David Byrne and Brian Eno’s album My Life In the Bush of Ghosts is so much fun that at first you don’t notice how some of the found sounds they used are actually kind of disturbing. In that regard the audible whipping in The Jezebel Spirit takes the cake, but this one is pretty scary too. I’m not sure if the insistent percussion makes the preacher’s voice creepier or if he’d be more scary alone, but it’s definitely eerie. And genius to take something no one in their right mind would want to listen to, and make it worth listening to. Eno and Byrne used snippets of obscure records, old radio broadcasts and whatever else they liked the sound of, mixed with a trailblazing combination of new instrumentation and electronic sound effects. It was absolutely unique in its time and stands as one of the cornerstones of basically the entire genre of electronic music. Many, many careers have been built on duplicating its principles of sound collage, but no one has ever done it better.
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