My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

Not for me, guys.

This album was released in 1981 and is classified as art/experimental electronic music with African and Middle Eastern beats and vocals. It is known for it's use of longer vocal samples and it's engineering/production. On many tracks the sample is the primary vocal. For me, each track is more of a rhythmic percussive jam than a "song". Some seem to be more complete than others. I can see how this album would be very influential to those that actually create music and sounds but this is challenging even for a fans of these guys. While interesting, this is a long album and was hard to get through. Other than the few tracks below that are more accessible, I can't see myself actively playing this album. Regiment Help Me Somebody The Jezebel Spirit

I really try with Brian Eno but outside of a couple of songs I'm just not getting it.

Interesting but not my thing

I first came across this album because of the extended cd reissue put out by Nonesuch, but I now own both a copy of the album on lp and cd. Unsurprisingly, I'm a big fan of this album. A lot of focus is placed on its use of looping samples. That material is generally interesting, but main focus for me is the way that this album feels very much in conversation with the dub tradition without at all being a dub album. It's concerned with using juxtapositions of sound to create interesting textures and rhythms. Unlike the dub tradition there are moments where the focus on texture overtakes the interest in rhythm though. To be clear, this is not the syncopated rhythm of dub, but it does feel very much in conversation with that tradition. There are also moments, particularly with some of the extend tracks on the cd that are also very much engaged in the kind of ambient projects that Eno is creating around this time. It's something that creates a difference between the lp and the cd, but I really like both projects. The second half of the lp moves in that more ambient direction as it goes along. The bonus tracks feel like a logical next step, but it does make for a different listen and they break even more away from the kind rhythmic emphasis that defines even the later tracks on the lp.

Tää oli kummallinen ambientmölinä levy. Ei oikein mennyt edes taustamusana.

Look at me I'm David Byrne jingle jangle jingle bongo drum.

Op zich klinkt het wel geinig, maar het gevoel is weinig.

Not the biggest fan of cut-and-paste music, but this one did grow on me by the end.

It was good ... but not crazy good!

Not for me at all

A wild trip for sure.

I love the plethora of sounds and ideas on this record. It doesn’t all full form into a cohesive whole for me, but I do like it 3/5

Perhaps like me you’ve had a lot of the fruits of the Eno-Byrne partnership on the list so far, shown in the Talking Heads’ innovatively experimental but hooky tracks. Here we get some of where that partnership drifts into too much abstraction. There are some relatively memorable songs in places like America is Waiting, but for the most part it’s just the meandering style that makes much of Eno’s personal output a miss for me.

I love funk music and I love weird electronica, so it's little surprise that I love this album. As a collaboration between Byrne and Eno, you get the best of both worlds, with the funk rhythms present on Talking Heads records being taken to strange new places through the evocative, otherworldly soundscapes of Brian Eno, and what was at the time quite an innovative utilisation of sampling.

Sounds exactly how you’d expect an album by these two to sound. Strange and disjointed but catchy/funky electronic rhythms, combined with a variety of interesting samples. Take my three favourites, for example: ‘Regiment’ features a call-and-response melody between a female Lebanese singer and effects-laden electric guitar, ‘Help Me Somebody’ an evangelical preacher over vaguely ‘African’ percussion and an upbeat funky rhythm section, and ‘The Jezebel Spirit’ a sample of an exorcism being performed (!) over a similar funky rhythm section and blaring synth horns. Side two isn’t as compelling, but it’s still good enough overall for a strong 3 stars.

like the nutcracker but if it was sleep paralysis

I’m sure some people take enjoyment from this. I am not one of them. Mostly boring or annoying.

I'm thinking that when this album was released, it was pretty groundbreaking, but in 2026 it does sound a little passe.

p477. 1981. 1 star. Background music for 80s hipsters. Clean production for sure, but it's essentially this is album of noodling around half finished songs.

I had never heard this album before! Really interesting, the voice samples were kind of weird and distracting but overall a good 4 star album for me.

It's like Talking Heads' "Remain In Light" but without Byrne's vocals. Lots of really interesting tape loops and sample collages. 4 stars

I think this is pretty cool. I was psyched when I saw Brian Eno and David Byrne on the same album. It's not exactly what I was expecting, but still an intriguing listen.

Listened to this after going through a haunted house and it felt like this was an extended version of my experience in album form. Some of the samples and sounds on here sre extremely off-putting and creepy. There were moments of head bopping grooves made with interesting tinkering of sounds, but overall they were out-shined with the disturbing moments. I guess you could say the album was on theme for the night though...

I have weirdly mixed feelings about this album. It's the kind of record that sounds great on paper. Remain in Light is one of my favorite records ever, and much of this album sounds like the rhythm tracks from Remain in Light. So that's nice. But I'm also ambivalent about the "sampling" that happens on this album -- it's mostly exoticized flavor (appropriation) sprinkled on top of the rhythm section. Byrne/Eno are not actually that skilled at putting together a sonic tapestry with pre-recorded audio, and certainly were leagues behind their hip-hop contemporaries. The result is something a bit too self-consciously postmodern and a bit too "worldly cosmopolitan" in a repellent bourgeois manner (think of that awful Sting album around the turn of the millennium).

pretty awesome life 👍

I don't get it. It's like expermental music

Well, Apple music says few listeners find themselves in the middle when it comes to rating this album, and here I am, in the middle. I will say my ranking slowly dropped over the course of the track list; I was pretty high on the found-audio, experimental grooviness of the first half of the album, but by the second half it devolved into a potpourri of radio signals and vaguely Arabian instrumentals. Maybe this was intentional, but for a listener it’s not all that gripping on a first run-through. For now, I sit at a 3. Regiment is a banger though. STAND-OUT SONG: “Regiment” HONORABLE MENTIONS: “Mea Culpa,” “The Jezebel Spirit”

Apart from the opening track, this was pretty good

Weak, nothing interesting here. Both Eno and Byrne have done better Best tracks: N/A Rating: 2/10

Ya, das it gut

Cool to have experienced... once... 3/5

Ah, Brian Eno, you glorious weirdo. David Byrne calls you up and says, "I'm looking to try some new stuff." So Brian's like, "How new?" Byrne: "Loops and samples. Crabs committing suicide. A woman moaning faintly. But make it Roxy Music smooth. "On it."

Johan on hankalasti arvioitava albumi, tämä on nimittäin oikeasti varsin hyvä albumi mutta on todella erikoista musaa enkä tajua ollenkaan, mistä tässä on kysymys. Ehkä tämä aukeaisi, jos tämän kuuntelisi ajatuksella useita kertoja. Tämä on ehkä ollut merkittävä tiennäyttäjä tietyille genrelle, tuli vaan mieleen. Erikoisuus siis ilman muuta on, että biiseissä ei todellakaan ole erityisen selkeää rakennetta tai kaavaa, mitä pop-musassa on yleensä tavannut olla. 3/5

11/10/2026 This is such a duff album. This music is more suited for a space age game than to be making it onto my playlist. Disappointing to say the least. Spotify listeners: 2 million

Get it might be groundbreaking but it’s not the most exciting

This use of African sounds in an art-rock record (by two white, non-African musicians, it must be said) is surprisingly tasteful, serving to complement and elevate those tracks rather than feel oddly tacked-on as an embellishment. I missed a pop element on this, something that would deliver more satisfaction than straddling the edge of too weird.

love when cool stuff like this comes up and i get to read the top reviews, it's like looking up ulysses on amazon. it seems like the artist is just trying to be weird. the artist is just trying to unmoor me from the mundanity of the world i've come to expect and see the possibilities of a different one. the artist is just trying to display an interiority that is at odds with the one that has been shaped for me by extant powers. surely people are just pretending to like this for attention. as opposed to me who must enforce acceptable parameters of form in the public space and have the narowness of my own perception reinforced by the exclusion of anything else from the public sphere. in seriousness the album art for this is so bad, and the music is good. is this an influence on the "fourth world" or "cd era ambient" output? the mix of byrne's africanesques and eno's tech virtuosity are the same qualities that make me dig yasuaki shimizu and the like. it's jammy and chill and has lightly driving drums to keep your feet on the ground while your head's in the reverby and soundscapey clounds. added to the library

I like the eastern sounds

Strange, challenging and interesting.

It was boring and not particularly good.

These guys got it figured out

Unconventional. And you’d expect nothing less from these too. Keep on keeping on my dudes.

Despite my huge respect for Mr. Byrne & Mr. Eno, I have never managed to warm to this album. It touches all the ethnomusicology bases that usually gets me on, but it is far too derivative of Can & the solo work of Holger Czukay and just feels like an impersonal curio for Westerners.

I like plenty of Brian Eno's music, and I love Talking Heads. But this album has never clicked with me, and I can never work out what people see in it. The sample-based approach must have been reasonably innovative when this was recorded. But I find the endless spoken samples pretty annoying. They don't seem to add anything interesting - but are like unwanted radio chatter over the music. Most of the sung samples aren't my cup of tea either. If you take away all the samples, you would have a pretty enjoyable record of fourth-world ambient-exotica, with a rhythmic emphasis and some subdued nods to post-punk-funk. Pretty enjoyable music - but presumably I shouldn't be spending the whole album wishing away all the samples. 3*

Ei puhutellut. ⭐️⭐️

Very innovative Eno is an influential genius and Byrne creates vocal gymnastics to fuse with Eno's soundscapes.

I think my biggest issue is how little it feels like an album. It's a collection of weird sounds, and that is interesting for a minute, but at the end you are left with the sentiment that there could have been 10 000 thousand other weird ass noises that could have been included. There is little cohesiveness, little thought behind the pacing or flow of it. The experimentation is novel one by one, plenty to be interested by on it's own, but it doesn't really work as an album and that is disappointing especially since I love both of them

Not sure I understood this one, definitely some unique sounds but not in a way that was super enjoyable. I can respect it though

Eno y Burne, dos gigantes. Colaboran juntos (ya lo habían hecho unos años enates con More Songs About Buildings and Food del 78 o Fear of music en el 79), Byrne sin Talking Heads (con quienes publicaría Remain in light ese mismo año) y Eno pues él mismo. También participan otrs gigantes como Robert Fripp y Bill Laswell. Aquí hay sonidos electrónicos, muchos, y muy pioneros para su época, junto con ritmos y sonidos orientales y africanos. Sampling antes del samplis, es decir con cintas electromagnéticas. Mea Culpa, está bien pero Regiment con Dunya Yusin (problemas legales de por medio) es mucho mejor. Help Me Somebody con un sermón de un religioso de Nueva Orleans y ritmos funkies africanos. Qu'ran también tuvo problemas con los islamistas, y retiraron sus aportaciones. Un disco experimental. Prefiero otros de Eno.

Brian Eno has played around with ambient and more esoteric ideas a lot, and at times he managed to truly capture the majesty that such a sound can become. Unfortunately, this is an album where he completely misses the mark as far as I'm concerned, the fairly average first half only just saving the second half from dragging this album down to a 1 star.

I’ve been meaning to check out this album for a while, and it turned out to be more experimental, and more enjoyable than I expected. Going into it, I was assuming it would be David Byrne singing over Brian Eno’s music, but that wasn’t the case at all. Instead of traditional vocals, the album is built around samples and found sounds. Everything from exorcisms to Arabic chanting, to political speeches, all spliced, looped, and repurposed in really creative ways. If anything, this album probably ended up influencing a lot of early dance and hip hop producers in the way it showed how samples could be used to create something totally fresh and different from their original context.

An interesting soundscape, ambient, odd, intriguing.

Think I need to listen to this again. It's very David Byrne, a bit oddball and interesting. I probably missed lots of ideas and nuances in there, will come back to it

First half outweighs the second before it gets a bit too spacey and ambient. Still great! Proto-‘Remain in Light’

not really my thing

Gladly surprised. Don’t know if it was my mood or how the day was going but this album clicked. It’s immersive, vast, and innovative. These guys deserve their reputation

Byrne's manic funk and Eno's glassy experimentalism fuse remarkably well. this record is a box of chocolates that constantly offers new delights to interest the listener, whether they're impeccable grooves, quirky samples, or beautiful sounds.

Intellectualizing this album is to disrespect it a bit, but it's better as an intellectual exercise than an album. As with so many experiments, not everything hits, but sometimes it does, and sometimes it misses by juuuuuust that much. The failures tend to be more interesting than the successes, but they're also not as fun to listen to, and that's probably how to describe this album in brief. I was immediately reminded of Mclaren's Duck Rock, that being a much lesser album in the same experimental area. Historically and geographically situated, this album probably cannot be overstated and you should probably listen to it even if you end up not liking it. Which is a perfectly reasonable response. Time has left it behind quite a bit, actually, but that doesn't mean it's not fun to go back and see the ur-texts.

Is the cover generated by the PowerPoint default pattern?

This is a walkabout by two guys doing weird guy shit together. Eno and Bryne no a thing about music, that is undeniable and there is ample evidence that there combined knowledge and understanding of rhythm, tempo and even pop music itself is second to none. So why is this rhythmic experiment such a dull pile of crap. I actually own this record and bought it new when it came out as I was a fan of Talking Heads and of Eno’s production work. I found his solo stuff, particularly the ambient pieces, pretty dull but I knew that he had some interesting ideas and this collaboration seemed a great idea. Except it is not. Samples and found sounds seems interesting except this early experiment of mashing it all up with African rhythms and electronics was just fragmented. It is the dissonant Frankensteining of these songs that fails to connect with me. I played it several times in the early 80s but could never connect with it. Perhaps it’s not my roots. It still doesn’t connect. Listening to the album today was tough because I could have spent time with the new Gurriers record or even the new Chelsea Wolfe record which come off as far more engaging and entertaining than this. So, what to make of it? I conclude that time is better spent elsewhere than playing this. 2/5

Obnoxious crap on a stick

Quelques compos qui m'ont parlé et la grande variété au sein de l'album est agréable, mais conceptuellement c'est le cul entre le prog des années 60 et l'expérimental des années 90-2000, un peu perdu.

What the actual fuck was that.

Still good

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the first collaboration between Brian Eno and Talking Head's David Byrne outside of the 3 Talking Heads releases that came before this. I know a lot of people may like this project but I really struggle to understand the hype behind it all as I was left really confused by the end of this 42 minute abstract experiment. Weird songs are unfortunately not something that is going to make me give an album high praise, it must earn my respect and continue to impress me. This album does neither of those things and instead leaves me confused and frustrated for what I just put my time into seeing the talent that can most definitely make some really great music. I know I am going to get a lot of flake for this rating but I will gladly stand my ground and say that this is a waste of your time and a huge disappointment coming from Eno and Byrne. This project abandons what both artists were so well at doing and makes a project that feels so far fetched from their strong suits. Really frustrated with how this turned out as I was really looking forward to this release.

feel like there’s a backstory on this album that i need to better understand to judge it, crazy collab though

Slitsomt.

This seems like a sister album to Fear Of Music. Very similar tone and flow in the album. Wordless music, just some random vocalization from David Byrne. The album is great, but similar to Fear Of Music, it gets lost in experimenting; might be Eno's MO

This one lost me a bit on the first track, where it feels like the sampled vocals are sitting over the music rather than in it. As the album went on and the vocals started to weave throughout the music I was hooked though. A lot of the samples make this sound like an album from the late nineties rather than 15-20 years before.

While Eno's relevancy in this sort of exercise of labelling which are the most meaningful albums cannot be understated, and this album has the novelty of it being such as stepping stone for music to come, I could do without this album particularly. 7/10 [DROP]

initial impression: I don't know how this counts as pop. It doesn't sound like pop (then or now) and it wasn't popular at the time. half hour later: yeah this is ass, i can't even make it through the whole thing

Fun collab from two of music’s most inventive minds. The samples are a bit cringely appropriative but do sound cool against Eno and Byrne’s soundscapes.

It was OK. I expected more when i got the lp all those years ago.

Some fun jams on here, but ultimately too much experimental for my liking.

Genuinely visionary and genuinely held at arm's length — the two things coexisting honestly rather than contradicting each other. Eno and Byrne essentially invented world music, sampling, and ambient hip-hop simultaneously before any of those genres had names, layering field recordings, radio evangelists, exorcism ceremonies, and Lebanese mountain singers over funk and electronic rhythms in a way that had no precedent in 1981 and plenty of descendants since. The innovation is real and the historical importance is undeniable. The feeling of something cooked up in a laboratory is equally real — a record that fascinates intellectually without quite generating the emotional pull that earns return visits. The found vocals that replace Byrne's singing remove the distance his voice has created elsewhere in this project without fully replacing it with warmth. A three for a record that pushed doors open without quite inviting you through them.

Not

Just lock Brian Eno and David Byrne in a room together and let them do whatever weird stuff they want to

Dense simulacra for people who read Baudrillard for shits and giggles.

Började som en trea men tradigt mot slutet

Om man ser till de låtar som faktiskt ingick i albumet så tycker jag att det var riktigt bra! Stark fyra! Det här ska lyssnas på igen. Sju bonus tracks av varierande kvalitet (i den versionen på spotify som länken hänvisade till) gynnade inte så mycket, så jag bortser från dem i min betygsättning. Lyssnar nog på versionen utan bonus tracks i framtiden.

Otroligt att Byrne/eno pionjärade triphop! Tyckte det här var kul

Första lyssningen tyckte jag tvåa, inte andra lyssningen. Galet hur mycket Eno påverkade Talking Heads sound. Går att förstå att de andra medlemmarna kände sig överkörda

Not my favourite, prefer albums with singing as opposed to soundtrack music or instrumental albums.

On the first couple of listens I was feeling a 2, but this grew on me massively once I got into it. Feels really ahead of its time for 1981 too. Some great samples in here. Favourite tracks: America Is Waiting, Mea Culpa, Help Me Somebody, The Jezebel Spirit, Moonlight In Glory.

I like all versions of Eno except ambient Eno, which is just boring. This collab with Byrne showcases Eno at his most inventive and daring, and highlights the influence he had on the best Talking Heads albums. The use of samples and found sounds was ahead of its time.

Okay I like it, picasso

If you don't like this album, I get it. It's weird. There's no lyrics to speak of. What words there are in songs feel more like samples than something that goes with the music. Try leaning into it. Let the weirdness of this one wash over you. It goes in good places, and doesn't leave you out to dry like other weird songs. This is trip-hop geneaology. Without this, we don't get Tricky or DJ Shadow. There are a few different flavors in here, but it's good. Like an ice-cream shop. My Rating: 4/5

Interesting but goes on too long

I don't mind a bit of sound collage if it's meaningful and feels like it has a purpose. Now, you layer it onto some afrobeats and a ton of funky basslines and well, you got yourself a stew going. I have a huge amount of respect for Eno as a musician, artist, fearless pioneer. I don't always enjoy listening to his projects, which is fine. But this is brilliant.

I love Brian Eno and I love David Byrne. And I find My Life in the Bush of Ghosts pretty interesting. But I didn't love it. It's ambienty, it's experimental, it's even noisy at times. It's an interesting clash of ideas that somehow works. But I wish I liked it more.

I've gotta call out bias with this seemly endless run of brit shit

Interesting stuff. The sampling and the playfulness come through. Not something I'd listen to every day, but certainly an influential and teaching lesson on creativity. I'm going 3+

A NEW collection of random sounds from Brian Eno! I haven't dropped a 1 in a while. Let me try that.

There's a couple stinkers on here, but overall this album is excellent. Having spent a LOT of time listening to this in the scrublands of South Texas in the mid-1990s, it was nice to take this little trip down memory lane and to enjoy what I'm sure was cutting edge music back in 1981. Adding this to my rotation again, for sure.

I’m a fan of a lot of Eno albums but not this one. The title is the best part and I guess that’s sampled, too. The best parts bring Remain in Light energies, but without vocal melodies, just speech.

Another kind of ambient, mixed with Heads-style world music. Mostly not bad, but still repetitive; old after a while. As with the airports album, hits my personal ambient ceiling.

2/5 - Have to rate this for my experience with it, not the guys' names on the album. It's a bunch of sounds. I heard them. I'll never listen to this again, if I'm being honest.

Cool album, men det bliver 3 i stedet for 4 fordi jeg anerkender at jeg kommer til at sætte noget andet med begge kunstnere på før jeg vil høre denne igen

Kan man overhovedet sige at det er forud for sin tid når det stadig lyder lidt som om det er fra fremtiden?