A study of Brian Eno's discography entails sorting through tight competition for the British musician-producer's most influential album: good luck. Entering hereabout was a loan from the library, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, produced and released by Eno, and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, in 1981.
Eno, in 1979, several solo works after his retirement as oddest member of the equivalently flamboyant art-band Roxy Music, began a search for "music where music wasn't supposed to have been." He was taping radio broadcasters and other forms of speech, then putting the excerpts to music. Byrne soon joined the project and, according to the pair's enthusiastic distractions, Bush of Ghosts was — as Byrne reflected in 2005 — conceived first as "an imaginary culture," then a sort of futurist dance record. When finished, the album was comprised of eleven tracks, each song cradling samples of the human voice, taken from mass media and introduced, without the aid of sequencing electronics, "by trial and error." Rhythms and instrumentation were of African music, both from mother continent and New World.
What does it sound like? Danceable; deceptively of traditional culture, since the two used "cardboard boxes for kick drums, biscuit tins as snare drums"; busy in some moments, but prudently so; and then in other moments, accompaniment suitable for driving late at night.
The album, which was re-mastered for a 2006 edition of 18 tracks, is credited by one retrospective with having inspired "hundreds of artists in genres ranging from DJs to alternative to electronic." Bush of Ghosts is indeed excellent, with all of Eno's eclecticism and few of his pensive inconsistencies — a rare omnibus record, not a more typical curious, uneven pastiche. But it isn't well-known, nor are examples of its influence conspicuous in either pop or rock as are others, so while it predates the sampling era, the album can't be thought of as seminal. It may even be too unusual for the wide appeal demanded by a masterpiece, such as Eno's 1978 Music for Airports.
For the musician, it is instructive — and thanks to associates of Eno and Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is now heuristic. A website, "in keeping with the original spirit" of the album, provides, to anyone interested, every contributive track for two of the record's songs. They can be used in new creative works. Take and give back: a showcase of third-party mixes is right up front.
A brief review of that, however, exposes the poverty of today's avant-garde. Here Eno and Byrne named their album after a grotesque novel by the Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola — which was in fact about ghosts and bushes — whereas the title connoted, for a couple of entrants, the sitting president of the United States. Tiny imaginations discern only a conspiracy. It could be worse, as for some the word triggers coprolalia.
That's the bad news. One can, easily enough, just listen to Eno and Byrne.