Exotica [Paperback] Review

Exoticaby David Toop
David Toop is arguably the most intelligent music critic writing today, his range of interests prospecting across an avant garde canvas coloured by the 20th century's foremost writers,thinkers and musicians.
Although Toop's subject is predominantlythat of fabricated soundscapes in a real world, a music which has come tobe categorised as exotica, his roots are literary and extend to novelisticcosmographers like Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and William Burroughs.Toop is erudite, but refreshingly unacademic in the way his texts areinterspersed with autobiography, anecdote, interviews and fiction. Bringingimaginative criticism to bear on a range of subjects from the beginnings ofethnic music to Josephine Baker and Yma Sumac, Les Baxter and Martin Denny,Toop succeeds in aligning the concept of the exotic with world music. In acentury in which we have grown to be increasingly interiorised, televisionoften providing our point of contact with the external world, so music hascome to assume the role of transporting geography into our rooms. In thisrespect Les Baxter's floridly contrived soundscapes prove central to Toop'sthesis, for Baxter was throughout the 1950's to offer his listeners packagetours in sound. According to Toop Baxter's music provided 'runningexcursions for sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboourges before lunch, view a pagan ceremony through gaps in the bamboo, gowild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home stereocomforts in the whitebread suburbs.' Baxter's albums carried titles such asCaribbean moonlight, Jewels of the Sea, Ritual of the Savage and Ports ofPleasure, and by hinting at sexual licentiousness in exotic landscapes, themusic was to prove irresistible to a 1950's record buying public.
Toop is particularly good on inventive vocalists like Josephine Baker andYma Sumac. When Baker arrived in Paris in 1925 as a dancer with La RevueNégre, she caused a sensation by exposing her breasts when she danced.Aspiring to chanson, she injected the medium with her atavistic Africanroots, so as to create an exotic vocal genre.
Yma Sumac noted forher collaboration with Les Baxter on Voice of the Xtabay, was anextraordinarily volatile singer of South American ancestry noted for hermulti-octave range and freakishly histrionic tone. Sumac shared with Baxterand Denny the ability to transpose a spuriously sourced primitivism to thecontrived medium of the Western recording studio.
David Toop is amarvellous guide to the curious, the bizarre, the culted and the durable in20th century music. His book includes interviews with the eclectic likes ofBurt Bacharach, Ornette Coleman, Bill Laswell, Maroumi Hosno and NusratFateh Ali Khan, the renowned Pakistani popular singer.
More thanjust a vibrantly maverick musician and musicologist David Toop writes withthe exciting inventiveness of a fine prose stylist. This is a book to beingested slowly and with careful attention paid to the originality of theauthor's metaphors. Exotica is a rich text in the best sense ofcontemporary writing.
JEREMY REED

Click Here to see more reviews about: Exotica [Paperback]

Product Description:
"Exotica" takes a look at the music and people behind some of the world's most witty, experimental and adventurous sound recordings. Since the invention of the microphone, people have experimented with sound, putting everything from thunderstorms and dolphin sounds, medical operations, native jungle drums and junkyard trash down on vinyl. Notions of the exotic have inspired popular music and musicians in all fields from classical, through "easy listening" to rap - from Stravinsky to the Boo-Yah T.R.I.B.E David Toop takes the reader through the 20th century's fascination with exotica, its icons and practitioners, taking in the work of Les Baxter, the meaning of Carmen Miranda, leopard skin leotards and pink fluffy cubicles, elevator music and more. Included are interviews with Burt Bacharach, Ornette Coleman, Bill Laswell, YMO's Haroumi Hosono, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Buy cheap Exotica [Paperback] now