Asif Khan Inc.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – Brian Eno & David Byrne

It’s eerily funny when you start listening to an album released two decades ago, and the first song starts with a newsreader like voice saying something on the lines of “America is waiting for investors”. Yes, everyone knows that we are facing a financial meltdown, and the shambles the American economy is in. Soothsaying, did someone say? Not so sure if any prophecies regarding socio-economic state were actually present, but “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” contains a message in music which stands as relevant even today. By the time they got together to work on this album, both Brian Eno (as the progenitor of Ambient Music) and David Byrne (having spent time with Talking Heads and other solo stuff) had already built sonic skyscrapers. It was probably a desire to create something never experienced before which led them to sample such abstruse sources as Middle Eastern mountain singers, faith healers and above all, an exorcist. A blend of electronic elements and funk, with insane amounts of inspiration from the Third World, the album has the capacity to induce a trance. Experienced first hand on “Regiment” with its dervish like vocals on a groovy funk bass guitar beat, you retreat into a reverie to the haunting rusticity of the voice. The brush with the transcendental continues as the exorcist gives out a wry laugh while flushing out demons on “The Jezebel Spirit” against staccato funk beats. It does not end there, but pushes further on “Help Me Somebody” as Rev. Paul Morton leaps into a sermon on percussive sounds plugged with funk emerging from the African heartland. The mountain singer returns with his Arabic verses on “The Carrier”, and you get a taste of quaint Arab pop voices on “A Secret Life”, both of which promise to play with your mental state. A record which laid the path for the way electronic resonance would be fused with other material in times to come, the spirits contained within the album are potent enough to shake foundations, when played even today.