Today’s Vinyl: Brian Eno-David Byrne

This platter provided many a freaked-out evening in a certain college dorm room near the UT campus. Combining obscure religious chants and sermons with a charging, percussion-heavy, loop-oriented sound, you could reasonably point to this record as a progenitor of electronica, IDM and other sample-based genres, as well as nearly everything Al Jourgensen ever recorded. I recall Peter Gabriel bashing this record for only superficially incorporating Eastern and African influences, and in some cases the vocal samples do feel like exotic window dressing on a straightforward Western rhythm. But this record is really more about texture than anything else, and on that front it delivers, with contributions from spectacular studio players like Bill Laswell and David van Tieghem.

This vinyl version (as well as the original CD) showcase one stark difference from the recent 25th anniversary re-issue: The first track on side 2, Qu’ran, which contains a sample of Algerian Muslims chanting from the Qur’an, was removed completely from the re-issue. The track had been condemned for many years by some Muslims as blasphemous, and Byrne explains the exclusion (somewhat vaguely) in a 2006 Pitchfork interview here. As part of the anniversary reissue, Byrne and Eno released two of the tracks online as full multitracks for anyone to remix, as well as a number of unreleased recordings. It’s on Lala here, or you can stream samples of all the songs at the website for the reissue.