Babau: The Sludge of the Land

"At a time when the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom was still in living memory, the NYC-born composer and his band were under contract with "tiki culture" maven Don the Beachcomber at a Hilton hotel in Honolulu, where they'd developed a style of easy-listening music that incorporated animal sounds, Latin pop influences, and a mish-mash of traditional instruments like shamisen and gamelan from Asia and Polynesia."

"In 1957, nearly seven decades before Babau's new "post-exoticism" album The Sludge of the Land, bandleader Martin Denny released an album called Exotica. The new sound became a global fad, even in the locales that exotica artists fantasized about. The Japanese band Yellow Magic Orchestra, who pioneered the use of sampling in popular music and presaged hip-hop and techno, covered Denny's "Firecracker" with a futuristic 1978 synth-pop interpretation that delights in the song's catchy appeal while subverting its chintzy orientalism."

Martin Denny's 1957 Exotica fused animal sounds, Latin pop and traditional Asian and Polynesian instruments under tiki-culture patronage, creating a global fad. Yellow Magic Orchestra later sampled and transformed Denny's "Firecracker" into a futuristic synth-pop cover that subverted orientalism while retaining catchy appeal. Contemporary experimental musicians now routinely recombine past and present sounds into new pastiches. Babau, a duo of Luigi Monteanni and Matteo Pennesi, emerged from the cassette-label boom, run the label Artetetra, curate the Future Pidgin residency in Milan, and research transglobal sonic subcultures. Their album The Sludge of the Land probes kitsch beneath respectable musical forms and questions creation of unique perspectives from global detritus.

Read at Pitchfork