As of this writing, some 31,586 songs have reportedly been downloaded from the public-domain website dedicated to the re-release of David Byrne and Brian Eno‘s 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Two Ghosts songs, their 20 to 24 individual tracks laid bare, are available for free download, as are dozens of remixed versions by semi-anonymous contributors.
And as of this writing, the site’s community’s favorite track (as well as the top fave by the site’s organizers) is CGrossmeier‘s fairly generic dance entry, “There’s No Escape,” laced with a bit of turntablism. The title is actually longer than that. In the dropdown window it appears to be “There’s No Escape I,” but when you select it to play, it appears in a different window, where the title appears to be “There’s No Escape From…” something or other. Such is the website’s interface: for all its blank backdrop and simple pulldowns, it isn’t all that functional at the moment. At least in the Mozilla browser, the Listen page seems to get hung up a lot. You can select various filters (abstract, rough, slow), but nothing necessarily results. Likewise, a search for a specific name of an artist may yield a null return, even if the name appears in the Top 20.
Still, there is good stuff to be heard. Particularly recommended: “My Hero Is Echo” (MP3), credited to Asbestos, scrapes some distant chant over flutters of threadbare percussion and an undulating bass element so slow you can almost see the sine waves, before the whole thing ascends into the ether.