Brian Eno, David Byrne

OUTSIDE

Like an eel slipping and writhing free of every attempt at control or classification, "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" leaves a disorienting impression on first listen, thanks to the sheer wealth of ideas and stimuli that gradually build up in the listener's mind, unsettling and destabilizing through their sheer contrast. It's genuinely difficult to describe this record in simple terms: you could call it, for instance, one of the most successful offspring of an irreproducible season in the history of popular music crudely labelled "rock", specifically post-punk, itself a generic, multi-faceted term. Or you could call it a bold, even presumptuous attempt to create a "new" music that gathers up stimuli from other musics — those of the third world — and blends them with suggestions and fragments of more familiar sounds, in order to realize something else entirely, in what amounts to a pure act of creation. Or again, one of the most complete and definitive manifestations of the new 80s course, the eruption of postmodernism, the whirl of techniques, styles and stylistic tics, tribal and funky sounds sterilized and passed beneath a dome of glass and steel, a utopian but never naive musical realization of the Global Village prophesied by Marshall McLuhan, and so on.

This is undoubtedly the ripest fruit, the greatest achievement reached (and reachable) by the union of two cultured minds, dazzling with intelligence, in love with the sounds of the world, playing with concepts, Pavlovian reflexes, rhythms and harmonies twisted and turned inside out like a sock. Brian Eno and David Byrne would arrive exhausted at the end of their journey together, but with two miraculously similar yet wildly different works, two different ways of applying avant-garde conceptualism to the rock song. The first is the celebrated "Remain In Light", probably the greatest legacy of Talking Heads; the second is this mysterious record, which winds sinuously down unfamiliar paths — not because there weren't earlier examples of treated vocals or ethnic influences, from John Cage to the experiments of Holger Czukay (as clearly laid out in the booklet accompanying the 2006 reissue), but because of the way so many intuitions are fused into a single, dazzling work.

Brian Eno's and David Byrne's approach toward other musics was gradual. Eno already had an ongoing collaboration with Jon Hassell on his Fourth World Music works, shimmering evocations of an earthly paradise, and together with Byrne he had already fully explored the richness of tribal rhythm on "Fear Of Music", the Talking Heads' 1979 album; that's where you'll find "I Zimbra", a driving tribal-funk track charged by Byrne's whip-crack voice declaiming a Dadaist poem by Hugo Ball.

After that excellent record, and the tour that followed, the three of them (Hassell included) took a break, during which they immersed themselves in listening to then little-known works, musical collections mostly from Africa and the Middle East. It was during this period that the groundwork was laid for a record that would sound like an ethnographic document bearing witness to an invented culture, complete with a specific background to give the whole thing unity.

Later, having lost the trumpeter along the way, the concept evolved further, partly because their attention had shifted with equal enthusiasm toward certain bizarre expressions of Deep America — namely radio and TV broadcasts built around politics and religion, which at times conveyed an almost mystical fervor and an unthinkable sense of rhythm. Obscure preachers, combative orators and evangelists with ringing voices were patiently recorded and pressed into service as narrating voices of the new world, decontextualized and scanned purely as a source of timbre and rhythm. Around these, and carefully chosen vocal excerpts from African and Middle Eastern records, they built pieces of music that served as a soundtrack sometimes consonant, sometimes complementary, and at other times in stark contrast with the leading voice.

The term leading voice isn't used by chance: it lies at the heart of the complex discourse the two undertook, and from the outset they wanted to give the project a precise identity by deciding not to use their own singing voices. After all, listeners associate certain voices with specific traits tied to a particular social setting — they're well-known, thoroughly internalized inputs. Here, that gets turned on its head: a deliberate distancing from those words sung, chanted, shouted, declaimed, presented in all their field-recording glory, complete with hiss, distortion and everything else, voices introduced into other contexts that strip away their original meaning and force us to reconsider them, to see them in a different light; that's exactly what happens on this record.

The record's gorgeous title is just one more stroke of genius in the project: "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" is the name of a 1950s novel by South African writer Amos Tutuola, who dismembered and reassembled the English language into a kind of ecstatic slang to better convey the adventures of a boy in a forest inhabited by dark presences. Eno and Byrne hadn't read the book, but the title seemed perfect for naming their work in progress: after all, what were those recorded, extracted voices, plucked from the airwaves and torn from their lives on vinyl, if not single-sense perceptions gradually spreading everywhere, exhalations with no body to touch, no other senses to experience?

By 1980 the record was ready, but it would sit on the shelf for months, since the relatives of a young woman who had since passed away, and whose voice had been used, objected to the recording's use; on top of that, its stepbrother "Remain in Light" was finished, and the label wanted to give it priority. All of which greatly frustrated the pair, especially since in their original plan "My Life..." was meant to come out first, as a deliberate statement about the evolution of their musical vision, both as solo artists and as Talking Heads. In the end, it was released in February 1981.

INSIDE

One trait that stands out in this record is its liminal nature. "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" moves on several levels along a ridge between seemingly opposite worlds: East and West (though, as noted, the actual contributions are fairly limited), a popular streak and avant-garde/experimental impulses (both in the final result and in the backgrounds of the two artists involved), cold urban geometry (evident in some of the guitar and synth parts) and wild tribalism... Another peculiarity is the apparent absence of the expressive urgency typical of rock 'n' roll; rather than plumbing emotional depths, the record moves instead along horizontal planes, stimulating mind and spirit with a tireless interweaving of symbols, isolated conceptual fragments endlessly reshuffled in search of new directions, other meanings, different auditory connections. And by the end you're left with a sense of dissatisfaction, an inability to fully unlock all its secrets and mechanisms — a gap you try to close through repeated listens.

In short, the process began with recordings of voices sourced from various places (the Middle East, Africa, the United States) — pop singers, reactionary talk-show ranters, preachers and evangelists with messianic and/or ecstatic tones, even an exorcist — around which they stitched together musical pieces with the help of top-tier guests such as Bill Laswell, Robert Fripp, Busta Jones and others, who play both traditional instruments (bass, guitar, keyboards, etc.) and found objects (as with many of the percussion sounds heard on the record).

Every track is built on a repeated rhythmic/harmonic structure that could, in theory, run indefinitely; instead, the band opted for a roughly three-minute pop-song length, a choice that makes the material more accessible while also turning each piece into a sound miniature, remarkably rich for its brevity and apparent simplicity. The key lies in the rhythm, which drives the first part of the record, and in the ambient melodies that take over for the rest, though never in a rigid way. Different balances between the two poles emerge track by track, so that the finished product has a clear organic quality, despite the many different influences swirling within it.

That said, the listening experience proves dense, enjoyable, and often thrilling. Take "Regiment", a genuine archetype for all the ethno-pop to come, with Eno's synth evoking the simoom, the desert wind, and the wailing voices (yes, they really do sound like ghosts) darkening the overall mood; the track is anchored by the melodious vocalizations lifted from Lebanese singer Dunya Yusin, and it's magnificent in reaffirming the record's core idea of integration/contrast between Middle Eastern melody and tight funky rhythm, with Busta Jones's bass front and center. The same voice trills on another track, "The Carrier", with the music wrapping itself in dreamy swirls, punctuated by stick bass and disembodied moans fanning the flames.

If instead you try to shuffle cards upon cards, the result is that Frankenstein's creature known as "Mea Culpa": a dense grid of voices intersecting and colliding continuously makes room for a relentless, numbing tribal loop, a hypnotic mantra that could indeed go on forever, with the insertion of a dark voice that, rather than declaiming, mutters obscure threats: it brings to mind, indifferently, either a gathering of African witch doctors in Central Park or the South Bronx teleported into the middle of the savannah.

The first half is one continuous surprise, opening with the unsettling "America Is Waiting", all edges and jolts of drums, guitar and keyboard wails with harsh metallic glints, the voice "stitched" and "glued" together (a gut-level, or worse, politically charged intervention), fading into a delirium of hiccups, in contrast with the relentlessly driving rhythmic pattern. And what to say about "Help Me Somebody", a frenetic, possessed track, a sublime garment of polyrhythms and bursts of percussion systematically filling every gap (a masterpiece of production), all draped around a preacher who sounds like Little Richard on acid, with the added viciousness of extracting scraps of phrases that shatter the granite-like self-assurance typical of televised sermons, starting with the title itself ("Help me somebody!"). Indeed, because despite the apparently detached mood, running underneath the whole record is a bleak, pessimistic undertone, like a gaze full of dark omens cast on the US as it entered the Reagan era, so laden with closed-mindedness and Manichaeism.

There are no overt statements, just a forcing of (musical) events so that they reveal that leering, far from comforting face. As happens in "The Jezebel Spirit", a recording of an actual exorcism, which is nonetheless given a bouncy, mocking soundtrack, opened by a scornful laugh that dares to use as its rhythmic pulse the gasps of the poor woman subjected to the act, driven on by the heavy Yankee drawl.

Apparently less striking, the second half of the record slows the pace and expands the atmospheres, which lazily accompany inlays of disjointed phrases opening into ecstatic odes to the Spirit ("Moonlight In Glory"). "Very Very Hungry" is a curious experiment in reproducing in vitro a night in the jungle, its distinctive feature being the voice chopped into a handful of syllables; "Come With Us" freezes the vision with a voice (the most bigoted, hardline America) that does indeed sound as if it were lifted from beyond the border, but is only the second-to-last stop before a more serene finale, with a soft-footed entrance into the cathedral of sound that goes by the name of "Mountain Of Needles", where one stands in respectful silence before the soaring synth strokes.

AROUND

If the critical fortune of "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" was probably lower than that of "Remain In Light", partly due to its higher degree of cerebralness, its influence on later music, if only as a pioneering work, was immense: besides marking a turning point in production techniques - here wonderfully handmade, later plundered left and right in the age of digital sampling - it was hugely important for the development of hip-hop, of ethno-pop offshoots, and in general of music that feeds on sampling. It had many beneficiaries, from Public Enemy to the Moby of "Play", a multimillion-selling record that makes more pop (and, let's be honest, more banal) the idea of pairing an apparently incongruous sampled voice (blues, in Moby's case) with music heading in different directions.

Perhaps a direct heir - degenerate, maybe, but crafted with the same obsessive care - can be considered the celebrated "Endtroducing" by DJ Shadow, that is, a white man in love with Black culture (…) who reinvents hip-hop with an extraordinary tour de force of cut&paste, recreating from hundreds upon hundreds of vinyl samples tracks that are perfectly formed, exceptionally strong and "alive" - a rare example of renewal within tradition.

The various editions of the album since its release have kept roughly the same structure, with one notable exception: the omission of the track "Qu'ran"; this piece, built on the chanting of Quranic recitations, was included in the original tracklist and was later removed (replaced by "Very Very Hungry") after vehement protests from a British Islamic organization, which considered it blasphemous. Here too one could speak of foresight, unintentional of course, and sadly still relevant today. As for the 2006 enhanced edition, besides a full seven bonus tracks that add little or nothing to the overall result (though "Pitch To Voltage" at least deserves a passionate listen), it also features some heavy remastering changes to certain tracks: "Mea Culpa", extended by over a minute, the addition of Afro voices in "The Carrier", a different mix for "Regiment", and so on.

This process invites some genuinely fascinating reflections, tied to how a work is perceived over the years, and to the will to update it rather than leave it exactly as it was released. In today's climate of intense fragmentation and remixing, the process does indeed seem "normal", but it leaves one a little uneasy thinking, for instance, of those who first got to know the record back then, and now find it with different nuances; is that right or not?

The question seems to remain open, tied to matters of personal taste, depending on whether or not one is willing to accept the fact; fortunately, this does not undermine the value of the record, it must be said, whether in this form or in its original 1981 incarnation.

This writer recalls reading, years ago, an enthusiastic review of "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" that closed more or less with these words: "One of the greatest records ever released".

Such judgments are usually overblown and not particularly useful, but every now and then, on yet another listen to this masterpiece, some oblique glint from one of its countless shimmering facets makes you think that statement isn't so far-fetched after all.

Note: the main sources used in writing this review were: for the tracklists of the various editions, the website discogs.com, while for background on the record, both Simon Reynolds' book "Rip It Up and Start Again" (published in Italy as "Post Punk") and the substantial booklet by mr "Ocean of Sound" David Toop included with the 2006 CD edition proved very useful…along with a thousand other sources (music magazines, online reviews and the like) whose memory has settled so thoroughly over time as to become indistinguishable.

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18/12/2007