Exotica - Yukio Mishima

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"Erotica and exotica are close, not just semantically, but in their promise of a life less ordinary, detached from the libido suppression of reality, responsibility, rationality and 'civilization', hitched instead to a hopeless belief in the free physicality of primitivism. 'Thus, when confronting those possessors of sheer animal flesh unspoiled by intellect,' Yukio Mishima speculated in Confessions of a Mask, 'young toughs, sailors, soldiers, fishermen - their was nothing for me to do but be forever watching them from afar with impassioned indifference, being careful never to exchange words with them. Probably the only place in which I could have lived at ease would have been some uncivilized tropical land where I could not speak the language. Now that I think of it, I realize that from the earliest childhood I felt a yearning toward those intense summers of the kind that are seething forever in savage lands'"







This was the final post in the 'Exotica' series.

Exotica - Meditation on Violence

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"[Maya Deren's] other films included Meditation on Violence, made in 1948, a study of the Chinese Wu Tang and Shaolin boxing and Shaolin sword, enacted by Ch'ao Li Chi. Prescient in its anticipation of exotic montages of the near-future, Deren's soundtrack combined a recording of Chinese flute with here own tapes of vodun drumming, documented in Haiti. She moves between dream and dynamic action in her filming, the boxer gliding in slow motion, soundtrack silent, then exploding into the quick violence of drums and fists, the paradox resolved by flute and drums together. (...) In her schematic notes for the film, Deren maps the trajectory, a parabolic arc determined by music. 'The ultimate of an extreme becomes its opposite,' she wrote. 'Here the ultimate violence is paralysis after which the REVERSAL.'








Post scriptum

Here is a post by Kode9 on Deren's film.

Exotica - Kenneth Anger

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"At the beginning of the sixties, Brian Wilson was writing ecstatically romantic songs in celebration of heterosexual desire and homosexual gang displays. 'We''l get the roughest and the toughest initiation we can find', written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love for 'Our Car Club', might be lines sung in Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos. This unfinished short film was described by Anger as 'an oneiric vision of contemporary American (and specifically Californian) teenage phenomenon, the world of the hot rod and the customised car'.

In fact, Anger used 'Dream Lover' by the Paris Sisters. He envisaged the cars as 'an eye-magnet of nacreous color and gleaming curvi-linear surfaces' while the customers would be presented as 'shadowy, mysterious personages (priests or witch doctors)'. In his biography of Anger, Bill Landis quotes from an interview with Spider magazine. 'The cars,' said Anger, 'particularly the drag races - what they call the rail jobs - are not only obviously power symbols, terribly phallic and all this, but they're also an involvement in a controlled ideal, in a controlled death-tempting ritual.' In a camp musical, we can imagine the Rommel-inspired attack batallions of Charles Manson and the Family singing 'Our Car Club' lyrics in chorus, like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, as they hurtle over the dirt fire roads of the helter-skelter escape route, heading for Death Valley in their customised dune-buggies, Manson firing Crowleyan magic at pursuing helicopters."


Kustom Kar Kommandos - 1965



Scorpio Rising - 1964

Exotica - Throbbing Gristle

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"Pacific (and Pacific-rim) exotica was a tabula rasa for fantasy, both sincere and ironic. The first signs that Martin Denny's exotica was not hermetically sealed and buried came from two very different sources. In 1978, Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats included an instrumental track called 'Exotica', an ominous, fugitive vision, like an island glimpsed briefly through sea mist. Perhaps this was the island of Samburan, where Joseph Conrad sent his antihero, Heyst, in Victory. With the benevolent act of saving a damsel in distress, Heyst hoped to escape the world, only to be pursued by an unholy trio of villains, their grimacing, amoral misogynist of a leader greeting Heyst with, 'I am the world itself coming to pay you a visit.'"

Below you'll find a YouTube video of the intriguing 1981 student film 'Mask Of Sarnath'. It was written and directed by Neil Ruttenberg - employee at Inner Sanctum Records, musician, radio deejay, sciptwriter and filmmaker. The film, a 20-minute horror film that was a finalist in the Student Academy Awards, has a soundtrack provided by Throbbing Gristle.

Exotica - Harry Smith

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"Along with his interest in music, Harry Smith was a pioneer of American graphic film. Stills from his films look extraordinary. The earliest, made between 1939 and 1946, were hand painted or batiked directly onto celluloid. Later surrealist animations, shot between 1957 and 1962, were photographed from collages with titles such as 'The ascent to heaven on a dentist's chair', 'The descent from heaven in an elevator', and 'The skeleton juggling a baby in the central tableau of heaven' . Inspired by magick and music, they aimed at a synaesthesia of image and sound."


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Exotica - Screamin' Jay Hawkins

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"Alan Freed also brought Screamin' Jay Hawkins to movie fame: 'I did Don't Knock the Rock, but they cut it out - they even paid me for it, but they cut it out because I walked on naked with a loin cloth across here, white shoe polish marks on my face, a spear in one hand and a shield in the other, like one of those wild Mau Mau and I was singing a song called 'Frenzy'. The movie people claimed it would be an insult to the black people of the United States. I bet it would go over today. Again, I was trying to explain to them that I was different, I do everything different. Do you realize they banned 'I Put a Spell On You' because it had cannibalistic sounds? When they banned it, it had already sold a million. When they banned it, it sold another quarter of a million. I wish they'd ban every record I made." Screamin' Jay Hawkins, interviewed by Norbert Hess in Blues Unlimited, 1976."

Below you'll first find a truly wonderful YouTube video for "I Put A Spell On You". Second, an entertaining, long (1h 42m) Greek (English-language) 2001 documentary on Screamin' Jay Hawkins called "Screamin' Jay Hawkins: I Put A Spell On Me" featuring Jim Jarmusch, the Fuzztones, Bo Diddley, Diamanda Galas, Arthur Brown, amongst others.


I Put A Spell On You



Screamin' Jay Hawkins: I Put A Spell On Me


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Wouldn't it be nice if Imperial's N.i.l. would cover 'I Put A Spell On You' on his next album?

Exotica - Dr. John the Night Tripper

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"It was in (...) 1967 (...), that [Mac Rebennack] transformed, like the Loop Garou of legend who carried his head under his arm, into Dr. John, the Night Tripper. 'The original Dr. John claimed to be a West African prince,' wrote Jeff Hannusch in his notes to the Dr. John Anthology, 'and lived in New Orleans during the mid-1800s. He told fortunes, sold "gris-gris" potions, and held seances and voodoo ceremonies. Rebennack had long held a fascination for voodoo, especially as his sister gave him some books on Haitian voodoo she found at an antique store where she worked. Several musicians Rebennack hung out with (particularly Jessie Hill) shared his interest and occasionally he'd visit Cracker Jack's drug store on South Rampart Street, which sold candles, love potions, good-luck floor wash, and incense.

During the period of promoting his Dr. John persona to the rock press, Rebennack played up the voodoo, played down the R&B. 'I was afraid of voodoo, black magic,' he told Jacoba Atlas for Melody Maker in 1970, her transcription adding to the factionalisation, 'but when I got to the Temple of Innocent Blood dey's all dese people groovin' around happy, no race differences, no hates. Dey wuz all one! And I could feel it all aroun' me. I say, dus is fo' me.'

(...)

With its strange timbres, its deep studio echo, its loose-limbed percussive clatter and throb, its ominous tales of charms and spells and nocturnal rituals, [the music of Dr. John] conjured the secrets of African-American mythology and Louisiana magic, filtering them through phantasmagoric Hollywood and its technologies: old as the swamp, new as plastic, real and fake all at once."

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Exotica - instrument inventors

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"Noise for the machine age mixed with the echoes of magical rites and ancient court ceremonies. Alongside the futurism of electronics, percussion emerged from centuries of intellectual purdah as a major new multiple instrument for the first half of the century. The newly invented jazz drum kit took its place among ritual drums of Cuba, Africa, Haiti and Brazil, shakers and rattles of Central and South America, scrapers from Mexico, gongs from Burma, xylophones and marimbas from Africa, tuned percussion from Bali and Java.

Then there were the unique inventions from numerous instrument inventors: Harry Partch and his Spoils of War, Zamo-Xyl and Mazda Marimba; Luigi Russolo and his Intonarumori; Harry Bertoia's Sonambient gongs and metal rods; the Baschet Brothers and their chronophagic Structures Sonores - the Crystal, the Glasshorn, the Tubes Graves, the Grille a Echo."


Here is a video Harry Bertoia's Sound Sculptures:




Here is a video of Catherine Brisset playing the Braschet brothers' Crystal; with Gilles Dalbin on percussion.




Here is a short video of a reconstruction of Russolo's Intonarumori by the Russolo Ensemble:

Exotica - Harry Partch

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"The early works of composer, instrument inventor and theorist Harry Partch (...) have been described by Danlee Mitchell as 'masterpieces of Americana, employing the language in a natural style uninfluenced by European traditions' (sleeve notes to The World of Harry Partch). Through Partch's search for integrated theatre, this Americana was enriched by more remote sources. 'The work that I have been doing these many years,' stated Partch, 'parallels much in the attitudes and actions of primitive man. He found sound-magic in the common materials around him. He then proceeded to make the vehicle, the instrument, as visually beautiful as he could. Finally, he involved the sound-magic and the visual beauty in his everyday words and experiences, his ritual and drama, in order to lend a greater meaning to his life. This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual."

Here is a nice BBC documentary on Harry Partch:

Michael Taussig - Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing (pt. 1)

Michael Taussig's 1986 ethnography "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing" examines the origins of the extraordinary cruelties inflicted by colonial rubber traders upon Colombian Indians and those of the shamanic healing rituals of the Colombian Indians living in the Putumayo foothills.

In Taussig's view, both the cruelties and the healing rituals are motivated by a view of the Indian as a Wild Man, that savage from medieval and Renaissance legend, Europe's version of Bigfoot.

The cruelties visited upon the Indians in the 19th and early 20th century by the colonial rubber industry were extreme. This terror was bloodthirstier by far than could be explained by rational, economic motives: in fact, the terror went against business interests as it destroyed scarce labor power. Taussig views the terror as an abreaction against the Wild Man, a construction of the Indian as a savage anti-self of the colonist, an anti-self which necessitated violence as savage as the 'savage' it was directed against. This anti-self was not well-defined and clear-cut, but was swathed in what Taussig calls 'epistemic murk': the colonists worried incessantly about the Wild Man, and this worry infected their imagination with terrible nightmares of Indian attacks, conspiracies, uprising, treachery, etc. It was the unclear, murky nature of the wildness ascribed to Indians in colonial fabulation that gave this wildness such a powerful, obsessing hold on the imagination of the colonists.

Quoting Alfred Métraux's 1958 book 'Voodoo In Haiti', Taussig notes that "Man is never cruel and unjust with impunity: the anxiety which grows in the minds of those who abuse power takes the form of imaginary terrors and demented obsessions. The master maltreated his slave, but feared his hatred. He treated him like a beast of burden but dreaded the magical powers imputed to him."

White colonists visit Indian shamans to be cured of the sorcery. The sorcery is either of human origin, perpetrated because of Invidia (envy, a capitalist affect par excellence), or the result of mal aires (literally 'bad winds'; for Taussig, memories about Indians killed in colonial conquest coming back to haunt colonists). The colonists believe that the 'wilder', the more mysterious the Indian is, the more powerful his healing capabilities are. Thus, in the healing rituals of Indian shamans, the healers use the view of the Indian as a Wild Man. The terrific magical powers imputed to the shamans by the white colonists are a colonial construction appropriated and used by the colonized. Taussig: "So it has been through the sweep of colonial history where the colonizers provided the colonized with the left-handed gift of the image of the wild man--a gift whose powers the colonizers would be blind to, were it not for the reciprocation of the colonized, bringing together in the dialogical imagination of colonization an image that wrests from civilization its demonic power.” It is Exotica used as a healing power by those deemed Exotic by the colonists.

The shamans use yagé, a hallucinogenic drink made from the Banisteriopsis spp. vine, native to the Amazon Rainforest, in their healing rituals. The psychological effects of yagé, the montage-like (dis-)order of the healing rituals and the symbolic wildness create an 'epistemic murk' which heals by unraveling colonial, capitalist culture: "Wildness challenges the unity of the symbol, the transcendent totalization binding the image to that which it represents. Wildness pries open this unity and in its place creates slippage. (...) Wildness is the death space of signification.”

Some critical remarks:
- Taussig's book is about yagé ceremonies and the symbolic efficacy of montage and cut-ups. Yet Burrough's and Ginzberg's book 1963 "The Yagé Latters" is only given passing mention. Isn't it likely that Taussig's book is more deeply indebted to Burrough's conceptual apparatus than he acknowledges?
- Taussig's description of the montage-like (dis-)order of the healing rituals is also very reminiscent of Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of the rhizome. Another unacknowledged inspiration?
- In one of the final chapters of the book, Taussig almost calls Victor Turner a fascist, in short because he feels Turner's (Durkheim- and Mauss-inspired) attention to the community-forming effect of ritual and symbols is totalitarian. I disagree with Taussig on this point. Not only does Taussig fail to acknowledge the roots of Durkheim's and Mauss's thought in left wing (albeit non-Marxist) activism, and the continued relevance of that thought for issues of social solidarity. But if one denies the continued importance of community and solidarity, one plays into the hands of neoliberalism and its spurious, atomizing individualism. Furthermore, isn't Taussig's unwarranted attack on Turner the type of theoretical intolerance which will ultimately lead to a left wing divided against itself, to left wing paralysis? Finally, Taussig misrepresents the dynamic nature of Turner's analytic framework, which is directed not towards legitimizing stable hegemonies but towards change, towards "social structure in action".

Despite these criticisms 'Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. A Study in Terror and Healing' is rightly regarded as Taussig's major work. Where Taussig's 1980 book 'The devil and commodity fetishism in South America' suffered from a heavy-handed Marxist approach, the orthodoxies had been shaken off by Taussig when he wrote this book six years later. While retaining a strong left wing political focus, Taussig's approach to his subject matter had become much more free (in an almost Free Jazz sense of the word). Walter Benjamin's work had clearly begun to inspire Taussig. But the book is not only highly interesting not only from a theoretical standpoint. It is also very well written, the theoretical content informing the literary structure of the book: the text is riddled by alterations, cracks, displacements and swerves, making it a work of hallucinatory montage. Recommended!

Exotica - Colin McPhee

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"[Composer and ethnomusicologist] Colin McPhee was not a surrealist, but his self-willed displacement in Bali projected him into the Interzone, the imaginative construct, a place that encouraged 'extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the exotic, the erotic, and the unconscious'. Though McPhee was too discrete to make a connection public, the 'sensuous charm' that he heard in Balinese music seems connected to his enjoyment of other sensual pleasures: cooking, drinking, sexual freedom. In his essay, 'Eros and Orientalism in Britten's Operas', musicologist Philip Brett quotes a letter from McPhee in which he wrote; 'Many times there was a decision to be made between some important opportunity and a sexual (homosexual) relationship that was purely sensual. I never hesitated to choose the latter. This I did deliberately and would do again and again, for it seemed the only thing that was real. The Balinese period was merely an extension of this."

• Over at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the are some silent films by MacPhee, as well as a slide show.
• His book 'A House In Bali' is still available.
• Here is an excellent blog post on McPhee.
  

The YouTube video below contain some silent movies Colin Mcphee shot in Bali in the 1930's.


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Exotica - Josephine Baker (pt. 2)

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"Josephine Baker's role as an exotic was complex. Posed in photographs with tiger-skin rugs, she was described as the 'Nefertiti of now' by Picasso. She danced encircled by rhinestone-studded bananas that rose up around her waist like a girdle of sparkling erections. As biographer Phyllis Rose observes in Jazz Cleopatra, the bananas, set in 'jiggling motion, like perky, good-natured phalluses' evolved into stiff tusks. Photographed in The Ziegfeld Follies in 1935, Baker wore a bikini that mutated her erogenous zones into spiked weaponry, impeding any action other than display, anticipating Madonna's spiked bra by more than half a century. Walking her pet leopard along the Champs-Élysées, glorious in her role as a stranger in a strange land, she colluded with the crude fantasies of Africa that so enraptured the French (which were, after all, a relief from the unequivocality of American racial segregation or the racial abuse she suffered from Austrian Nazis), yet she scrubbed her skin with lemon juice at night in the hope of lightening her dark skin."

Here is a beautiful and touching BBC documentary on Baker:














Here is a link to a nice London Review of Books article on Baker.

Exotica - Josephine Baker

From the 1999 book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"Paris in a later age became the spiritual, and actual, home of Josephine Baker, one of the most celebrated exotics of the twentieth century. Born in St Louis in 1906, Baker traveled to France as a dancer in La Revue Nègre. According to biographer Lynn Haney, the show's producer had been advised by the Cubist artists, Fernand Léger, to bring an all-Black show to Paris. 'Give them Negroes,' Léger told André Daven, after he had seen an exhibition of African sculpture at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. 'Only the Negroes can excite Paris.'

So Baker arrived in Paris in 1925, where she performed alongside Sidney Bechet at the Théatre des Champs-Élysées. Picked out from the troupe as a relatively uninhibited body beautiful, she was persuaded to expose her breasts when she danced. The show-stopping climax was Baker's dance with Joe Alex: 'The drummer beat out a steady jungle rhythm, a tom-tom call. Josephine returned with Joe Alex to do their savage dance. She rode onstage upside-down, carried on Alex's broad shoulders. All she wore was a bright pink feather tucked between her thighs ans a ring of feathers circling her ankles and neck. Alex swung her around in a slow cartwheel ... Josephine and Joe then engaged in a primitive mating dance, filled with ardent passion.'

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Exotica - Sun Ra

In 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world', author David Toop compares Les Baxter and Sun Ra:

"As a striking illustration of the link between these two mavericks of American music, compare Baxter's 'Brazilian Bash', released in 1956 on Skins! A Bongo Party with Les Baxter, with Sun Ra recordings from the late fifties and early sixties. Tracks such as 'Solar Drums', 'Friendly Galaxy' and 'Angels and Demons at Play' feature a similar blend of exoticas: either echo-saturated Asian percussion meditations or Afro-Latin rhythms, mysterious flute melodies and glistening keyboard ostinatos. Even their song titles seem to be borrowed from each other's exotic aesthetics: Baxter recording 'Saturday Night on Saturn' and 'Blue Jungle', Sun Ra recording 'Space Mates', 'Kosmos in Blue', 'Tiny Pyramids' and 'Watusa'.

For both Ra and Baxter, the exoticisms were a part of a broader picture. Sound, particularly electronically generated or mutated sound, was a highly evocative medium for depicting vivid unknown worlds, utopias implied by America's postwar Tupper-conservatism of the suburbs and racial division. Though there were some small similarities in their aims and methods, the real world in which they lived and worked divided them so totally, they may as well have been creatures from two different planets. While Sun Ra was defining a New World Afrocentric identity, Baxter confirmed the imperialist fantasies of the old world, now engaged in tourist escapades as well as military expeditions."

Exotica - Les Baxter (3)

In his book 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' the author David Toop writes how Exotica composer Les Baxter's penchant for sound colors found enormous opportunity in horror films:

"Baxter confirmed his enjoyment of this freedom in Soundtrack! 'But horror films, in actual fact,' he said, 'present far less restrictions to a composer because of the extreme range of orchestral color at your disposal. The hardest films to score are those like Born Again where nobody turns into a monster or develops X-ray vision, where there are no ghostly houses sinking into the swamp.'"

Here are some trailers for films mentioned in the Soundtrack! interview.

Frogs (1972)




Goliath and the Barbarians (1959)




Premature Burial (1962)

Exotica - Les Baxter (2)

From 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"[The films Les Baxter was scoring] draped themselves loosely around invasions from without - space monsters, voodoo zombies, revivified mummies, commie rockets - or they sparked paranoid alarms of panic within - biker gangs, body snatchers, vertical corpses, vampires roaming the suburbs - ensuring teen appeal by a judicious combination of fixations. They were dedicated to the alienated outsider: the alien, the creature, the thing, the biker, the drunk, the lonely surfer, the man who shrinks to nothing, the woman who grows into a fifty-foot monster, the man with x-ray eyes whose nightmare of perception was to see through the surface of society, so incurring his own destruction."

Here are some trailers for films scored by Les Baxter.


Bride And The Beast (1958)




The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)





Savage Sisters (1974)

Exotica - Cry of the Banshee

From 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"In the sleevenotes of Les Baxter's 1970 soundtrack for Gordon Hessler's American International film, Cry Of The Banshee, Baxter archly reported that one passage in the music had been reported by friends 'to cause an apparition to materialize. I had no idea, in my own writing, that such a thing was taking place, although every composer knows that sometimes when he is writing he will write things he doesn't remember, as if they come from an "outside" source. Whatever caused this, some said that during this particular passage they thought they saw Satan materialize - others were not sure just who the spiritual image was, but I feel I must warn those who have a fear of the supernatural of the possibility of such an occurence."



Find the record sleeve - including the notes! - and a rip of the soundtrack here.

Exotica - Carmen Miranda

"With her arrival in New York, she found her speech, accent and mannerisms turned into idiocies by the American media. The American public (and Wittgenstein) loved her for her fractured accent and odd expressions, the inter-language of her songs ans high-speed repartee, part-English, part-Portuguese, part-monkey cries and sound poetry. Men, of course, lusted after her exotic exuberance or, lusting after other men, they dressed in Carmen Miranda outfits." From "Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world", by David Toop (Serpent's Tail, 1999)

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"In the 1930s, whenever he felt exhausted and drained from his classes at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein would go to the cinema with a friend or some student. Ray Monk tells us that he would always sit in the front row, where he could probably immerse himself more completely in the stream of images and sound, and he preferred either westerns or musicals starring
the Portuguese-Brazilian Carmen Miranda." From "Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir", by Norman Malcolm (Oxford University Press, 1958).


Wittgenstein, Directed by Derek Jarman, Britain 1993, color, 35mm, 76 min.

Exotica - Yma Sumac

From 'Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world' by David Toop:

"Yma Sumac's origins are still in doubt, muddied by claims she was an Incan princess, a descendant of Atahualpa, who was killed by the Spanish in 1527. This dubious legend was matched by counterclaims that she was Amy Camus from Brooklyn. (...)

Only few singers possess the freakish, octave quality of Sumac's voice. (...) A generic jungle landscape is conjured, interspersed with magisterial orchestral climaxes, presumably suggestive of pyramids, citadels and sun temples rising out of forests." (...)

Sumac, like the parabola of her voice - its low moans and masculine gutteral, the musical saw of her upper registers - floats between identities, wrapped in the image manufacturing of Hollywood and her self-created ambiguities."

Below are YouTube videos to the 1954 film 'Secret of the Incas' which stars Sumac.

Exotica - Les Baxter