My Life in the Bush of Ghosts has been called a seminal album for many genres, but it was for me personally too. I discovered it while browsing the library’s LP collection for strange music, probably in 1985 or 1986. Having been exposed to the Talking Heads (which I grew to love despite hearing Take Me To The River first) and Brian Eno in prior year, I borrowed the record and immediately decided I liked it enough to tape it (a big investment at the time). It is one of the few listenings from that time period that I still indulge. Most of the tracks hold up very well.
This success led me shortly after to pick up Talking Heads ’77 by Peach of Immortality at a used record store. It was unclear whether it had anything to do with the Talking Heads (it doesn’t) but the store owner said it was very strange. It was the first noise album in my possession and is probably the only recording I own manufactured copies of in two formats (LP and CD). I still love it.
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was recently reissued on its 25th anniversary. This would be unremarkable but for the release of sources for two of the album tracks today under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, which is great and very satisfying.
Of course I wish they had used a more liberal license and that the remix site wasn’t Flash-based or at least did not require Flash 8, which renders it inaccessible to Linux clients. Small complaints and a reminder to throw some money at Gnash, which seems to have made its first alpha release a few days ago.
Update: bush-of-ghosts.com claims to require Flash 8, bush-of-ghosts.com/remix does not and does work on Linux. Can’t say I’m sorry to miss whatever “interface” is on the home page.
Gnash sucks. Instead of improving the public domain GameSWF library, which it is based on, the FSF decided to fork it under their ridiculously restrictive license and promote their culture of control. Now if you go to the Gnash website, you get a message telling you “Gnash is 100% Free Software” and linking to the GPL. No, GameSWF was free software. The GPL is just a damn shame, that’s what it is.
The FSF’s promoting their legal nonsense as “free” is disgusting. It boils my blood, and I would never give them a cent.
Anonymous, I prefer public domain as well, but GameSWF development seems dead and I consider GPL vastly better than proprietary.
[…] seen I haven’t been thrilled with (though I’ll always be a fan because her music is the second that grabbed me as not only enjoyable but somehow special) and because she’s a very engaging […]
It’s 2010 and gnash STILL sucks. How can one screw up development of an alternative to something that has its full specs open and available to developers to make Flash alternatives?
No seriously, they can use the SPECS and they still have managed to screw it up.
That said, I much prefer the GPL to proprietary licenses, and MUCH much more prefer it to licenses that are practically designed to give your code away to others without considerations like KEEPING it open like the BSD license.
Yaro,
I thought that Gnash more or less sucked, but then I realized the devs seem to be more excited about getting running on a bunch of devices moreso than web browser embed we expect — watch the lead dev’s presentation at LibrePlanet 2009. Which is cool on its own and they can do whatever they want. Not sure how much this has to do with Gnash’s seeming slow progress, just a theory. Could be that there’s just a huge amount to implement and Flash is a moving target. This also seemed to be the case with free Java replacements prior to Sun releasing OpenJDK, and somewhat the case with Mono relative to .NET, though I’ve followed that even less closely.
You really prefer proprietary to permissive (BSD)? Surely not, but that’s what your wording implies.