Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World
Every year brings one great pop disappointment, and in 1999 it’s the nonappearance of the CD companion for David Toop’s new book, Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World. Even if it had come out, it would barely have registered as a blip on the pop-culture radar: highbrow art-school theorist culls his favorite tiki tracks in a probably vain attempt to legitimize an often (and often rightly) dismissed genre, yawn. Besides, didn’t the lounge revival crest four years ago? But the crucial difference between, say, DCC’s Music for a Bachelor’s Den releases and the Exotica disc would have been Toop himself. Toop, a British critic and musician, also may be the most important music anthologist working today.
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As a writer, his legacy has already begun to solidify. His 1996 book, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds, which Toop describes as “a collection of diverse views, thoughts, [and] experiences [that] trace an expansiveness, an opening out of music during the past one hundred years,” has gained a fervent cult audience, and just as Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train inspired a rash of historical contextualizing, Ocean’s aesthetic–based on sound rather than sense, built around jump cuts and fanciful segues between historical eras and styles, the print equivalent of a mix tape–will doubtless be copied for years to come. Kodwo Eshun christened the bandwagon last year with More Brilliant Than the Sun.
Exotica, the book, reads like a chapter of Ocean writ large–and in fact exotica is one of the styles that figure into Toop’s Ocean-ic taxonomy. The term usually refers strictly to Hollywood’s chintzy misappropriations of African, Asian, and Latin music in the 50s and 60s via bandleaders like Les Baxter, Esquivel, and Martin Denny (whose 1958 album gave the genre its name), but just as Ocean’s survey of ambient music didn’t begin or end with what the industry sells under the label “ambient,” Toop’s new work defines “exotica” merely as music whose primary appeal is its otherness.
