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FEATURE FEATURE out, replayed bits, added other sounds. It became a mixture of a live band and sound collage, which was what ended up happening with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Remain in Light.” But there was a problem with the “studio as compositional tool” concept, at least when applied to a rock band: it empowered the composer (the producer/arranger) at the expense of the musicians. Eno and Byrne’s expanded authorial role on “Drugs” effectively relegated the other members of Talking Heads to session-musician status, something that caused enormous friction on the next album, Remain in Light. The burgeoning friendship between Eno and Byrne didn’t just unsettle the balance of creative power within the band, it frayed emotional ties. Bassist Tina Weymouth acidly claimed the pair had merged into a symbiotic unit, even wearing similar clothes like some post-punk Gilbert and George. Byrne himself talks about the relationship as “mutually beneficial and codependent in a way. We had musical things to gain from one another—each one could offer something slightly different to the other.” Eno expounded on his new theories in July 1979 when he gave a lecture entitled “The Studio As Compositional Tool” at the New Music New York festival. Hosted by The Kitchen, this ten-day event was a triumphant end-of-decade celebration of a varied yet cohesive movement of downtown Manhattan composers defining themselves against the uptown classical music establishment (where European-style dissonance still held sway). Reporting on New Music New York, Village Voice’s Tom Johnson identified two distinct waves of downtown music: the founding minimalist elders (Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Robert Ashley) and a new generation forging connections between composition and popular music (like Laurie Anderson, who used elements of performance art, video, and electronics; or Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, who deployed amplified electric guitars). Eno fit perfectly smack in the middle of all this. He was profoundly influenced by Reich’s repetition and use of tape-delay loops, but also embraced dance rhythms, electric noise, and the sound-sculpting possibilities of the recording studio, just like emerging downtown composers Arthur Russell, Peter Gordon, and David Van Tieghem. Alongside the polyrhythmic groove music he made with Talking Heads and David Byrne, the other major strand of Eno’s musical output during the New York years consisted of idyllic-yet-eerie ambient soundscapes. The Plateaux of Mirror, his collaboration with Harold Budd, began with the LA-based pianist sending his compositions to Eno in New York, but the actual recording was done in late 1979 in a studio in Daniel Lanois’ studio in Hamilton, Ontario. Around that time Eno also produced Day of Radiance by Laraaji, a zither player he discovered in Washington Square Park. A spiritual seeker exploring yoga, t’ai chi, and Eastern philosophy (he currently holds workshops in laughter therapy), Laraaji’s quest for “cosmic music” had taken a decisive turn in the mid-’70s when he traded his guitar for an autoharp, which he then adapted and electrified. He came to believe that metallic chimes—bells, gongs, cymbals, gamelan ensembles, and his beloved zither and hammered dulcimer—put the listener “in touch with the higher presences.” “In Tibet they 14 “WE WOULD HOLE UP AND MAKE FAKE ETHNOGRAPHIC RECORDS, WITH THE SLEEVE NOTES AND EVERYTHING. WE'D INVENT A WHOLE CULTURE TO GO WITH IT.” - <strong>BRIAN</strong> <strong>ENO</strong> are used to break up concentration, get you outside linear time, into a trance state,” he explains. Laraaji had been playing in the same spot in Washington Square Park for a few years, sitting always in the lotus position with his eyes shut, when one day he opened them to see that someone had left a message in his busker’s hat. “It was from Brian Eno and it said ‘Would you like to meet to consider a recording project?’” he recalls. In their post-Eno careers Budd and Laraaji would both go on to make music so tranquil and gently rhapsodic it verged on New Age. But Plateaux and Radiance—Ambient 2 and Ambient 3 in the series of releases launched by Eno’s Music for Airports—have a certain uncanny edge. In both cases Eno’s role largely consisted of creating the ambience in which the compositions were situated, using reverb, harmonizer, and other studio techniques to smudge the edges of the sound into oneiric soft-focus. Both projects prefigure the preoccupations that would lead to Eno’s other supreme masterpiece of the New York era: 1982’s On Land. Plateaux’s track titles—“Above Chiangmai,” “Among Fields of Crystal,” “Wind in Lonely Fences”—speak of Eno’s mounting interest in creating the musical equivalent of landscape painting, while “Meditation #2,” the final track on Radiance, is based on Laraaji’s mental image of New York’s Central Park Reservoir on a moody winter day. Another inspirational collaborator Eno hooked up with in 1979 was Jon Hassell, whose post-Miles, raga-influenced music Eno had encountered when the trumpeter/composer performed at the Kitchen that summer. Hassell’s knowledge of exotic ethnic sounds and his concept of “fourth world music” (hi-tech modernity meets pre-industrial tribalism) would be massively influential on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Indeed, the album was conceived as a three-way collaboration. Byrne recalls “all hanging out together, talking and exchanging records.” At his Tribeca loft, Hassell played Eno and Byrne field recordings on ethnomusicological labels like Ocora. The idea emerged that “we would hole up and make fake ethnographic records, with the sleeve notes and everything,” says Byrne. “We’d invent a whole culture to go with it.” In August 1979, Hassell and Laraaji were both present at the first sessions for My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Also contributing to the dense mix of sound was Van Tieghem—whom Eno had seen doing a gizmo-based piece called “A Man and His Toys” at New Music New York—and two bassists: Tim Wright from DNA and Bill Laswell, then in playing Zu Band (later to mutate into Material). “What was so weird was that at first I thought I’d wasted my money,” Eno would wryly comment of these early sessions. “I just couldn’t understand it at all.” But gradually, sculpting down “this barrage of instruments playing all the time,” an audio concept emerged of a “jungle music” sound, embedded in a spacious widescreen production he’d never achieved before. Profiling Eno for Musician toward the end of 1979, Lester Bangs got advance glimpses of the work-in-progress: “It sounds like nothing we’ve ever heard from Brian Eno before; like nothing ever heard before, period. The influence of the move to New York is unmistakable: a polyglot freneticism, a sense of real itching rage and desperation... It gives intimations of a new kind of international multi-idiomatic music that would cross all commercial lines, uniting different cultures, the past and the future, European experimentalism and gutbucket funk.” Working in Los Angeles and San Francisco for a while before returning to New York, Byrne and Eno added an extra element to the mix: alongside field recordings (Muslim devotional singing, the gospel chants of Sea Islanders off the coast of Georgia), they found themselves increasingly obsessed with the ranting and raving of talk-radio hosts and evangelists. This proto-sampling approach would be hugely influential on later sound-bitebased genres like hip-hop and jungle. What’s less well known is that Bush of Ghosts was itself influenced by very early hiphop—more so breakdancing than early rap records. Ironically, this connection with hip-hop would be forged not in New York but when the duo were out in LA. “Brian and I met Toni Basil, a choreographer who later had a hit single with ‘Mickey,’” recalls Byrne. “She was working with this street dance group the Electric Boogaloos and was going to do a whole show based on popping and locking. Brian and I thought it was the most amazing dancing we’d ever seen. In a way, some of the music we were making we thought was slotted for her to use in a television program with these dancers. But it never happened.” Eno thought that the future of video, a form with which he had just started to experiment, would involve either ambient imagery (close to stationary) or dance (extreme kineticism). Both would be endlessly rewatchable, because ambient images would become like décor while the fluid intricacy of experimental dance would be so sinuously complex you could never get bored with it. Byrne and Eno’s work on Bush of Ghosts was interrupted when they joined the rest of Talking Heads during the sweltering hot New York summer of 1980 to start work on the group’s fourth album. Initially titled Melody Attack, the album quickly became a pop version of the ideas being explored on Bush of Ghosts—ideas like the Fela-meets-Terry-Riley’s-In-C approach of “having lots of instruments all playing very simple parts that mesh together to create a complex track,” as Eno explained to one interviewer. “For example, there were five or six basses on ‘Born Under Punches’ each doing simple bits.” Unfortunately this methodology reduced the other Heads— Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, and keyboard player Jerry Harrison—to raw content generators, producing material to be assembled into constructions by Eno and Byrne. There was also a kind of deconstruction of the band itself, with bass parts being provided by people other than Weymouth. Roles became fluid and uncertain. Even Byrne himself had to change his approach: rather than go into the studio with written songs, he improvised clipped, chanted melodies to suit the roiling rhythmic density of the new direction. His vocals became increasingly percussive, verging on rapping in sections of “Born Under Punches” and “Crosseyed and Painless.” On the shimmering dreamscape “Seen and Not Seen,” Byrne abandoned singing altogether, reciting the story of a man who learned to change his facial appearance by willpower. Remain in Light was an artistic triumph, but it was also a disaster: pushing for the new direction and assuming a vastly Brian Eno and David Byrne in NYC, 1981. Photo by Ebet Roberts/ Redferns 15
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