Exotica

New Internationalist, Sept, 1999

(Serpent's Tail, ISBN 1 85242 595 4)

Of course, however much we enjoy these records, it will never be with the same meaning that their Malagasy fans can bring to them. Tarika's `Ilahikolo'-an ancestor dance that refers to one of the island's favourite pastimes of bringing out your (dead) relatives for a party-stands little chance of being regarded with anything other than macabre fascination by western audiences. This is in spite of the fact that for Malagasis the ceremony is a joyous occasion. So what do we get from these records? This is a topic raised in David Toop's wonderfully provocative book, Exotica. Toop sets up a polemic that takes him on a worldwide journey: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Willie Colon, Hawaiian rappers Boo-yah Tribe and the sad tale of Carmen Miranda are just four of his stops. Probably alone amongst contemporary music writers, Toop is actually a curator of sound: a polymath with an intense and unaffected interest in music and its place in the world. At times his prose has a dreamlike quality to it, perhaps a necessity when dealing with the light jazz with added bird song and fake-Polynesian twangs of Martin Denny. Toop is spot-on in his analysis of stress-busting New Age music and scathing towards those who collect music like a tourist's mementos. For him, music, and more particularly sound, is a thing of infinite power. A superb book.

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