1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 478. Brian Eno & David Byrne – My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (1981)

By and large, I’ll eat up anything put in front of me that features either Brian Eno or David Byrne individually, so would combining the two of them make something twice as good, or would they suffer the “supergroup” effect and be less than the sum of the parts? 

Well for one thing, Eno’s been producing Talking Heads for a couple of albums now, to generally good effect, so it’s hopeful. And what do we get? Adventures in sampling!   

The tracks are more like the sampling done by Public Service Broadcasting where the music is woven around the inherent rhythm of the sample, than the likes of Avalanches, Art Of Noise, or even Big Audio Dynamite who either compile whole songs from fragments or do a lot of drop-ins. I like both approaches. 

The underlying rhythms have an Afro-beat direction, especially towards the beginning of the album, and there’s something of an Arabic feel to most of the tracks, sampling Lebanese singers Dunya Younes and Samira Toufic on Regiment, The Carrier, and A Secret Life, and recital of the Qu’ran on the track, also called Qu’ran.  

Other samples come from American talk radio and religious sermons. Thus there’s something of a vague sense to the album of the collision between spirituality and religiosity, the soundscape of the tracks being not unlike a shamanic ceremony or an existential experience. Towards the end of the album the music becomes more abstract and fragmented, less tuneful than near the beginning. 

More than Holger Czukay did, Eno and Byrne don’t just drop samples into an ongoing piece of music, they use the sample as the basis for the tune, riffing on the inherent musicality of the sampled song, recital, or conversation. Sometimes they tweak the sample – on Mea Culpa, for example, the radio phone in discussion is looped, changed in speed, to form a beat basis for the track. Sometimes they leave it as is – Dunya Younes’ singing, for example. And so they push forwards both possibilities for sampling that later artists will use. 

No, arguably they don’t invent the procedure, Czukay at least having got their first, or even The Beach Boys on Pet Sounds, but as Eno has always done, he lays the groundwork and explores what the technology can do, setting out new options for future artists. Not to mention "borrowing" concepts from hip-hop which hasn't made the list yet but is very much a thing by 1981. And it sounds beautiful.