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by Matt Keppel
Buck Rogers never had it so good. Mid-20th century Americans' vision of the future was a rosy utopia of "service-oriented" robot butlers and super-quick transportation systems, without all the fuss of troublesome aliens and world dominators. The Space Race was beginning, convenient household appliances were popping up left and right, and ultra, hyper, and deluxe entered the streamlined lexicon of futurespeak.
In this burgeoning era of mega-productivity, a soundtrack was created to
provide background ambience to the lives of the leisure-enjoying bachelors
and bachelorettes of the 1950s. Hi-fi stereos had just been introduced
and to test their brilliance of multi-dimensional sound, instrumental,
jazz-styled records emerged. Esquivel, a Mexican orchestra conductor and
arranger, started releasing these soundtrack-type albums mixing horns,
strings, choirs, and percussionists. All these "Every instrument but the
kitchen sink" contributions meshed to form an enormous sound collage to
the untrained ears of the Eisenhower era. To our current youth, though,
Cabaret Esquivel (RCA Records) -- one of the many recent Esquivel
re-issues -- just sounds like the zany soundtrack to Saturday morning cartoons
and "Brady Bunch" re-runs; all promising futurism of sound lost to "Tom
& Jerry" chase sequences.
Of this new generation of listeners, '90s British drone-pop band Stereolab picked out the key elements of relaxation and suaveness from Esquivel's catalogue and added it to their brand of Velvet Underground-esque atmospherics. Naming one of their earlier full-length releases Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (Too Pure U.K. Records) -- the title of an Esquivel compilation -- was a definite nod to the master of lush arrangements. But with Stereolab, the kitsch quality so inherent in the recent "Lounge Nation" revival of cocktail jazz and all things Vegas has been thrown out the window in favor of minimalism, bubbling '70s primitive synthesizers, and lyrics concerning social and political upheavals. It's easy-listening for the graduate school set.
If Stereolab is the serious side of "space age" pop, then Astral Sounds From Beyond The Year 2000 (Scamp Records) is its jokey younger brother. When the moon landing and the Apollo program were all the rage, all things cosmic were all things popular. Instrumental 'soundtracks' to non-existent movies would regularly sell truckloads. With titles like "Astral Freakout" and "Tripping on Lunar 07", the peace and love era of the late '60s was bordering on kitsching itself to death. Post WWII eye (ear?) -opening inventions with stereo equipment (hi-fi, updated speaker systems) moved increasingly inward as stereo headphones and, later, Walkmans made personal music consumption a solitary, individual experience. Head music, mind-altering sounds, may all have emerged thanks to the conducting hands of one Mr. Esquivel, millions of sci-fi B-movies, and too much time spent in Las Vegas's velvet lounges.
