You know the drift. You can include artists that mainly work visually too, if you like. I imagine some early electronic music gurus fit the bill. It is, after all, not a genre but more an aesthetical attitude in regards of certain ways of producing and appreciating music/ visual arts.

Joe Meek
Martin Denny
Irving Fields
The Legendary Stardust Cowboy
Lucia Pamela
Enoch Light
Dick Hyman
Mort Garson
Perez Prado
Jack Costanzo
Hoyt Curtin
Bruce Haack
Si Zentner

Somehow I can't see this being a super-popular thread. One of the best things that I have heard is Mort Garson's recordings of the signs of the zodiac. Some incredible music on there.

[Savage Clone]

I went through a big phase with this stuff in the early 1990s, but haven't spent much time with it since.

I like:
Yma Sumac
Martin Denny
Arthur Lyman
Les Baxter
The Surfmen
Korla Pandit
Esquivel
Kali Bahlu (excellent!)
Enoch Light has a few decent ones, and even the usually-awful Hugo Montenegro did a couple of OK LPs in this vein, but these two are spotty at best (but usually with great cover art)

There are quite a few others; perhaps I will re-visit this section in the collection later today.

For me it started with buying the soundtrack to the 1976's version of ''King Kong'' by John Barry when I was in my teens, and I never looked back. There is something about the way the record sleeves look, the clothes, the instrumentation used and the various approaches to the way music is played and written that presses so many right buttons in me.

[Savage Clone]

I have this one, which is pretty good. This music was still all pretty cheap when I was buying it, and this particular LP is quite the find.

 

 

Aside from his studio work with popular artist like Glen Campbell, Dorris Day, Mel Tormé, The Lettermen and many others, Garson was a pioneer to the world of electronic music.From the mid 60’s to the mid 70’s, Garson wrote music for a number of strange theme albums. One of the most popular, and sought after, of these strange records is Cosmic Sounds by The Zodiac, which featured many well known, but unnamed studio artist of the time, and is known as the first recording from the West Coast to use the Moog Synthesizer.

mp3
The Zodiac - Aquarius
Other cult albums included an album to accompany the book The Sensuous Woman, Plantasia, an album to help plants grow, The Wozard of Iz, a psychedelic satire based on The Wizard of Oz, Electronic Hair Pieces, and a series of 12 albums based on signs of the zodiac.
mp3
Wozard Of Iz - I’ve Been Over The Rainbow


Mort Garson is also the composer behind the National Geographic theme song, which you can listen to by clicking here.

http://www.die-monster.com/index.php?paged=3

May he rest in peace.

What IS Space Age Pop?
Attempting to Define an In-Between Genre

• Exotica
• Space Age Bachelor Pad Music
• Jet Set Pop
• The Now Sound
• Cocktail Music
• Incredibly Strange Music
• Outsider Music

This music might be characterized most easily by what it isn't. It's rarely simple enough in structure and instrumentation to be called rock (and certainly retains enough of a sense of humor to be disqualified as art rock). It's not serious or straightforward enough to be called jazz. It's often too esoteric or extreme to be called pop. It's in some middle ground between all of these, which means it's populated with the outcasts from other well-established genres. As a result, Space Age Pop is full of brilliant, bizarre, and exciting sounds, which are particularly striking to ears accustomed to the stereotypes that populate the more familiar genres.
Among these outcasts, though, there are some common features that a simple categorization can help identify. The following list offers some labels for these categories and matches some names against each. I should state up front, though, that my definition of "Space Age Pop" can be summed up as: all of this and more.
Exotica

The strictest definition limits exotica to the imitations of Polynesian, Afro-Caribbean, and Hawaiian music that were produced by Les Baxter and others from the mid-1950s to the very early 1960s. This music blended the elements of Afro-Cuban rhythms, unusual instrumentations, environmental sounds, and lush romantic themes from Hollywood movies, topped off with evocative titles like "Jaguar God," into a cultural hybrid native to no place outside the San Fernando Valley. There were two primary strains of this kind of exotica: Jungle and Tiki. Jungle was definitely a Hollywood creation, with its roots in Tarzan movies (and further back, to W.H. Hudson's novel, Green Mansions. Les Baxter was the king of jungle exotica, and spawned a host of imitators while opening the doors for a few more genuine articles such as Chaino, Thurston Knudson, and Guy Warren. Tiki was introduced with Martin Denny's Waikiki nightclub combo cum jungle noises cover of Baxter's "Quiet Village," although Denny's vibe player, Arthur Lyman, soon became the style's most representative artist. Tiki rode a wave of popularity in the late 1950s and early 1960s marked by the entrance of Hawaii as the 50th state in 1959 and the introduction of Tiki hut cocktail bars and restaurants around the continental United States. Tiki exotica is now enjoying a resurgence in popularity, and Tiki mugs and torches that once collected dust in thrift stores are now hot items.

Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music

A phrase coined by Byron Werner to describe the music of Esquivel and others that reveled in dramatic contrasts of dynamics, instrumentation and vocal effects, and wild movements of sound from left channel to right and back again and seemed aimed squarely for the generation of white American males that came of age with Playboy magazine and high fidelity stereo equipment. "Imagine George Jetson as a bachelor: 'Hubba-Hubba!'"
Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, also called Space Age Pop or shortened to SABPM in this acronym-friendly age, actually spans pre-stereo "high fidelity" recordings introduced in the mid-1950s to the brief and unsuccessful attempt to push quadrophonic recordings in the early 1970s. It encompasses a huge range of music, but is best characterized by the recordings from a few particularly outstanding series:

• RCA's Stereo Action
• Command's Persuasive/Provocative Percussion albums
• London's early Phase 4 albums
• Mercury's Perfect Presence Sound albums

To this list could be added many more imitations: the Medallion series from Kapp; Directional Sound, which repackaged and altered recordings by Francis Bay and members of his band; Liberty's Premier series; and United Artist's Wall-to-Wall stereo albums, to name a few. These albums also featured distinctive packaging--gatefolds with bold abstract designs or glossy photos or, in the case of RCA's Stereo Action series, sturdy cardboard outer sleeves with die-cut openings revealing rainbow-colored abstract photo images on the inner sleeve. The visual and audio presentations were both intended to set these recordings apart from everything else on the market, and the liner notes went on at eye-glazing length about how the bass saxophone motif would stress your sub-woofers or how the passage where the melody is played by tuned bongos might cause the needles on inferior stereos to skip. Very little space if any was devoted to the quality of the musical interpretation--as the British comic duo Flanders and Swann put it in their song, "The High Fidelity," "But I don't really care for music much--it's the high fidelity!" That quip does the genre injustice, though. The studio musicians playing on many of these recordings were awesomely proficient, the arrangers innovative and irreverent, and the results can still astonish nearly 40 years later.

Jet Set Pop

My name for the (mostly instrumental) music that followed the decline in Space-Age bachelor pad music in the early 1960s. Jet Set Pop enjoyed vastly greater popularity that its predecessor, epitomized by the many Top 40 hits by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass that implanted themselves into the genetic memory of anyone who drew breath back then. Its rise was marked by the introduction of Brazilian bossa nova music in 1962, which added numerous songs that quickly became new exotica standards: "The Girl from Ipanema"; "Summer Samba (So Nice)"; "Desifinado"; and Sergio Mendes' "Mais Que Nada." Herb Alpert added the Tijuana Brass sound in 1963, and Tony Hatch, Petula Clark, Tom Jones, and John Barry's James Bond scores provided British alternatives to the Beatles. Claude Lelouch's film A Man and a Woman provided plenty of grist for the cover mill in Francis Lai's title song, as did Maurice Jarre's "Lara's Theme" from Doctor Zhivago. Even Germany enjoyed one of its few moments of success on the pop scene with Bert Kaempfert's many hits, including his theme to the the film A Man Could Get Killed, a number one hit for Frank Sinatra when done as "Strangers in the Night," and Horst Jankowski's equally successful "A Walk in the Black Forest." In the U.S., Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick quickly crossed over from soul to pop pulled in some of the decade's biggest hits. And perhaps the biggest hit--certainly the most covered--was "More" from Riz Ortolani's score for the bizarre documentary, Mondo Cane.

Incredibly Strange Music

Introduced explicitly as the title of two 1993 volumes by Re/Search, an avant-garde publication based in San Francisco. As covered in these books, this label includes everything from Exotica as described above to sound effects, serious and comic and unintentionally comic spoken word, and stag party records, to Moog synthesizers, to outrageous foreign covers of U.S. pop hits. The two ISM volumes helped spark current interest in exotica, though, with interviews that brought the names of Martin Denny, Korla Pandit, and Yma Sumac to a new generation, and led to release of two CD compilations of music mentioned in the book.

Outsider Music

Championed by Irwin Chusid in his excellent book, Songs in the Key of Z, Outsider music includes anything that might be considered to fall outside the mainstream of popular musical. And here the mainstream applies on a global scale, so what's termed "World Music" doesn't pass the test in most cases because it's usually just mainstream pop music from somewhere else on the planet. Although the Outsider Music Mailing List page claims that lounge/exotica music does not qualify, I would beg to differ. Certainly many of the fans of one enjoy and collect the other. But more importantly, there is the fact that so much of the music and musicians covered on this site have been overlooked by the two primary indicators of historical memory: reference books and reissued recordings. Yes, there was a time when Ray Conniff was just a turn of the radio dial away, but now his music is relegated to die-hard fans and those who roam the beaches on which the detritus of the music marketplace washes up. Somewhere My Love is just as much a cast-off or exile from the mainstream as something by Shooby Taylor. No one can ever expect to collect all the music that has been carried away on the tides of the marketplace, but the act of remembering the forgotten is a fundamental refusal to surrender the future to entropy.

The rest is on here: http://www.spaceagepop.com/whatis.htm

[Rob Instigator]

I cannot stand any of this shit. I hate the whole "exotica' revival that occurred after the ska revival (the 4th or 5th one) died down. Boring music for old farts.

Yma Sumac is a peruvian singer and sang tons of stuff, not just what white people have labeled "exotica/tiki/whatever"

Esquivel sez MUCHA MUCHACHA


fucking horrid shit.

[Savage Clone]

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

Boring music for old farts.

I think The Smiths and Dinosaur Jr. could be lumped into this category by this point as well.
Yes, the revivalist stuff was sketchy at best, but that can be said of most revivalists of any genre.

[the ikara cult]

All of you frighten me

[Dead-Air]

My basic list would mostly just repeat everyone elses. I actually listen to this type of stuff a fair amount though, and once had a dj gig at Happy Hour playing just this stuff. Arthur Lyman is ahead of Baxter and Denny on my list. Yma Sumac is amazing. The 101 Strings psych album "Space Out" is really great in a cheesy manner. Sergio Mendez and Brasil '66 and '77 have done tons I really enjoy (their covers of "Day Tripper" and "Easy to be Hard" among the top).

My favorite lesser know is Stu Goldman his Orchestra and Chorus who I can't even find on Google to link. Basically instrumental musaky versions of pop standards ("Downtown", "I Think I'm Goin' Out of My Head", etc.), but with chorus vocals on only the key words, making it incredibly ethereal and weird.

[RdTv]

Most of these have already been said but:
Martin Denny
Henry Mancini
Esquivel
Les Baxter
Enoch Light
Morton Gould
Yma Sumac
Cal Tjader (some of his mambo w/ vibes stuff)
Bobby Montez (Jungle Fantastique)
Walter Wanderley

I can understand how some may not like this movement of music. But to me the cover art for a lot of theses records are excellent in a corny and cliched type of way. The whole fact that people sat around theirwhite picket fenced, formica countertop, vinyl sofa- house and listened to this as escapism music during the 50's and 60's is hilarious, just the contrast I guess between what was apckaged and how the audience acted towards it. All that being said, there is some really cool orchestral pieces amongst the whole ''exotica'' movement and good music is good music.

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

You guys would like this album I think
http://illegalart.net/bryson/index.html

But I approve of Martin Denny and that kind of stuff.

[terminal pharmacy]

noone has mentioned wesley willis???

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

I cannot stand any of this shit. I hate the whole "exotica' revival that occurred after the ska revival (the 4th or 5th one) died down. Boring music for old farts.

Yma Sumac is a peruvian singer and sang tons of stuff, not just what white people have labeled "exotica/tiki/whatever"

Esquivel sez MUCHA MUCHACHA


fucking horrid shit.

All good taste is bad taste, matey!

 

Do the hustle while listening to this, Rob:

 

Originally Posted by the ikara cult

All of you frighten me

Why?

 

Cool blog: http://doyouspeakenglishradio.blogsp...1_archive.html

and one of the best websites ever:
http://weirdsville.com/

 

 

Excellent bad art on this site too:
http://www.hugemagazine.com/thrift/bailey/eviltwin.html

 

 

 

 

More good bad art on this wonderful website:http://www.unpopart.org/artworks/artworks2.html

 

Record sleeve galore on here:http://www.danacountryman.com/danaco...anacovers.html