Hotel Exotica

It was a musical cocktail born in a marketing meeting: Two parts easy listening, one part jazz, a healthy dollop of conga drums, a sprinkling of bird calls, and a pinch of textless choir. Serve garnished with an alluring woman on the album jacket for best results. Liberty Records co-founder Si Waronker called it Exotica; the soundtrack for a mythical air conditioned Eden, packaged for mid-century, tiki torch-wielding armchair safariers. In the five years after Exotica—Martin Denny’s 1957 landmark Liberty debut—arrived, hundreds of other ethnographic forgeries washed up in record racks all over the U.S., bearing titles like Sophisticated Savage, Sacred Idol, Chant of the Jungle, Polynesian Paradise, Exotic Paradise, Taboo, Primitiva, Forbidden Island, Afrodesia, Hypnotique, Percussion Exotique, and a barrel’s worth of other portmanteaus. “All of those ica and itiva endings I came up with because I thought I was being cute,” Waronker said. “And I don’t know why, but nobody got wise.”

Cochin Moon is Haruomi Hosono's fifth solo album. Initially a collaboration between Hosono and illustrator Tadanori Yokoo, of whom traveled to India alongside Hosono; Yokoo ended up only drawing the cover, having been the worst victim of an outburst of severe diarrhea amongst the group during the trip, rendering this as virtually a Hosono solo album. Cochin Moon was written to be the soundtrack of a non-existent Bollywood film, a trait inspired by the artists' trip. The album includes performances by Tin Pan Alley keyboardist Hiroshi Satō and Yellow Magic Orchestra members Ryuichi Sakamoto & Hideki Matsutake.

The unbelievably prolific Haruomi Hosono is one of the major architects of modern Japanese pop music. With his encyclopedic knowledge of music and boundless curiosity for new sounds, Hosono is the auteur of his own idiosyncratic musical world, putting his unmistakable stamp on hundreds of recordings as an artist, session player, songwriter and producer. Born and raised in central Tokyo, his adolescent obsession with American pop culture informed his early forays into country music, which he would revisit later in his career.

Rob Burger’s keyboard work can be heard in everything from Guggenheim showcases to the blockbuster film Ocean’s 8 – in addition to albums by John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, and Iron & Wine – but the moonlit compositions he spins up on his own may be his most compelling work.

It’s seldom that anything involving Fat White Family comes with a heartwarming story attached. They are, after all, a band who describe themselves as “an invitation, sent by misery, to dance to the beat of human hatred”, whose artistic obsession with the ugliness of life is apparently reflected behind the scenes. Their music springs from a grimy personal world of penury, mental torment and hard drug use: “heartwarming” isn’t really on the agenda.

The "Kontor Top Of The Clubs" is Germany's #1 dance compilation series. Volume 89 features the 69 best and hottest club tracks, compiled and mixed by the two residents Jerome and Markus Gardeweg, and this time by LUNAX with their musical flair.