Four albums from the legend Arthur Lyman who lit the blue touch paper on exotica. From heavy sound effects-led exotica to much simpler soulful jazz all powered by Lyman’s awesome marimba playing. Key sounds from the incredibly strange world of music for any bachelor pad.

For fans of Martin Denny/ Les Baxter. As loved by Lux and Ivy of The Cramps, Throbbing Gristle and many more…

Featuring the band’s million-selling debut, ‘Taboo’ from 1958 acclaimed as an early pinnacle of the genre. The eerie and echoey ‘Bwana A’ taking the listener much further into the jungle. ‘Bahia’ with its added ship’s horns, thunder storms, parrots, paraquats, rainfall, tinkling marimba, and a lonesome violin. Plus ‘Leis Of Jazz’ in which Lyman revisits his jazz roots and love of Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton.

This is music like nothing else:

“A conch shell wailed, the conga drums thump-thumped, the bamboo sticks clattered," Time magazine wrote in 1962, "The four men on stage were constantly on the move — clacking wooden blocks, scratching a corrugated gourd, flailing away at Chinese gongs, weaving rhythms that were insistent, sinuous and hypnotic. Occasionally, when the spirit moved them, they barked like seals or whooped like cranes.”