David Byrne er ugens konspiration

David Byrne er overalt i mit liv disse dage; han optræder hvidhåret i den åndddsvagt fine og fint åndssvage  film This Must Be The Place og synger titelsangen, der jo er en gammel Takling Heads-klassiker, der igen og igen popper op i filmen i forskellige udgaver, lidt ligesom titelsangen i Robert Altmans The Long Goodbye (min yndlingsfilm som bekendt):

og i dag faldt jeg over bog-formateringen af hans egen fornøjelige film True Stories fra 1986, der foruden manus og stills indeholder kuriøse avisklip (Sande Historier) og pokerfjæsede mini-essays apropos filmens motiver, og bl.a. dette:

Conspiracies

It's not what you know, it's who you know. Everybody believes in some conspiracy or other.  The ones you believe in seem perfectly plausible. The ones you don't believe in seem like they were thought up by a bunch of nuts and kooks. Can one person be a conspiracy? was supermarket barcoding prophesied in the Bible?
  Is it true that a very large percentage of government leaders went to a very small number of prep schools in the East. Sure, they hire each other. Sure, they appoint each other to official posts. So it's true. The world is run by the student council in high school. But those guys didn't go to your high school or mine. It's the high school acsorss town that runs verything. Shakespeare was heavily into conspiracy. Everybody would like to conspire against everybody else ... if we could get away with it, if we could get the chance.



- men jeg stadig lystlæser mig gennem How Music Works; jeg er kommet til side 191 i kapitlet "in the Recording Studio", det handler om Talking Heads i studiet med Brian Eno producing:

Eno was the one who encourarged us to mess with the sounds after they were recorded. He'd done a little of that on our previous record, but now the gloves were off. The furthest we went was on the song "drugs". We had initially recorded a fairly straightforward backing track that seemed a bit conventional, so w began to mute some of the instruments, sometimes just silencing specific notes. This made some parts open up; there were more gaps, more air. I had a recording of koalas that I'd made while we were on tour in Australia (they mainly grunt and snort, in contrast to their cutesey appearance), and that got addded in here and there. The grunts worked like indertiminate animal answers and echoes to my singing. More sounds went on - an arc-like melody created using an echo machine, and then a guitar solo at the end that was made by selecting fragments from a number of improvised solos. Finally, I sang the song after jogging in the studio, because for some reason I wanted to be out of breath. Of course, I was singing the same words and melody as I had been on the earlier, straighter version of the song, but now to a vastly alterede musical track - a fact that also affected how I sang. The song, as it was released, was an arrangement of sounds that one would never have come up with in rehersal or sitting writing with a guitar. It could only have been created in the studio. As Eno observed at the time, the recording studio was now a compositional tool.