The Exotica Project

It's easier for me to define exotica, a lush, atmospheric, sometimes-sappy instrumental pop music of the '50s and '60s, than it is for me to explain why I love it. I think it has something to do with nostalgia for a time I didn't really live through -- a late-postwar period in which the world was bigger and stranger, and unfamiliar locales could be described with a straight face as "exotic." (One historical theory holds that the music was initially marketed to ex-GIs home from the Pacific, and trickled down to the populace at large.) There's something emotionally resonant in that idea. It's like we're looking back at a generation that looked forward, and out to a larger world it hadn't yet subsumed. Also: While the music is frequently syrupy, some of it is unironically pretty. And some of it, like the best of genre superstar Les Baxter, bubbles with an unexpected, almost subliminal complexity. Dan Shiman, who's also proprietor of the excellent MP3 blog Office Naps, curates a fantastic introduction to the music at The Exotica Project. (Via the tireless Maria Popova.)

• [Anonymous]

  Some modern takes on the genre can be found in “Two Zombies Later”, a compilation by the now sadly defunct netlabel Comfort Stand: http://www.comfortstand.com/catalog/001/

• [Anonymous]

  Look for The Comstock Orchestra and, of course, Yma Sumac!

• [Godfree]

  Oh, man. What a great link! I wish there was a “Play All” feature. Off to make a new Pandora channel…

• [Anonymous]

  That stuff is amazing! Ok I’m only on the fourth one so far. Massive copyright violation? That would be sad if it disappeared, I have to see how much I can buy online. It’s like… It’s like… The original Star Trek! Incredible. Love it.

• [Anonymous]

  Martin Denny also has quite a few good tunes in that style!

• [jfrancis]

  I like my exotica in space

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN3-6stydFg

• [Lester]

  Glad to know there are others like me. During the 90s lounge craze, I had trouble telling people that my love of Exotica was un-ironic.

  To me Les Baxter was making soundtracks to my favorite movies never made. (Of course, he also did real soundtracks…) It was cool and funky in its almost idealistic approach to world cultures. Of course this isn’t what real Polynesian, African, Asian music sounds like, but it is a great romantic reflection of discovery. It wasn’t the music the Polynesians played, but it could have been the music playing in the head of Americans visiting exotic South Sea islands.

  Also, I could drink a mean cocktail with this stuff. I’d drink the hell out of that cocktail.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  No Yma Sumac?

  • [Anonymous]

    you did not look hard enough:

    http://officenaps.com/?attachment_id=800

  • [jfrancis]

    I saw her sing at the Hollywood Forever 2005 Day of the Dead celebration.

• [Anonymous]

  More @ http://www.kpr.ku.edu/retro/

• [sapere_aude]

  Exotica is cool. Though, personally, I prefer bossa nova: http://www.allmusic.com/explore/style/bossa-nova-d308

  (And, like Lester above, my love for the music is entirely un-ironic.)

• [Anonymous]

  Catch you listening to this, they lose all respect for you forever.

  http://somafm.com/play/illstreet

  • [sapere_aude]

    Please do not direct me to a site that automatically downloads songs to my iTunes player. I have nothing against the songs per se (good bossa nova); but I object to websites that automatically download stuff onto my computer without asking me first.

    • [Ito Kagehisa]

      object to websites that automatically download stuff onto my computer without asking me first

      I don’t mean to be rude, but why are you using a system that allows this to happen? In the United States, you would be at considerable legal risk – you could be stigmatized for life, quite literally. Hopefully you are living somewhere with a less broken legal system!

      I’d rather walk around with a loaded gun pointed at my head than use a computer that could be made to download child porn without my permission.

      • [sapere_aude]

        I don’t mean to be rude, but why are you using a system that allows this to happen?

        I don’t mean to be snarky, but since you asked, there are two reasons:

        (a) I’m not a paranoid conspiracy theorist who thinks the government wants to entrap me into downloading child porn (and I know enough about the law to know what my rights are should I accidentally download something illegal – and the legal risk is nowhere near as great as you make it out to be); and

        (b) Like most people, I choose to use the operating system that I find most “user friendly” and that is best suited to my own computing needs, rather than choosing an operating system based solely on its ability to prevent something that rarely happens and is usually quite harmless.

        Besides, are there any operating systems that prevent automatic downloads? Because, I’ve had automatic downloads happen both on Mac and on Windows systems.

        • [Ito Kagehisa]

          You can turn off automatic run on media insertion in Windows although it’s kind of annoyingly tedious to do. Google for more info, it’s easy to find. For browser-based stuff you can run firefox with noscript on windows, mac, and linux. Noscript will take a little getting used to, but it provides you nearly bulletproof protection and is well worth the investment of your time. I cannot recommend it enough – give it a try!

          Uhm, Apple heresy alert. iTunes is a really terrible music player and a really terrible music management system, compared to everything else I’ve used. It is apparently an excellent music distribution system if you buy music online, and many people find it worthwhile for that reason. That doesn’t fill a need for me, though, because I buy physical CDs directly from artists and rip them to FLAC, and use them on Logitech squeezeboxes and linux desktop audio players for the most part, converting them to .mp3 when I load my $15 chinese iPod clone. End Apple heresy. I won’t install iTunes on MSwindows, because it seriously compromises both performance and security by installing multiple complex daemon processes. It poses no such problem on a mac, where it is well integrated. I don’t know how to make iTunes not load things, because I only use it on the Mac mini at work and only for playing CDs. Noscript will keep firefox from calling iTunes, though.

          As for operating systems, well, I am a cheapskate, personally, although when I was raised it was called being “Scotch” and it was a virtue. Consequently I run linux on computers I build from discarded refuse, because that is the cheapest most effective way to do it. Recently linux has become reasonably user friendly; the popular distributions are easier to install than windows and my octegenarian father, formerly an Apple fan, has no problem using it. My friend Pedro the Cruel, who is a welder and musician by trade and not particularly software literate, recently converted to Ubuntu from Windows XP and he adjusted to it in less than a month (he now says it’s much better than Windows, but you know how fresh converts always are). I recommend Ubuntu if you are installing the OS yourself, and whatever linux comes on the machine should be fine if you buy pre-installed like most people prefer.

• [nixiebunny]

  Yummy! You can see a full interview with Les Baxter done by my exotic friend Peter in the 90s here.

  http://www.tamboo.com/baxter/baxinterview/index.html

  (The hallway in Peter’s house at the time was a Gig Gallery of big-eyed puppy paintings. He’s hardcore.)

• [Anonymous]

  Some more suggested listening: Mr. Ho’s Orchestrotica, which I got from Amazon.

• [Anonymous]

  Make your own on an Optigan! Or a Java applet emulator thereof!!