The 1981 Collaboration That Shaped the Future of Electronic and Pop Music
- Sangamon County News
- Nov 11, 2025
- 1 min read
In 1981 fresh off their recording of the seminal classic “Remain in Light,” Taking Heads front man David Byrne and uber producer Brian Eno (David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, Coldplay, Devo and Paul Simon) produced a record that is still influencing recording artists today; “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” is named after a book of the same name written in 1954. It was a novel by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, which chronicles a young boy who gets lost in a mystical African forest filled with ghosts and other supernatural beings; which very aptly describes the music.
Eno and Byrne took an experimental, layered collage approach to assembling the record using a live polyrhythmic band and augmenting it with haunting, ghost-like samples, detached sound effects, audio fragments, tape loops, and filtering them through synthesizers, sequencers, and various electronics. It was the first time traditional vocals were replaced with found samples and looped voice recordings drawing from a variety of diverse sources that ranged from a crazed, midnight radio talk-show host, Lebanese mountain singers, tribal drumming, manic street preachers, a (very haunting) exorcism, Algerian Muslim chanting, and Egyptian pop, all recontextualized and added to a contemporary mix of funk, indie rock, early hip hop, and ambient sounds.
The influence of this ground-breaking records can be heard in artists as diverse as: Public Enemy, Massive Attack, Moby, Thievery Corporation, Kate Bush, DJ Shadow, Frank Ocean and Kendrick Lamar.
