…hear our flash-eyed mother who is snoring like strong wind…

Amos Tutuola's novel, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, was published in London in 1952. We start with the book, because the title is central to an appreciation of this record. Some titles are afterthoughts, the identification of a product, or they attempt to capture the mood of a collection of songs, but this is a title that stimulates anticipation and controversy, even before the music begins. Questions arise quickly enough; why are these two urban, urbane, successful, and apparently secular white men, Brian Eno and David Byrne, push-pushing in the bush, haunted by ghosts?

Tutuola's book is strange, not least in the Nigerian English of his text. He writes, for example, about the "television-handed ghostess", an image that anticipates the musical Afro-futurism exemplified in the 1960s and '70s by Sun Ra, Funkadelic, Fela-Anikulapo Kuti, Sly Stone, Lee Perry, and Miles Davis. Dylan Thomas described his writing as "thronged, grisly and bewitching". The book is a visceral accumulation of disgust, fear, torment and humiliation, but its narrative, the tribulations of a young boy who finds himself in a parallel world of weird, frightening ghosts, contains echoes of such familiar stories as Alice In Wonderland, or The Wizard of Oz.

…my voice was entirely stiffened or dead…

In 1979, unsure of his future direction, Brian Eno took a sabbatical in Thailand. In his luggage he carried a number of tapes. Nigeria's Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was among them, along with a BBC recording of English dialects. Interviewed at the beginning of 1980 by Richard Williams in the Melody Maker, Brian talked about his love of North African singing, and about the discoveries he had made whilst listening to the dialect record, on which redundant information in speech patterns was used to add variety and colour to conversation. "I started thinking about that," he told Williams. "Mentally, I'd already given up the idea of writing songs . . . one of the reasons being that, after hearing those Arabs, I'm less interested in the sound of my own voice. So I started thinking that the dialects are already music, and you could point to that fact by putting them in a musical context." Eno also played Williams a track from the as-yet unreleased My Life In the Bush of Ghosts. "You heard the thing with the phone-in conversation," he said, "and I've been working mostly in that direction, mostly taking radio voices because they're easy to get hold of, and putting them to music . . . It satisfies a lot of interesting ideas for me. One is making the ordinary interesting, which I've always been interested in doing. The other is finding music where music wasn't supposed to have been. And another is finding a pre-delivered message, which you put in a context so that the meaning is changed, or the context amplifies certain aspects of the meaning."

…dancing the ghosts' dance…

In the early 1970s, radical innovation in black music was rewarded largely with indifference or hostility. As musicologist Jason King has said, "the larger chronological history of African and African-diasporic minimalism hasn't been written yet." From the rock (and jazz) perspective, Miles Davis records like On The Corner were barely understood, and the intense trance/funk of James Brown's "Super Bad", Sly Stone's "Africa Talks To You" and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's "Gentleman" was dismissed as repetitive, sybaritic, and reactionary. Yet there were signs that dub aesthetics and funk beats were subverting whitebread fantasies of musical sophistication. Punk's embrace of roots reggae and dub, and the punk-funk of James Chance, heard on the Eno produced No New York album of 1978, were two indications of growing inclusiveness.

…noises as if one hundred winches are working together…

In 1975, released on Eno's Obscure label, Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, by Gavin Bryars, sampled and looped singing by an old man, homeless yet radiant with faith, orchestrated to the point where sentiment overwhelms cynicism; also in 1975, released on Obscure, American Standard, by John Adams, including extra material taped from an evangelical radio talk show.

In 1948, at the Paris radio station RTF, Pierre Schaeffer invented musique concrète, using machines that could record environmental sounds onto disc, then play them back. "A particular technique devised by Schaeffer was the sillon ferme or closed groove," wrote Hugh Davies in A History of Sampling (published in Experimental Musical Instruments, 1989), "in which - similar to the later tape loop - a short sound was recorded in a groove that formed a complete circle rather than spiralling inwards. Schaeffer's diary for 1948 documents the various stages . . . they included the idea of an organ based on gramophone turntables (April 1948), even imagining himself, Hollywood style, surrounded by 'twelve dozen' turntables."

"Composer, who no longer arranges sound in a piece, simply facilitates an enterprise. Using a telephone, he locates materials, services, raises money to pay for them." (John Cage: Art and Technology, 1969).

In 1951, John Cage composed Imaginary Landscape No. 4, a piece for 12 radios, each with 2 players who controlled parameters. The New York premiere was quiet, because of the late hour and the fact that most radio stations had ceased broadcasting. "Picking up snatches of music and speech," said one of the performers, Harold Norse, "with lengthy silences in between, it had a disturbing effect."

This was an idea he had tried before: in his 1960s art student days, looping the speech of an English actress, then "R.A.F.", his collaboration with Snatch, released as the b-side to "King's Lead Hat" in 1978, experimenting with German voices laid over and under choppy reggae/funk beats; in the same period he mixed Kurt Schwitters' 1920s sound poem - "Ur Sonata", or sonata for primitive sounds - into "Kurt's Rejoinder".

1960: For Amazing Grace, Richard Maxfield samples and cuts-up the voice of revivalist preacher James G. Brodie.

1961: For Collage #1 ("Blue Suede"), James Tenney samples the voice of Elvis Presley singing "Blue Suede Shoes", edits the tape, then composes the fragments with an IBM punch card system.

1965: For It's Gonna Rain, Steve Reich samples the voice of a black Pentecostal preacher in San Francisco; 1966: For Come Out, Steve Reich samples the voice of Daniel Hamm, a young man arrested and beaten by police during the Harlem riots of 1964. Each phrase - "It's gonna rain", and "Come out to show them" - is looped and played simultaneously on two Wollensack tape recorders. "I thought the economy of them was so stunning," Brian Eno has said. "The complexity of the piece appears from nowhere."

1966: For Telemusik, karlheinz Stockhousen samples indigenous music from Africa, the Amazon, Humgary, Cina, Spain, Vietnam, Bali, and Japan. "I wanted to come closer to an old, an ever-recurring dream," he said, "to go a step forward towards writing, not 'my' music, but a music of the whole world, of all lands and races."

…through the noises of these heads…

Bored with New Wave, hungry ears were turning to Nigeria, and the surreal, techno-retro music of Fela, King Sunny Ade, Sir Shina Adewale. Convergences all around: David Byrne contributing post-punk disco guitar to late 1970s tracks by Arthur Russell; Talking Heads' Fear of Music album, produced by Brian Eno, and featuring a new African influence on "I Zimbra".

In 1980, Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics, was released as a collaboration between trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell, and Brian Eno. Fourth World was Hassell's magic realist concept of a 'coffee coloured' classical music of the future.

…staggering here and there in the bush…

In 1976, Music In the World Of Islam is released, a 6-LP box set of recordings by Jean Jenkins and Poul Rovsing Olsen. Jean Jenkins, Appalachian banjo player, ethnomusicologist, and curator at the Horniman Museum, London, wrote this in her sleeve note: "The human voice is the foundation of all music within the Islamic world. Indeed, in some areas it is the only type of music which exists." Her recording of "Abu Zeluf", sung by Dunya Yunis, a girl from a northern mountain village in Lebanon, is sampled for two tracks on My Life In the Bush of Ghosts.

…as if ten persons are beating drums to my cry…

Drummer Prairie prince, from The Tubes, remembers his part in the sessions at Eldorado Studios on Hollywood and Vine, alongside percussionist Mingo Lewis, who had played on Santana's Caravanserai. A drum kit in the studio, painted battleship grey, belonging to The Screamers. "We're just going to use it as a banging board," says Brian. A Linn Drum machine was brought in. "First time I ever saw one." Playing along with loop tracks, plastic garbage cans, taped them all together. "My credit was cans and bass drum, but I played a lot of different things. All three of us played piano. He had thrown some coins into the piano and it made this clanky sound. It was one of the most wonderful recordings I've ever done."

Years later, the influences ripple outwards: The Bomb Squad productions for Public Enemy, Kruder and Dorfmeister, Goldie, 808 State. Few genres of music are left untouched by this experiment.

…if a bush is too quiet there would be fear without seeing a fearful creature…

— David Toop