Post by thecereal on Nov 7, 2018 23:24:06 GMT
The 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by ambient musician Brian Eno and David Byrne of Talking Heads-fame is a landmark of the music industry for being one of the first studio albums with extensive use of sampling. The following reissues of the album suffered a removal of one track, "Qu'ran", at the request of the Islamic Council of Great Britain. “Qu’ran” can be heard online.
In 2006, Virgin Records released a 25th anniversary edition of the album with several new tracks never before heard, although “Qu’ran” is still removed. With the release of the anniversary edition, Eno and Byrne announced the launch of the website bush-of-ghosts.com, a website where the duo offered the original samples from two of the album’s tracks, “Help Me Somebody!” and “A Secret Life”, free to download and released under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 license, which meant free to share and remix the samples for non-commercial purposes.
The website’s domain, however, is no longer owned by EMI, the parent company of Virgin Records, with the URL address on the Creative Commons website leading to a webpage unrelated to the album (The Virgin Media article in this new domain is pure coincidence, since Virgin Records and Virgin Media are owned by different media conglomerates, thus being unrelated to one another).
Pasting the URL onto the Wayback Machine you’ll get the website back when EMI owned the domain, with background music borrowing samples from the album’s tracks, although from what I can gather, none of them are from the downloadable tracks. There are two links: “Enter Album” and “Enter Remix”, with the latter leading to the current bush-of-ghosts.com website, while “Enter Album” leads to a gateway timeout.
An artist named Harij uploaded onto Soundcloud a remix made with samples from “A Secret Life”.
In the music’s description the author shares the link to the remix page.
Pasting this URL onto Wayback Machine the website either gives me errors or it says that access is forbidden. Simply clicking on the URL redirects to the current Bush of Ghosts website as well.
There’s also one online album dedicated to remixing “Help Me Somebody” called “Our Lives In the Bush of Disquiet” by disquiet.com.
I've also found a video of apparently one of the sample tracks from "Help Me Somebody". One thing that I'm not sure about this video is whether or not this is the actual sample or was it edited, since it doesn't match the original song's lenght.
Aside from that, there's a list of samples used in each album's tracks on Whosampled.com.
This has been my research, so far.
It kind of boggles my mind how these free tracks have never been saved on Archive.org, nor they're available on the 25th anniversary release alongside the "Mea Culpa" music video. I've sent a DM to Harji asking if he still owns the samples. I'm also going to send an email to Disquiet.com.
