My life in the bush of ghosts

That was the title of the album released in 1981 by Brian Eno and David Byrne and, more than 20 years later, still holds some relevance after repeated turns on the cassette player.

Eno has been known as a music wunderkind who has produced the likes of U2 and Talking Heads, the latter group of which Byrne was frontman.

Prior to the heavily Middle Eastern-influenced My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Eno produced the third and fourth Talking Heads albums of the late ’70s to early ’80s, Fear of Music and Remain in Light, that featured the trademark ethereal. atmospheric soundscapes that characterized his work with U2, notably The Unforgettable Fire and Achtung Baby and his own solo effort Music for Airports.

My Life, though, appears to be a one-shot collaboration between Byrne and Eno, as no other known CD by them together exists, at least none that we know of. The album, when it was first released, caught the attention of many for its exhaustive use of Middle Eastern polyrhythms and hypnotic chanting, the elements blending well in an electronic, avant-garde rock mix that today still stops the listener on his or her tracks.

America is Waiting kicks off proceedings in a frenetic note, the crisp guitarwork verging on the minimalist and sounding like Robert Fripp, ex-guitarist of King Crimson. It might have been labeled repetitive at the time, except that the staccato-like riffing virtually inhabited a world of its own, and so would be hazardous to ignore.

Byrne, who has since gone into semi-retirement producing Latin-American chanteuses, is the usual quirky vocalist, coloring his phrasing with a playful, haphazard bravado. If his work with Talking Heads bordered on the grim and obscure if not drug-addled, especially in the early ’80s, Byrne here is more light-handed, though never depreciatingly sober.

One might even say that the Byrne-Eno collaboration opened the byways for world music long before the term was invented, and whetted the music consumers’ appetite for other sources of the aurally untried, untested, and distinctly exotic.

My Life capitalizes on this last ingredient by employing the services of a couple of women chanters who are the melodic hub in the third song of each side (programs then were the old-fashioned side 1 and side 2).

Regiment, which could be a worthy soundtrack for snake charmers, has the vocalist laying down the goods in a wordless trance while a bass slithers around and weaves in and out the basic song structure.

The Carrier has a taut melodic line built around similarly hypnotic warbling, all strung out as if biological agents were lurking underneath.

Another cut, Moonlight in Glory, uses a flavorful chorus reminiscent of a Mediterranean marketplace close to dusk, bringing forth images of a crescent moon through musical instruments one is very likely hearing for the first time.

In a meditative track such as Qu’ran, the bass drum makes its presence felt in a kind of uneasy peace, as if portraying a calm before all hell breaks loose.

Byrne is at his eccentric best in songs like Mea Culpa and The Jezebel Spirit, the latter track in which he mimics an exorcist trying to drive out an evil (Jezebel) spirit from the subject, full of black humor that recalls the Talking Heads at their lurid best.

Eno also proves that he has lost none of the old tricks as he spreads subdued ambient noise enough to fill a room, as in the case of Mountain of Needles.

The rare Eno-Byrne teamup came most likely by way of Fear of Music, and its stark precise rave-ups Life During Wartime and Cities, tough songs for exiles anywhere: I’ve got to find myself a city to live in.

Also that same album’s Paper, with Byrne absurdly repeating the line Hold on to that paper. Or even such an abstract diversion as Electric Guitar.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts can only be the natural course of this musical dialogue and melting pot, skimming the interiors and fragments of disparate possibilities to come up with a jewel of a work, that for a nanosecond there two decades ago really seized the vertiginous moment.