Nonwrestler Blog

weekly mp3 #8: david byrne & brian eno - regiment

My favourite track from 1981's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was made available for download when the album was reissued in 2006. Lots has been said and written about it, but if you haven't heard of it around the time Eno was producing Talking Heads he and that band's frontman wrote an album together. It's usually described as instrumental, which is somewhat ironic given it's built around the premise of writing instrumentation around pre-existing vocal recordings. I suspect in this case "instrumental" = "David Byrne does not sing on this record". :p

'Regiment' is the album's most blatant funk moment, which may be in spite of having Bill Laswell guesting on bass. Never liked that guy. I'm much more excited by the soaring guitar laid down by one of Eno's more frequent collaborators, Robert Fripp. It's a slightly edgier sound than the Frippertronic vibes of Bowie's '"Heroes"', but that gives you a general idea of the sound... It's pretty great.

The vocalist, says Wikipedia, is Dunya Yusin, a "Lebanese mountain singer". I thought she sang songs, not mountains, but she sounds amazing anyway. Crikey.

If you have the urge, Byrne and Eno have offered up all the tracks from the original multi-track recordings of a couple of songs, which you can download and remix. As they point out, it's in-keeping with the spirit of the original... although I have to say I think it'd probably be more in-keeping with the spirit of the original if you could release the results under your own name and get royalties off them. ;)

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 13:10