WaterCoolerGossip

Brian Eno and David Byrne are rereleasing a remastered version of My Life in the Bush of Ghost, a heavily influential album from 1981 that used a lot of atmospheric and found sounds. Here is an excerpt from an essay David Byrne wrote about the album:

At that time there were no samplers, so the found vocals were often flown in (this consisted of two tape machines playing simultaneously, one containing the track and the other the vocal) and, if the Gods willed, there would be a serendipity and the vocal and the track would at least seem to feel like they belonged together and it would be a “take”. . . . Sometimes we’d record radio sermons after-hours on our cassette players that were built in to our late 70’s boom boxes. The quality was sometimes dubious (on “Come With Us” we had to make the hiss part of the dark ambience)…but overall we came to realize that hi fidelity was vastly overrated- and sometimes the harsh megaphone like quality of these vocals was actually more immediate sounding. Like transmissions from a desperate planet. Other times the vocals often came from those records we’d been listing to over the previous year.

I think some people found all this disturbing. In the West anyway the causal link between the author and performer is strong. For instance, it is assumed that I write lyrics (and the accompanying music) for songs because I have something I need to “express”. And that as a performer it is assumed that everything one utters is naturally autobiographical. I find that more often, on the contrary, it is the music and the lyric that triggers the emotion within me rather than the other way around. By making music we are pushing our own buttons, in effect, and the surprising thing is that vocals that we didn’t write or even sing can make us feel a gamut of emotions just as much as ones that we wrote. In a way making music is constructing machines that, when successful, dredge up emotions- in us and in the listener. For some, this fact is, it seems, repulsive, a trick, a betrayal and deception. Many prefer to see music as an “expression” of emotion rather than a generator of it.

Also, I have been obsessed with the new Hot Chip album for the past couple days. "Colours" has been on repeat; it's TweeTronic. The album has bit more range than that descriptor but it's all laid back. I did not really like their first album but there are lots of good tracks on The Warning. Look for this scorcher soon.

Colours (MP3)
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