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: #24066 in Music
• Released on: 2006-04-11
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Enhanced, Extra tracks, Original recording remastered
• Dimensions: .28 pounds

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

An Influential Album Gets Its Due
Reissues don't get much better than this.

First, the sound quality is much improved over the first CD reissue, warmer and more balanced, with slightly better definition.

Second, three of the tracks are actually longer than on the original release. "Mea culpa" is almost a minute and a half longer. "Regiment" is about 15 seconds longer, thanks to an extended intro. "The carrier" is 43 seconds longer, including an extra vocal in the middle that, upon comparison, was clearly excised from the original version. (In addition, "Moonlight in glory" takes a bit longer to fade out, though it does not otherwise seem to differ from the original.)

Third, the rather thick booklet actually has liner notes, with essays by David Byrne and Brian Eno (though theirs seem to be mostly David Byrne) and David Toop. You don't see liner notes much anymore, so this is a real treat.

Fourth, the new cover art on the slipcase perfectly illustrates the nature of the contents of the package. The image is actually that of the original album cover, only updated using current technology.

Fifth, according to the official web site created for this reissue, "David Byrne has personally overseen the tracklisting and remastering". I have seen too many artist catalogs remastered and reissued without the participation of the artists themselves, and the results are usually lacking in some respect. This is not the case here.

Finally, the video for "Mea culpa" is included. And at a decent resolution, too.

I have only two real complaints about this remastered edition. One is the omission of the track "Qu'ran", though I realize that particular choice was made back in the late eighties, when the first UK edition of the CD was released. It also would have been nice if the liner notes had included a mention of this track and the reasons for its absence, even if only in passing. In any event, if this track is a must-have for you, I recommend tracking down a used copy of the first US CD edition (Sire Records, 6093-2). The other is the omission of the credits identifying the voices used. David Toop mentions one of the sources in his essay, but none of the others are specifically mentioned anywhere.

Highly recommended.

It's STILL Years Ahead Of Its Time!
I got my copy of this CD the day it was released, as I had been waiting for this reissue for years. My 17-year-old daughter is very music-savvy. We were out driving in the car, and I played "Mea Culpa" and "Regimen" for her.

I asked her "When do you think this was recorded?" She told me "Probably sometime in the last ten years, maybe in the late 1990's." When I told her that David Byrne and Brian Eno recorded "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" in 1979-80 without the use of computers or digital equipment, she was stunned!

A lot of music that is now 25 years old has not stood the test of time; it sounds dated, cliched, dull. Not the music on this disc! It sounds as fresh, as scary, as exciting to me as it did when it was first released. The explosive percussion, the shimmering, chattering keyboards, the strange yet perfect "found" vocals... it's all here, in all its innovative glory. Six bonus tracks have been added, and although I feel they don't make the original album better, they add some insights into the music. Extensive liner notes serve to put this work into perspective as the true landmark that it is.

A masterpiece 25 years ago, it is still a masterpiece today and I suspect it still will be considered such 25 years from now. Run, don't walk, to wherever this disc is sold, and BUY IT. You will not be disappointed.

What really happened in the eighties.
Albums like this one are what makes me grit my teeth when people talk about how vapid 1980's music was. If only they knew how much they missed that was brewing below the surface (The early Butthole Surfers and Big Black, for example).
Anyway, I have loved this album since the day it was released on vinyl. Along with Holger Czuckay, Gregory Whitehead, Derek Bailey, Giorgi Ligetti and other experimental audio artists of lesser or greater extremes, this collaboration between Eno and Byrne came out with little fanfare and seemed to be overlooked for years afterwards (and in Gregory Whitehead's case...still). Back then the internet wasn't around to make it so easy for us to find such music and the music industry didn't see a lot of profit in it, so they gave us Boy George instead. Bush of Ghosts was one of those albums you would get wide-eyed to discover in someone else's record collection. It was a shocker to find someone else who had ever heard of it, let alone actually listened to it.
This album is a great combination of intelligence mixed with soul. I can't tell how many converts it has won over through me alone. No matter how your exploration of music led you to this page in Amazon I hope you'll buy this CD and see where it takes you next. Hopefully that journey will have nothing to do with Billy Idol......or American Idol for that matter.