepping stone for music to come, I could do without this album particularly.

7/10 [DROP]

Fun collab from two of music’s most inventive minds. The samples are a bit cringely appropriative but do sound cool against Eno and Byrne’s soundscapes.

Genuinely visionary and genuinely held at arm's length — the two things coexisting honestly rather than contradicting each other. Eno and Byrne essentially invented world music, sampling, and ambient hip-hop simultaneously before any of those genres had names, layering field recordings, radio evangelists, exorcism ceremonies, and Lebanese mountain singers over funk and electronic rhythms in a way that had no precedent in 1981 and plenty of descendants since.

The innovation is real and the historical importance is undeniable. The feeling of something cooked up in a laboratory is equally real — a record that fascinates intellectually without quite generating the emotional pull that earns return visits. The found vocals that replace Byrne's singing remove the distance his voice has created elsewhere in this project without fully replacing it with warmth.

A three for a record that pushed doors open without quite inviting you through them.

Just lock Brian Eno and David Byrne in a room together and let them do whatever weird stuff they want to

Interesting stuff. The sampling and the playfulness come through. Not something I'd listen to every day, but certainly an influential and teaching lesson on creativity. I'm going 3+

Probably the best Eno album I've heard. Super experimental, but doesn't really get me going?

I love both of you weirdos, but there's no way in hell I'm ever listening to this again (for reference, I gave Music For Airports five stars).

Not an album for regular listening, but if you’re in the zone it has a lot of great moments.

Quirky and weird. I'd listen again.

Admittedly, I'm more of an Eno guy than a David Byrne guy; I have to say, I think Eno's vision of an electric, ambient, psychedelic Africa pretty much carries this album. Maybe Byrne was just along for the ride? I don't know. I did a cursory dive and I didn't see much written about the creation of this album. It's pretty good though.

Bleep bloop music. Honestly enjoyed it more than the reviews led me to believe I would, but some of it kind of escaped me. It feels like a spiritual predecessor to tame impala or lcd soundsystem. 4*

There’s interesting sounds in here but I’m not really sure how to rate this