Have you ever turned one of those corners of the internet and had it open up a whole new galaxy of possibilities? Yeah, it's a total Wrath of Kahn moment. I had one today when over at BoingBoing, Bill Barol posted about Dan Shaiman, who runs Office Naps (a site dedicated to 45 curios), and is curating the Exotica project. As Barol says:
It's easier for me to define exotica, a lush, atmospheric, sometimes-sappy instrumental pop music of the '50s and '60s, than it is for me to explain why I love it. I think it has something to do with nostalgia for a time I didn't really live through -- a late-postwar period in which the world was bigger and stranger, and unfamiliar locales could be described with a straight face as "exotic." (One historical theory holds that the music was initially marketed to ex-GIs home from the Pacific, and trickled down to the populace at large.) There's something emotionally resonant in that idea. It's like we're looking back at a generation that looked forward, and out to a larger world it hadn't yet subsumed. Also: While the music is frequently syrupy, some of it is unironically pretty.
From the couple spins I've taken around the Exotica Project, it's pretty damn mind-blowing and proves that the net is one of the greatest memory repositories...if we have great curators. You got a fan in us, Dan.
Check out the BoingBoing article here.
& the Exotica Project here.
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