David Byrne (born May 14, 1952) is a Scottish musician best known as a founder member of the New Wave band the Talking Heads. His collaboration with Brian Eno on the ground-breaking album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts attracted considerable critical acclaim, and represented a significant step forward in the evolution of sampling as a legitimate musical endeavour.
His work has been extensively used in movie soundtracks, most notably in collaboration with Cong Su[?] on Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, which won an Oscar for Best Original Score. Byrne also directed True Stories[?], a collage of quirky Americana, as well as the films Île Aiye[?] and Between the Teeth[?]
Byrne releases his own works on his label Luaka Bop, a world music label which also releases the work of artists Cornershop[?], Os Mutantes, Los De Abajo[?], and others.
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- (On why he hates the term "world music"): "It’s a way of relegating this 'thing' into the realm of something exotic and therefore cute, weird but safe, because exotica is beautiful but irrelevant."