Arthur Lyman – Taboo - The Exotic Sounds Of Arthur Lyman

Top of the heap in my exotica collection. You couldn't pack more mojo into an analog recording.

Huge seller for Lyman...He sounded very similar to Martin Denny with the South Seas feel and the bird calls...Saw him once at a radio station concert (KMPC Teenage Underground) for only a hundred or so fans by old Hollywood Park in LA in a sleazy old timey nightclub on a Sunday afternoon...Lights were low but the performance with Red Hot...Lyman sold a whole lot of albums over the years...

I really like this. It’s chill. Slow it down and it sounds like Tortoise. I can’t believe this hasn’t been sampled more.

Superb sonics with this bleeding edge late 50s stereo release. A true 50s SciFi sonic journey for the ears ;) LOVE IT!!!

Wow, MORE COWBELL on [B5] “Dahil Sa iyo” the old Filipino standard (translates to English as “Because of You”) so don’t fear the reaper!

I with I could have been in the studio for 'Sim Sim' when someone had to have said, 'ya know, make those bird sounds super high in the mix, just turn it way up.' Great record! Certainly slightly more formulaic than Baxter or Denny, but it also removes most of the charming-yet-kinda-eye-rolling sincerity of those records. This keeps the kitsch intact, and that's not anachronistic at all. I think Lyman was more cognizant of his big-band-paradiddle-drumming take on blatant cultural plundering than most of his contemporaries (I mean, listen to Caravan,' that's too clever an amalgam of like 6 different contemporary sounds melded into a succinct danceable ditty for pre-hep-cat-era dilettantes to not be tongue-in-cheek right?!), which lends a nice subtle irony to the whole thing. Fantastic LP to drink wine, cook dinner and listen to loudly. LOVE it.

My version (SR 806A D12 and SR 806B D12 in the runout) is cut out of phase. Anyone else notice this?

My copy of this tape is a 1/2-track stereo tape, ie: the tape is designed for playback in one direction only on a 2-track machine, although it will play fine on a standard 4-track/2-channel deck. It may have also been issued as a 4T stereo tape as well.

Compared to Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman’s take on exotica is very in-your-face. He’s very heavy-handed with the “natural” sounds of waves crashing, “jungle sounds” of ooh-ooh-ah-ahing spider monkeys and marmosets and bird sounds and all that.The arrangements are great though. Very Hawaiian feel and it’s great to just throw on and chill to in a sitting-in-a-plastic-lawn-chair-on-a-patch-of astro-turf-next-to-a-charcoal-grill sort of way.

I've never noticed this on any other vinyl but the run-in groove features a noticeable hum which vanishes before the first track starts. Can anybody else theirs does the same?