My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Cool concept and interesting layering of the sample with the guitars.
Wish I could give it a 3.5.

Wow. So much better than I was anticipating. There are some truly interesting sounds coming out of this album. I hear nin, Moby, and most of the electronic scene. It's just really annoying how they fight so hard against their pop inclination. Just be pop guys. You don't have to be obtuse all the time.

Step aside Malcolm McLaren, this is how you make a plunderphonics album borrowing from various cultures, without it coming off as a cynical attempt. None of this should work in tandem - but it does, and that's the entire point of the genre, rather than just mindlessly mishmashing samples and themes together until you end up with a gigantic ball of ruined Play-Doh.

We get a wonderful array of samples, not least the religious chants / sermons and tribal percussion, re-contextualised into electronic soundscapes and underlined by David Byrne's customary angular playing. It's an unpredictable headfuck of an album - can you dance along to it? Not really. Is it passive listening? No. Is it laden with earworms? Also no. But it satisfies the "I like weird things" receptors in my brain and makes for a strangely spiritual, exhilarating experience. I am perhaps slightly more likely to gravitate towards Brian Eno's ambient works than this one, but it more than has a place in my library, and will be getting a purchase if I can find a decent quality copy of it.

Brian Eno even had the decency, unlike a certain someone, to remove the track "Qu'Ran" from the album's original tracklisting as it was deemed to be in bad taste by the Islamic Council of Great Britain. Listening to the track today (which is available on YouTube and on certain physical versions) - I wouldn't say it's any more culturally invasive than the rest of the album's religious sampling, containing sacred readings sung by a Muslim cleric, but it shows that Brian Eno wasn't fuelled by self-interest and had a high measure of respect for the corners of the world that he sought from.

This was about what I expected based on who made it, and the cover. Weird stuff, but it's amazing to hear how sampling existed even before it got mainstream.

I was skeptical going in. Then first few sings were fantastic and I thought I'd find a gem. Then the rest was boring and self indulgent. Oh well

Amos Tutola's novel is set in the middle of the traffic between the real world and the mythic mystical world, it's about multiplicity and transformation, hallucinatory subverted expectations and the substances like palm wine that lubricate metaphysical traffic. Taking its name from Tutola, this album is thematically similar - full of polyrhythms and multi-layered pulsating textures that shift and slip as they take shape, funk grooves and afrobeat patterns that hit an infinite repeating delay loop, chants and dream like samples and snippets. It's magical stuff, imaginatively conceived and perfectly executed.

Interesting but a tough listen compared to other collaborative works with eno.

It was alright. Not typically the type of stuff I like, but pretty cool.

Pretty interesting but zany experience.

I’m at a 4.

Definitely the least ambient soundscapes I’ve heard from Brian Eno yet, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – what a remarkably strange journey through sound that was. We’ve had earlier examples of sampling before this, namely in 1979’s “Movies” by Holger Czukay, but this feels like the first real mainstream use of the technique by an artist popular enough to bring it to a forefront. Granted, this sort of sampling of full radio / TV recordings hasn’t really stayed in vogue, but I do think you don’t get to some of the more vocal-heavy samples of 1980s rap without Brian Eno sort of giving the OK here.

I do have one question here – how much influence did David Byrne truly have on this album? He’s listed as playing a multitude of instruments on here, but I’d love to know just how much of this album’s direction is his vision. It certainly feels like Brian Eno wouldn’t dip his toes into this sort of thing without David Byrne’s influence looming larger, but there’s some part of me that thinks Brian Eno sort of concocted this concept on his own, & just had Byrne there since he’d understand the eccentricities of it all. I probably just need to read more articles about this – it’s a really fascinating project to me.

It’s not the most compelling album experience though, which is why I’m at a 4. A few tracks go too long, & a few tracks have really short instrumental loops that really start to nag once the track’s felt like it’s gone too long. Even though this is only a 40 minute album, the sampled vocals present feels rather scattered throughout, so the pacing of the album makes it feel a bit longer than 40 minutes. These are all small things that don’t necessarily ruin any one individual track, but they build up over the course of the album. There are also a few tracks that just didn’t click with me.

I did like a lot of this though, and if nothing else, I admire just how strange it is. Brian Eno certainly had the credibility to release something like this, but it’s just so far out of his established ambient wheelhouse for me that I’m surprised he actually did it. The amount of variety in this album is really cool, and I do hear a lot of influence on not just rap, but a lot of 80s pop music as well, in terms of just letting loose & letting the experimental freak flag fly. I really think it’s worth a listen – it might not be the most palatable album by modern standards, but the DNA of a lot of the decade to come is in here. It’s only a 4 for me, but it’s a pretty recommended one.

I too have a hard time coming to terms with my life in the bush of ghosts

Fuck no. 1.44

The percussion on here is super interesting and the sampling is pretty cool. Not 100% sure when you would listen to something like this. Like it’s little too weird to be danced to. The soundscape on Mountain Of Needles had me floating. Favorites were Regiment, Help Me Somebody, and Mountain Of Needles.

Like Remain in Light but less accessible

What can happen when two autistic creative geniuses get together. Amazing, innovative stuff that is still influencing music today. Could have been released last week.

Allez, on attaque un monument. Un de ces disques qui, rien qu'à l'évocation de son titre et des deux noms sur la pochette, vous oblige à prendre une posture intello, à hocher la tête d'un air entendu en murmurant "Ah oui, bien sûr, un album fondateur". Et sur le papier, mes aïeux, quelle promesse ! Brian Eno, le sorcier-producteur, le pape de l'ambient, l'homme qui pouvait rendre un annuaire téléphonique intéressant en le passant à travers trois synthétiseurs. Et David Byrne, le leader-anguille des Talking Heads, le type le plus bizarrement cool de la planète new-wave, capable de danser comme s'il venait de recevoir une décharge de 220 volts tout en chantant des trucs profonds. Le genre de collaboration qui fait mouiller les critiques musicaux du monde entier avant même la première écoute.

"My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" est sorti en 1981. Une date qui a son importance car c'est l'album qui, nous dit-on, a inventé le sampling avant même que les samplers existent. Une pièce maîtresse, une pierre angulaire, le chaînon manquant entre le post-punk, la musique ethnique et l'électro. Un disque qui, si on écoute la légende, a engendré à lui seul le trip-hop, inspiré Moby pour son "Play" et donné des idées à une armée de producteurs qui, sans lui, en seraient encore à enregistrer des solos de guitare.

Quand je tenais la boutique ou que j'étais derrière le micro à la radio dans les années 90, cet album était une sorte de totem. On ne l'avait pas forcément beaucoup écouté, mais on savait qu'il était IMPORTANT. On vendait du Massive Attack, du Portishead, du DJ Shadow, et on se disait : "Tout ça, les mecs, ça vient de là. De Eno et Byrne qui s'amusaient avec des bandes magnétiques et des enregistrements de prêcheurs libanais ou de chanteurs égyptiens." Le respect était total, presque religieux.

Alors, forcément, quand son tour est venu dans ma liste des 1001, je me suis préparé. J'ai sorti le bon verre, je me suis calé dans le fauteuil, prêt à recevoir la révélation. Et les premières minutes, nom de dieu, quelle claque ! C'est brillant, la production est d'une modernité confondante. On est en 1981 et ça sonne mieux, plus audacieux, plus inventif que 90% des trucs qui sortent aujourd'hui. On entend ces voix venues d'ailleurs, ces "found sounds", qui s'entremêlent avec des rythmiques funk-mutantes, froides et groovy à la fois. C'est hypnotique, c'est intelligent, c'est cérébral. On se dit "Putain, ils avaient tout compris avant tout le monde". Le concept est génial, le son est immaculé, l'album n'a pas vieilli d'un iota.

Et puis...

Et puis le premier morceau se termine et le deuxième commence. Et on se dit : "Tiens, c'est marrant, ça ressemble un peu au premier". Le troisième arrive. "Ah, ok, je vois le principe". Au quatrième, un léger sentiment de lassitude commence à poindre le bout de son nez. Au cinquième, on se surprend à regarder par la fenêtre en se demandant si on a bien rentré le linge. Au sixième, on se dit qu'on se ferait bien un café.

Voilà le drame de "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", c'est une idée de génie étirée sur 40 minutes. Une démonstration technique incroyable, une thèse universitaire sur le rythme et le son, mais où sont les CHANSONS ? Où sont les refrains, les mélodies qui s'accrochent à votre cerveau, les moments de grâce pure qui vous font oublier que vous êtes en train d'analyser un disque ? Nulle part.

C'est une oeuvre d'avant-garde, et ça me fait une belle jambe. C'est une collection de rythmes et de textures, c'est une putain de branlette intellectuelle de producteurs de génie qui ont oublié l'essentiel : l'émotion. Passée la surprise initiale, passée l'admiration pour l'audace et l'innovation technique, eh bien... on se fait chier. Royalement. C'est le même motif, la même formule, déclinée à l'infini. Une voix "exotique" samplée, une boucle de basse funky, une batterie métronomique, quelques nappes de synthé et hop, emballé c'est pesé.

C'est un album que je suis content d'avoir écouté, pour ma culture personnelle. Pour comprendre d'où viennent certains courants musicaux que j'adore. C'est un disque essentiel à l'histoire de la musique, c'est indéniable. Mais est-ce que je vais le remettre sur ma platine pour le plaisir ? Pour accompagner un trajet en voiture ou une soirée entre amis ? Jamais de la vie. C'est un album que l'on respecte, que l'on admire, mais que l'on n'aime pas. C'est une pièce de musée. Fascinante à regarder, mais on n'a pas envie de l'accrocher dans son salon.

Alors oui, c'est un album "fondateur". Il a fondé les bases de tellement de choses. Mais à force de se concentrer sur les fondations, Eno et Byrne ont oublié de construire une maison habitable. Ils nous ont livré un plan d'architecte sublime, mais sans les murs, sans le toit, et surtout, sans le coeur qui bat à l'intérieur.

Une expérience. Indispensable, mais unique. Dans le sens où je ne la referai pas de sitôt.

A decent half hour album dragged out way too long to the point where I was begging it to end. Love Talking Heads so was sooo disappointed with this.

Loved that. Some brilliant moments.

Yet another winner from Brian Eno - I've loved pretty much everything he's had a hand in that I've encountered in this project. This feels very ahead of its time.

1. Guys I think there is no will whatsoever
2. Guys I think he made a mistake
3. wooooaaaaahhooooooooaooaaaaaaahhhhh
4. Guys I think he knows
5.

Yeah shit is getting real weird idk if I can even give half assed summaries of whatever this is. This is exactly the shitfuckery I expected from Mr. Byrne and Eno.