14/11/2010: Exotica!

A musical style I discovered during those sun-drenched final weeks of my residence in New Medlock through Martin Denny’s album of the same name. Recently I have begun to further investigate the past-phenomenon of “Exotica” and its associated genres – music highly connotative of American “space-age bachelor pads” of the 1950s/60s (think the real-life equivalent of Thunderbirds or The Jetsons) – and am beginning to see a parallel of a sort between it and my own work, or ideas for work at least, with regard to the idea of artifice and interpretation.

Some notable releases of the genre with sleeve examples:

- Martin Denny – Exotica/Primitiva
- Les Baxter – Ritual Of The Savage/Tamboo!
- Yma Sumac – Voice Of The Xtabay


* A personal note on the “artifice” of “Exotica”/Manifestation of sorts on “Trafford Centre Art”:

Take something of interest (in this case “far-away”, non-western lands and cultures – but could also be applied to something else complex that people don’t care enough about to know the difference between pastiche and the genuine article - religion, magick, history etc.) and rely more on personal interpretation rather than fact to create some sort of image – not unlikely it will be shared by others. Trafford Centre art as it were - the bits that people value from historical periods remade now. In that example the grandeur of ancient Rome and Egypt among others are stripped of meaning and cheaply reenacted solely for the purpose of enhancing the shopping experience. The music of the Exotica genre itself is hardly of Polynesian origin, more in the vein of American cocktail bar and lounge music of the period and simply given an “exotic” sounding makeover; a relatively small detail which eventually becomes the main selling point. Many releases of the Exotica genre depict wholly American, or Western at least, ideals about the islands of the Central Pacific, their inhabitants and traditions, and not least, sexuality – particularly evident in the fantasy-romance-implying covers of Ritual Of The Savage (where we see a Western man attempting to woo a native beauty who looks suspiciously on the alert, probably for her husband) and Exotica (a sultry-eyed woman emerging from bead curtains (!) - an image not dissimilar to plenty of other Denny records), not to mention the amazingly voluptuous cover woman of Primitiva… These are playfully inaccurate interpretations that illustrate something that is in fact real – not in the places and cultures depicted but in the minds of enough middle-aged suburban Americans of the day to get Exotica to the top of the charts for several weeks in 1959.