Some things you have to be in the mood for. Personally, I am never in the mood for egg salad. Occasionally, I am in the mood for Stockhausen's Helicopter Quartet (the one where each member of a string quartet is aloft in a helicopter and skronking out bizarre musique concrete accompanied by the drone and swoop of rotorblades!). I am rarely in the mood for exotica. And Stop the Panic, sadly, is an exotica album. Ugh!
The project all started when electro-acoustic egghead David Toop and veteran pedal steel guitarist BJ Cole were yakking on about Les Baxter, Yma Sumac and the other luminaries of that 50's bachelor pad sound. Toop had just published his book on the subject and was filled with the promise that what Stereolab, Plone, and Broadcast had been achieving with their fusion of exotica and Krautrock could also be accomplished in the electronic avant-garde. Toop played Cole some Plug discs and Cole decided that Wagon Christ himself, Luke Vibert, was just the beatnik he wished to get all gaudy and South Sea Islander with. Ugh!
Stop the Panic, luckily enough, is not geared for a Tiki Hut experience. I'd feared that Vibert would churn out 13 versions of that wretched "Lovely" track that so marred his Tally Ho! record. Though Cole runs through the primer on the Hawaiian glide and the Nashville glissando, Vibert's straight-ahead beats cut the cheese to a tolerable minimum.
As Cole blithely swoops and curls his pedal steel line on "Dischordzilla," Vibert slams down rhythmic slabs like he's trying to crush his collaborator. "Cheng Phooey" begins life as a low-rumbling 303 line before releasing a venomous burst Polynesian acid. Cole's reaction-- to use his pedal steel as a machine of avant tonal color, as if wishing to wash away the spikes of the bassline. All of this recalls Cole's work with Billie Ray Martin ("4 Ambient Tales") and starkly demonstrates that the pedal steel associations with beach huts and Nashville can be rent asunder.
The duo pay another quick visit to the Land of Shriekin' N' Hollerin' on "Watery Glass Planet (Part 3)" and, as with "Cheng Phooey," the pair manage to heighten the gracious beauty of the pedal steel guitar by placing it in an atypical setting. There's a palpable watery glassiness to Cole's solos and Vibert deftly sets Cole's shimmering lines in just the right subtly spacy frame.
It's clear that Vibert and Cole haven't jumped on this project as an opportunity to wank around. These talented musicians have considered the profound complexities (and negotiated the fault lines) inherent in exotica. So the big pay off of Stop the Panic is that Cole and Vibert manage to subvert the genre without shoving its most gangrenous aspects in our faces. It was no accident that during the culturally repressed and globally paranoid 1950's, the American market became susceptible to sanitized, surreal images of the peoples who lived in steamy, aboriginal or Communist climes. Exotica was the pop culture banalization of the First World condescension of Joseph "The Impenetrable" Conrad. It was such a weird time-- I mean, at what other point in history would a new design of bathing suit was named in honor of a Pacific atoll that had just been cored by the test of a U.S. A-bomb? Yes, the bikini is a memento of First World entitlement. Wear yours with pride!
David Toop understands all the cultural resonances within the exotica genre, and Cole and Vibert have listened well to his sherpa-like guidance. Stop the Panic-- I hope-- will be the last word on this fusion of the avant-garde and the lei. However, a sinking feeling nags at me, and reminds me that the Stormtroopers of Marketing will surely seize this album and demand a truckload of tiki-ready platters from far less conscientious musicians. In fact, I'd start panicking now, if I were you-- but that's just the mood I'm in.
