Brian Eno and David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981)

by Geno Thackara

It’s not your usual dance-pop record, it’s not your usual helping of worldbeat or drum-and-bass groove… well, it’s not your usual anything. David Byrne and Brian Eno had spent years absorbing musical ideas from around the world: multilayered African rhythms, sampled voices, tape loops and studio trickery, everything from Miles Davis’s jungle-funk jazz to traditional Arabic chants. It seemed like a fun experiment to just throw everything at the wall with abandon all at once, and not only did everything stick, it made a fascinating new pattern that surprised them as much as anyone.

A big part of the fun was playing with one of Eno’s favorite artistic themes: putting familiar things in unusual contexts. They used guitar and bass but often manipulated the sound a bit more after the fact. They were likely to bang on random household objects and cardboard boxes as often as drums or congas. Instead of writing lyrics, they took recordings of other people’s voices – radio broadcasters, street singers, TV preachers – and found ways to match the rhythm of speech with the music. It’s like putting a picture in a new frame and suddenly seeing a whole different angle to it.

The result is the kind of album that feels familiar all over but doesn’t sound quite like anything else. It’s experimental, sometimes almost abstract, yet funky as all get-out at the same time. It’s the kind of thing hip-hop samplers and rave DJs explored in the decades since, but this was a completely analog affair thrown together with trial and error by splicing tape (yes, me lad, we didn’t have all your fancy digital thingys in those days). It was ahead of its time and still sounds like it could have been made last week.

Swampy, hypnotic, immediate enough to dance to and layered enough to spend years picking apart, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts has managed to stay as unclassifiable today as it was in 1981. It’s worldly and otherworldly at the same time – something for your brain as much as your feet.