My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

Hank Shocklee — the production architect behind Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad — cited this record as a direct influence on the sampling methodology the Bomb Squad developed. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was released in 1981, built almost entirely from found vocal sources: radio evangelists, exorcism recordings, Arabic singers, talk-show callers, layered over Afrobeat-derived rhythms. It pre-dates virtually all of hip-hop’s sampling vocabulary. The argument the record makes — that fragments of someone else’s recorded voice can be the primary melodic material of your own music — is the argument that Dilla, DJ Shadow, and The Avalanches each spent a career extending.

The record sat on the shelf for a year before release because of sample clearances. This was 1980, and the infrastructure for licensing found recordings did not yet exist. The most contested track sampled Algerian Muslims chanting from the Qur’an; the Islamic Council objected, and Eno and Byrne replaced it before the original pressing reached shops. The current pressing contains the substitute. I am curious what it sounded like — a record about other people’s voices, itself caught in the question of who owns a voice. The irony compounds the further you look at it.

The record that taught the music industry it had a sample-clearance problem was itself built from samples that hadn’t yet been cleared, released into a legal environment that hadn’t yet recognised they needed to be.