Track Listing

1. America Is Waiting
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
12. Pitch to Voltage
13. Two Against Three
14. Vocal Outtakes
15. New Feet
16. Defiant
17. Number 8 Mix
18. Solo Guitar with Tin Foil

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #660 in Music
• Released on: 2006-04-11
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Enhanced, Extra tracks

Album Description
Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts appears downright visionary. With its "found" vocals, cut-and-paste arrangements, funked-up rhythms and embrace of influences from all around the globe, the duo's controversial work anticipated the creative cross-pollination and technological innovation of contemporary dance music, world music, hip hop and alternative rock. You can hear echoes of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in the anthems Moby built around vintage vocal samples, in the outrageously exotic beats of Missy Elliot and Timbaland, in the Middle Eastern accented chill-out tracks of Thievery Corporation or Bjork's otherworldly soundscapes.

Amazon.com essential recording
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

Customer Reviews

WONDERFUL but ... THIS reissue falls because...
wonderful but it FAILS because of the reticence to include the orginally LATER deleted Qu'ran track....

this is a HOLY song and you can't let fundamentalists HIJACK the sacred. well, they can't but it was a corporation that ultimately cowered here.

a shame.

otherwise, 99.9% great album.

see the work eno did with jon hassel!

Astounding
This music is astounding, sublime, wonderful, violent, surprising, mesmerizing, subtle, groundbreaking...you get the idea. Most wonderful.

A favorite album made even better.
I purchased "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" when it came out on vinyl in 1981. I first heard it at a party and was immediately drawn to it. At the time, it was one of the most innovative albums I had heard. I have probably played this album more times than I have played any other; it is burned into my brain. When it was eventually released on CD in the late 1980's, the sounds was somewhat cleaner (no vinyl crackle and pops), and overall sounded much like the original vinyl. That release added "Very Very Hungry" as the last cut, which was not on the original vinyl. An interesting note is that Qur'an was still cut #6 on that release, and it was later self-censored on the 1990 CD release, and on this new remastered CD. "Very Very Hungry" was moved to cut #6 to replace Qur'an.

This remastered edition has remarkably better sound quality. It is a real pleasure to hear one of my favorite albums sound even better after all these year. As others have noted, some of the songs have a few short sections restored, and there are 7 new cuts. The new cuts are interesting historically, but perhaps since I know the old album so well, the new cuts seem disconnected from the rest of the album.

The included booklet includes many pictures and details about the production of the album which were not in any previous edition. The whole package is a great re-release.