How Music Works (27 page)

Ocora records treated a huge variety of music as if it were the equal of

Western classical or art music. The recordings were given respect, thoughtful presentation, and technical attention that was all too rare for non-Western

music. I had grown up on Folkways’s
Nonesuch
field recordings and the stuff Lomax had done for the Library of Congress, but the production values on the Ocora releases were on a whole other level. Eno and I realized that music from elsewhere didn’t need to sound distant, scratchy, or “primitive.” These recordings were as well produced as any contemporary recording in any genre. You

were made to feel, for example, that this music wasn’t a ghostly remnant from some lost culture, soon to be relegated to the almost forgotten past. It was vital, and it was happening right now. To us there was strange beauty there,
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deep passion, and the compositions often operated by rules and structures

that were radically different from what we were used to. As a result, our limited ideas of what constituted music were exploded forever. These recordings opened up myriad ways that music could be made and organized. There were

many musical universes out there, and we had been blinkered by confining

ourselves to only one.

By the end of 1979, Talking Heads had just completed what for us was a

long world tour for
Fear of Music
. It was the first time we’d received offers to play in many places (the south island of New Zealand comes to mind), and we

accepted almost every one of them. After we got back I took some time off to recuperate. I began spending time with Eno and Jon Hassell, who was beginning to develop and elucidate his “fourth world” concept, and we enthusiastically exchanged cassettes and vinyl we had found. Most of the music we were

excited about came from outside the English-language pop-music axis. At the

time, there was no way to find out about this kind of music except by word

of mouth. There was no Internet yet, and there were almost no books about

the pop music, not to mention folk or classical music, that was flourishing

outside the English- or European-language zones.

I seem to remember one day when Jon played some Milton Nascimento

records, which I didn’t get at the time—it took years until I did. Brian and I shared a fascination with African pop-music, although aside from Fela Kuti

we could find little information about any of the artists whose records we’d stumbled across. Pop music in many other countries, we discovered, came in

wildly different flavors, and it wasn’t yet a suitable subject for ethnomusicologists. The Lebanese-Egyptian singer Farid al-Atrache was a big favorite, as was duduk player Djivan Gasparyan. I had some cassettes of Balkan brass

bands and Ghanaian pop groups. We passed around our records, lugging vinyl

from coast to coast, apartment to apartment.

Inspired by these records, Brian, Jon, and I fantasized about making a

series of recordings based on an imaginary culture. (Unbeknownst to us, at

that moment in Germany, Holger Czukay and his fellow band members in

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150 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

Can, who were students of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, were begin-

ning their own “Ethnic Forgeries” series.) For a brief minute, we had the idea that we might be able to create our own “field recordings”—a musical documentation of an imaginary culture. It would be sort of like a Borges or Cal-

vino story, but this would be a mystery in musical form. It appealed to us, I suspect, partly because it would make us more or less invisible as creators. In our vision, we’d release a record with typically detailed liner notes explaining the way music functioned in that culture and how it was produced there—the

kind of academic notes common on such records. One might think the sort

of dark and wiggly sounds we were known for would not be credible as music

that had been found and recorded in some far-off cultural oasis, evidence of a kind of lost world where some branch of the pop-music tree had become

isolated from the rest of the world. But then you come across a real group

like Konono N°1, a group of Congolese musicians who play amplified mbi-

ras (thumb pianos) that they construct by wrapping wires around a magnetic

loadstone, plopping those inside the instruments, and then feeding the wires into a guitar amp, greatly distorted. I once heard one of the best lead-guitar players ever on a cassette that seemed to come from Sudan. The eddies and

backwaters of pop music do indeed produce some magical, unexpected meet-

ings so our imaginary group that played cardboard boxes for percussion and

Arabic solos on mini-moogs is not inconceivable.

Needless to say, that whole plan was abandoned, but some of the inspira-

tion behind it lingered. We decided to use our usual instruments in new ways, and whatever materials happened to be lying about would be used for sound

production. We’d try to pretend that we didn’t necessarily already know how a guitar or piano was meant to be played, and we would reject some approaches

if they seemed too informed by our own past experience. On the record we

ended up making,
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
, we sometimes used guitar cases or the above-mentioned cardboard boxes for drums, and pots and pans

for percussion. This might have all been a bit silly, but it did serve to shake us out of tried-and-true patterns.D

Eno had already begun work on some recordings that incorporated found

voices, and he brought these to the table. One of these led to the song “Mea Culpa,” which had a foundation consisting of layers of vocal loops of radio

call-in-show voices hemming and hawing. We both soon realized that the

“found vocal” idea might serve as the thread and theme that would pull the

new record together.

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I suspect that this idea appealed to us partly because it eliminated any conflict or likelihood of competition between the two of us as singers: neither of us would sing on the record. (This fact proved to be an issue for some folks down the line—how could it be “our” record if we weren’t singing on it?) Rely-ing exclusively on found vocals also solved a content problem: the lyrics would clearly not be derived from autobiographical or confessional material. Often, what the vocalists were actually saying didn’t matter to us at all. It was the

sound
of their vocals—the passion, rhythm, and phrasing—that conveyed the emotional content. This approach retained some of the “authorless” aspect that had appealed to us when we came up with the fake field-recording concept,

but it also turned out to be contentious to those who view songs primarily as vehicles for texts.

Using found elements in creative works certainly wasn’t a new idea. Duch-

amp had nominated stuff from the hardware store as fine art, Kurt Schwitters had made collages out of labels and packages, and Warhol had made “paintings” out of photos clipped from the tabloid press. In the plastic arts, this idea was, if not commonplace, at least acceptable. Bern Porter, James Joyce, JG

Ballard, and the collage books of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore lifted

passages from type and advertising copy and repurposed them. John Cage

and others had made sonic collages out of multiple records playing simulta-

neously or multiple radios tuned to different stations, but in pop music the idea was limited to novelty records (
The Flying Saucer
and
Mr. Jaws
) or self-conscious avant-garde experiments like the Beatles’s “Revolution 9.”

While we were in LA, Eno and I hung out a bit with Toni Basil, whom we both

admired. Her appearances on
Soul Train
with the dance group the Lockers were unforgettable, and the group she was working with and organizing at that time, the Electric Boogaloos,E were creating some of the most amazing and innovative dance we’d ever seen. Their moves put the

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arty dance world to shame. They were funky

and robotic at the same time, a combination

that somehow seemed apt. Either the machines

had gotten funky, or the funk had been infected

by a robot virus; whatever it was, it felt right.

Eno described the way the Boogaloos moved as

“somadelic”—something that made your body

go all wobbly the way LSD did your head.

152 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

Toni had an offer to do a TV special featuring these dancers, and for a

short while we imagined that
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
would end up as the score or soundtrack. Our ever-morphing guiding principal had changed

from an audio document of an imaginary culture to beats and sounds for

funky urban dancers for a Hollywood TV show! That project fell through,

but like the imaginary-civilization idea, it became another subtext for our

recordings, because it allowed us to imagine that we were making a dance

record. Of course, the influence of music on dancers is a recurring theme in this book, and we hoped our project could be a new kind of psychedelic dance music that might, at a stretch, get played in dance clubs, which would have

been hugely validating for us. Years later, I was predictably excited when I heard DJ Larry Levan play something off our record at the Paradise Garage, a huge dance club in New York.

This was the very early eighties, and some of the most innovative mix-

ing and arranging in pop music was happening in the dance-music world.

The rock scene was becoming increasingly conservative and entrenched,

despite all the shouting about freedom, individuality, and self-expression.

The influence of dub and what were then called “extended mixes” of songs

in the dance-club world were just gaining momentum. The fact that DJs and

remixers were using other people’s tracks as raw material resonated with our use of found vocals and the way we arranged songs by switching tracks on and off. We were turning the mixing board into a giant instrument. This arranging and composing technique soon became extremely common in hip-hop. No

credit to us—it was simply in the air at that time.

Neither Eno nor I saw ourselves as virtuoso musicians, but we aimed to

turn our limitations into advantages. We used those cardboard boxes as kick

drums, biscuit tins as snare drums, and bass guitars as rhythm instruments.

This had the advantage of making everything sound a little “off.” A kick drum made out of a guitar case did the job. It made a nice thud in the low range, but it also sounded slightly unfamiliar and fresh. We’d generally play each part that would eventually constitute the bed of the piece over and over, as if we were a human loop. Digital loops and sampling didn’t exist yet, but by playing the same part over and over, one could create a rhythmic and hypnotic

textural bed that could be manipulated and layered over later. There were

wonderful real players involved, too—drummers and bass players were the

foundation on some tracks, but by and large it was a DIY affair.

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Without samplers, we had to place the found vocals into our music by

trial and error. We’d have two tape machines playing simultaneously, one

containing our music track and the other the vocal, and if the gods willed,

which they often did, there would be serendipity. The resulting “vocal” over our track would feel like the parts had always belonged together, and we’d

have a “take.” The tape recorders were all “played” manually, and getting the voices to sync with the music tracks in a way that seemed like what a singer would do was very seat-of-the-pants—there was none of the incremental

tweaking and time-correcting of tracks that’s possible with modern samplers

and recording software, so throwing the vocals against the music entailed a