David Byrne, Brian Eno, Brian Eno, David Byrne, Tim Wright, Busta Jones, Bill Laswell, Chris Frantz, David Van Tieghem, John Cooksey - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Customers also search

Page 1 of 1Page 1 of 1

Track Listings

1	America Is Waiting - Brian Eno/David Byrne
2	Mea Culpa
3	Regiment
4	Help Me Somebody
5	The Jezebel Spirit
6	Very, Very Hungry
7	Moonlight in Glory
8	The Carrier
9	A Secret Life
10	Come with Us
11	Mountain of Needles

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Released in 1981, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a collaboration between ambient pioneer Brian Eno and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. On Ghosts, the two strong-willed musicians manage to come to a meeting of the minds, blending Byrne's herky-jerky funk with Eno's atmospheric sound sculpting. More than anything, this is a large album, intent on pushing itself to the front of the listener's consciousness. Abundant percussion (everything from booming tribal drums to eerie electronics) reverberates in the background while Byrne and Eno toss all manner of found sounds, field recordings, and radio broadcasts into the mix. What results is a groundbreaking album that introduced a generation to the dazzling possibilities offered by electronic recording techniques. Highlights include "The Jezebel Spirit," an electro-funk workout that uses a recording of an exorcism as its focal point, and "Very, Very Hungry," a mysteriously ethereal display of electronic percussion and large-scale sonic architecture. --S. Duda

Product details

Package Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.55 x 4.97 x 0.54 inches; 1 Pounds
Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ Sire / London/Rhino
Date First Available ‏ : ‎ October 21, 2006
Label ‏ : ‎ Sire / London/Rhino
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000002MM1
Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1

Best Sellers Rank: #45,831 in CDs & Vinyl (See Top 100 in CDs & Vinyl)
- #143 in Ambient (CDs & Vinyl)
- #561 in Special Interest
- #837 in Progressive Rock

Customer Reviews:
4.6 78 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

Important information

To report an issue with this product or seller, click here.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

78 global ratings

1 star

0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Juliet Blake

I love it

Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2001

Verified Purchase

My first introduction to this album was waking up one morning in '81 to hear "The Jezebel Spirit" playing in my room. Can you imagine? It must have been a sign or something. (No - it was my roommate who'd just bought the album and it was wafting into my bedchamber).
This very interesting, quirky, moody, difficult, dark, light, eccentric, pioneering, even humorous stew of sounds, voices, samples, in a backdrop of electronic soundscapes blends the incidental and percussive with the ambient--just what you'd expect to hear from a collaboration of Eno and Byrne.
Of course I would love it--Eno's collaborations rarely, if ever, miss, I love just about everything he's involved in (that I've had the pleasure of hearing). Both Eno and Byrne could be considered pioneers and geniuses in their own right (and are deemed as such by many) so how could this record be anything but something fantastic.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

M.Knapp

EXCELLENT Diverse Music!

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2020

Verified Purchase

EXCELLENT Modern /Contemporary music i’ve been dancing and teaching with for years ! 🌟👍

Helpful

Roger Yepsen

avant garde with a beat

Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2001

Verified Purchase

Byrne and Eno go beyond their best independent ventures with this peculiar colaboration. It's an early example of sampling, and the otherworldly effect just isn't to be had by merely plunking keys on a Korg or Kurtzweil. The funky beat by itself would be a great groove, but coupled with snippets taken off the AM dial, the result is the most sinister CD in our collection. A great gift album for anyone who's bound up in the pleasant cotton wool of Diana Krall or the Beatles.

Helpful

FloydWaters

Slowly "knocked me sideways"!

Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2004

I will admit it--when I first heard this album, I couldn't help but wonder exactly what I'd got myself into, or even whether I was going to like the thing. It sure had some neat stuff, that I could tell, but other things were very quirky, highly unusual, and perhaps a bit dated on the first hearing. But over time, I came to appreciate this album, and now I rate it quite highly indeed. I initially heard of it thanks to a recommendation by Pink Floyd's keyboardist Richard Wright, in a 1996 interview given to Record Collector Magazine.
Mr. Wright (who incidentally also thinks highly of Remain in Light) describes his first reaction to the album, presumably on its initial release: "This knocked me sideways when I first heard it--full of drum loops, samples and soundscapes, stuff that we really take for granted now, but which was unheard of in all but the most progressive musical circles at the time." That's really the key to getting used to this album--remembering that these were the first ventures into things we now consider ordinary. In a certain way, the roughness of parts of it gives it a unique sound that sets it far apart from the overpolished works of today. That is not to say this is *sloppy* in any way--the best was done with the technology that existed then, and for that I respect David Byrne and Brian Eno.
"There's a song called The Jezebel Spirit where there's a snippet of a preacher and the way the sounds were mixed in was so fresh it was amazing," Mr. Wright comments on a track that seems to get good reviews from most people. While I admit the track is well put together, there are times when I skip it because it can be quite unnerving! If you ask me, that exorcist sounds much more evil at times than the supposed demon he is trying to remove! I'm afraid I can't see why some reviewers are calling this track optimistic. Probably, in addition to "The Jezebel Spirit", my least listened-to track on this album is "Moonlight in Glory". However, over time, I have actually come to appreciate it even if it's not a favorite; this is why I no longer feel any heartburn with giving a full 5-star rating.
In my opinion, the three strongest tracks are the ones that draw from Middle Eastern sources for their vocals. Each of them, including the painfully short "A Secret Life", I wish had been longer! My two favorites were those with vocals sampled from Lebanese mountain singer Dunya Yusin: "The Carrier" and "Regiment". I must also point out the excellent guitar work in "Regiment", which seems to me like a precursor to the similarly enjoyable work in Speaking in Tongues' "Making Flippy-Floppy". I also noticed what seemed to be almost a sort of commentary by David Byrne upon politicians and televangelists (the latter are not slams on religion, in my opinion--rather, the *popularization* of it); the way sound clips are used seem to make both groups look a bit ridiculous at times. For instance, "Mea Culpa's" juxtaposition of the babbling politician's weasling out of whatever he did with David Byrne's listless "blah blah blah blah" makes just as much of a statement as if he'd written lyrics of that nature and sang them. I also notice that in the song "Come With Us", he makes the evangelist sound rather like some freaky cultist, which in my opinion sometimes becomes the case when the evangelist focuses upon creation of a personality cult rather than a religious organization. There are other examples than just these two, however.
Overall, I think this is a very worthwhile album if you're willing to put forth the effort that may be needed to adjust to it.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Susan G.

Unusual album

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2014

Verified Purchase

This is nothing like the talking heads and anything Eno has done. It takes several listening but the song by the woman singing in the Arab style is brilliant--I keep playing it over and over.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

MarcS

i like it. its good

Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2014

i like it. its good. I like it. its good. I like it. its good. Uh oh...I think the jezebel spirit had taken me over...

Helpful

A.R. Behrens

The Way To Destruction Given Over The Radio

Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2001

This 1981 collaboration between Talking Heads frontsman David Byrne and Techno-Systems-Wizard Brian Eno takes its title from a book of Nigerian folktales by Amos Tutuola. Somewhere in that beautiful book of tales (forgive me if I haven't seen it in twenty years and may be inaccurate in my description) a young African boy encounters a voice emerging from a tree log (there is a person inside the log) and thinks that the tree is haunted. Critics back in 1981 made the best of this, pointing out that the voice and log is a perfect image for this LP that includes found vocals from various sources, including the radio and television, as well as records of vocal performances from Folkways Recordings. The album gives the feeling of being awake at 4 in the morning in a dark room, flipping the channels at random, and finding yourself confronted by something dark and haunted, like a preacher performing an exorcism, an evangelist in tears begging God to help him, or an ultra-right wing fanatic ranting about words, words, words.
Byrne and Eno made a likely pair, just having completed the seminal Talking Heads album Remain in Light, already composing music for the Byrne-Twyla Tharp collaborative ballet The Catherine Wheel (which I am convinced contains outtakes from Bush of Ghosts). After having produced three Talking Heads albums, Eno finally managed to get private time with Byrne, another deadpan hip artist-type with a quirky public image and a penchant for experimental working methods. Their collaboration also created a tense resentment amongst the Talking Heads and was a pre-echo of later years when the non-Byrne Heads confessed that their old friend David no longer wanted to talk to them. While the rhythm section's side-project The Tom Tom Club was a funky clever fun band, they definitely showed where they begged to differ with the songwriter who wrote lines like, "Rattle of bones/Dreams that stick out/Medical chart on the wall." One can only imagine the pencil thin Byrne and the gentle English artistocrat with the synth keyboards sitting in a SoHo loft at 4 in the morning with their Warhol-like tape recorders pressed against the stereo speaker or the cable television channel.
The music is Afro-Funk in style, layered textures of strange poly-rhythms, blips and bleeps of synthesized sounds, danceable off-beats, driving tribal deep percussion, choppy guitars which Eno liner notes often described as "treated" and the larger-than-life funk bass of Busta Cherry Jones. There is also the awesome presence of Robert Fripp on "Regiment."
Fans of Moby's "Play" may want to listen to this album to see where the cue-ball headed one derived some of his techniques for songs like "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad" and "Natural Blues." And he lives in the same neighborhood once occupied by the Byrne-Eno hybrid. Hmmmmm....
My advice for unitiated would be to buy three records. "Remain in Light" by the Heads, "My Life In the Bush of Ghosts" and "The Catherine Wheel" score. Wait for the middle of the night, turn off the lights, turn on the CD player, and sit back to enjoy the haunting. Neither artist has ever recreated the artisitic high they hit with this trilogy.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

darryl

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on June 16, 2018

Verified Purchase

experimental songs. byrne and eno. are both underrated artists

Mr. T. Bower

Evocative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2019

Verified Purchase

Just as good as when I remembered it!

One person found this helpful

goldener59er

Ein zeitloses Meisterwerk

Reviewed in Germany on May 12, 2022

Verified Purchase

Diese Platte gehört in jedes Regal von Freunden zeitloser experimenteller eigenständiger Musik. Ein Meisterwerk, das Brian Eno und David Byrne seinerzeit abgeliefert haben. Zu dieser Kategorie gehören m.E. auch Remain in the light von Talking Heads aber auch das Jahre später erschienene Album Power Spot von Jon Hassel, an dem Brian Eno auch mitgewirkt hat.

Translate review to English