MY GHOST IN THE BUSH OF LIFE
The title references the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a collaboration between music producer Brian Eno and David Byrne of the Talking Heads, recorded between the years of 1979-1980 in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. The beginnings of the album were the result of Eno and Byrne’s shared fascination with African pop music. Eno had previously been working with recordings of found vocals and looping them. These found vocals would eventually be the only lyrical component of the album. The music of the album was performed using a variety of instruments, many of them found, such as a cardboard box replacing a kick drum, or biscuit tins as snare drums. The music was recorded first, and after the music was arranged the pair would play tapes of the found vocal samples to see if there were any congruencies. It was through this process that Byrne and Eno discovered the “innately musical” qualities of the vocal samples of: angry radio talk-show host, Arabic singers, preachers, and radio evangelist. The natural cadences and meter of these vocal samples “seemed to have been performed with the ‘band’.”
While not the first album including samples of previously recorded material, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was one of the first albums to rely so heavily on sampling that it began to call into question the actual contribution of the artist. Byrne addresses some of these issues in the liner notes of the 2005 rerelease of the album:
I think some people found all of this disturbing. In the West, anyway, the casual link between the author and performer is strong. For instance, it is assumed that I write lyrics ( and the accompanying music) for songs because I have something I need to “express”. And that as a performer it is assumed that everything one utters is autobiographical. I find that more often, on the contrary, it is the music and the lyric that trigger the emotion within me rather than the other way around. By making music, we are pushing our own buttons, in effect, and the surprising thing is that the vocals that we didn’t write or even sing can make us feel a gamut of emotions just as much as the ones that we wrote. In a way music is constructing a machine that, when successful, dredge up emotions - in us and in the listener. Some people find this idea repulsive, for it seems to relegate the artist to the level of trickster, manipulator, deceiver. They would prefer to see music as an “expression” of emotion rather than a generator of it, to believe in the artist as someone with something to “say”. This queasiness is connected with the idea of authenticity as well; that, for example, musicians who “appear” down-home must be more real. It is disillusioning to find out that rock and roll is an act and no regular folk in Nashville really wear hats.
All this as a contentious issue was resolved years later by electronic and hip-hop artists, whose music in many cases is either not played by them ( in the case of hip-hop artists), or, like us, remains more or less faceless; electronic artists often use a variety of friends and singers on their tracks, and almost never ever sing on them themselves. In their case it became acceptable that the author is the curator, and not the singer.
Almost 30 years after the release of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts sampling has been embraced as a legitimate form of musical expression. Electronic artist, whether they use samples or not, who were once confined to night clubs and raves in derelict warehouses, now enjoy a level of mainstream success comparable to artist of any other popular music genre. The most notable difference that exist now is the ease by which anyone can acquire and manipulate audio samples. While Eno and Byrne had the ability and financial resources to gain access to vast record stacks and studio grade audio equipment, this was obviously not common place in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Even if one could afford to construct a synthesizer and had access to audio samples the main economic barrier was the recording process. It has been with the rise and development of the personal computer and internet based file sharing systems that there are now countless individuals capable of not only recording their own music, but re-appropriating and reusing the music and audio samples of others without ever having to leave their computer.
The aim of this project, My Ghost in the Bush of Life, is in one respect an attempt to understand what defines the recording artists of the digital age and the digital realm. How does this new artist begin to collaborate with others? How much authorship can this artist claim, when the extent of his musical creation requires them to open only a laptop instead of a case with a trumpet? Does this artist ever perform in realtime with others, or does he merely make his creation public while never leaving his bedroom? Will this artists hear a remnant of something he once created in the background of another song created by somebody half a world away who he has never met, and if he did will he even be sure if it is his own, will he recognize his own ghost?
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