My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

Two years before hip-hop made sampling common sense, Eno and Byrne built an entire album from stolen voices — radio preachers, an exorcist, a Lebanese mountain singer — bolted onto grooves that funk with no living singer in the room.

The exorcism at the center of "The Jezebel Spirit" is the clearest test of the method: a real broadcast healer commanding a demon out of a woman, set over a taut dance pulse, and the discomfort of hearing it looped never quite resolves into either satire or reverence. That refusal to settle is the record's ethic — the found voice keeps its full human charge instead of becoming decoration, so "America Is Waiting" turns a broadcaster's paranoid babble into something both funny and menacing. Every producer who later chopped a vocal from tape owes something to what happens here first. What survives is stranger than any tribute admits: a machine-tight groove haunted by people who never knew they were singing on it.