Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to track But from a musical perspective, it can lead to something very creative and imaginative.”īelow is a list of some of the best exotica on bandcamp, from the genre’s initial rise, to its heydey, to the present.
There’s some ignorance and naivete to that vision. It’s supposed to be very primitive, jungle and mystery all around. The landscapes of exotica “were mainly fantasies,” he says, but “this abstraction is highly compatible with music.” He adds that “as a South American, it’s funny how this land was-and sometimes still is-perceived. So it was really exciting to discover our own little sound in the endless sea of bands.”Įcuadorian musician Nicola Cruz says that for him, exotica created a kind of doubled perspective on his own country, which opened up musical possibilities. “One of my favorite memories was driving around Bodega Bay on acid, listening to Les Baxter, Sergio Mendes, Esquivel, Walter Wanderley, and saying to each other, ‘Yeah, this is the kind of music we should make!’ At first we didn’t know of any other bands still making exotica, especially in the L.A./southern California music scene that we’ve grown up in. Jared Marin, the vocalist and guitarist of neo-exotica band Healing Gems, compares his discovery of exotica to that of a new, lost world. Today, the music is something of a marginal sound itself-which can make it a source of inspiration. The rise of rock and R&B pushed exotica gradually out of the mainstream in the late 1950s and ’60s. Cuban musicians like Perez Prado and Xavier Cugat worked in exotica as well. The amazing four-octave-voiced Yma Sumac was from rural Peru Sondi Sodsai was from Thailand. Arthur Lyman himself was of native Hawaiian, European, and Chinese descent. But it also opened the genre to musicians from an unusually wide range of backgrounds. The first wave of exotica often relied on ham-fisted and, frankly, problematic stereotypes about Africa, Latin America, and Polynesia. Alternately, they could let the spritely, bubbling sounds fade in and out of the background as they sipped martinis in a hotel lounge. Consumers could lean back by their hi-fi and imagine themselves swooping around the globe. Musicians in the late ‘40s and ‘50s such as Les Baxter consciously repackaged these tropes in a jazzier setting for suburban pop audiences. Classical musicians like Debussy and Stravinsky had a repertoire of musical devices to convey that feeling, like drones, pentatonic scales, wordless vocals, or unusual percussion. The evocation of the faraway as fantasyland preceded exotica itself. It’s kitschy and fake-and part of the excitement is that, when you cut yourself loose from authenticity, you can create anything.
With these words, Lyman is going for something specific-striving to evoke “youth, beauty, love and passion” in a deliberately “fantastic setting.” The goal is to take the listener not to any one specific geographical place, but to a world that evokes an exciting “somewhere.” In exotica, the world becomes a comfortably strange tourist destination, with plastic palm fronds and animatronic beasts roaring at a measured remove. In this fantastic setting, Pele knows all. The 1957 liner notes for Arthur Lyman’s The Legend of Pele do a good job of summing up the general aesthetic of exotica:Ĭasting aside her cloak of molten lava, she displayed herself as the ever-glorious fire goddess with all the flame of youth, beauty, love and passion.
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