Rayon Hula is my homage to the Hawaiian cool jazz/exotica/lounge musician Arthur Lyman and to Ellery Chun, creator of the Hawaiian shirt.

Otto von Stroheim, in his sleeve notes for the CD reissue of Lyman’s 1959 album Hawaiian Sunset, wrote, “Arthur Lyman was the link between Pacific Rim Exotica and American Jazz”. There is an expression—nahenahe—used to describe a certain preference in music that Hawaiians have. It roughly translates as “sweet and slow” and it is this quality in Lyman’s music that has always made it authentically Hawaiian. Jon Fitzgerald and Phillip Hayward, in an article entitled “Tropical Cool” in the book Widening The Horizon write: “…his work has rarely, if ever, been considered by local critics within the (continuing) tradition of contemporary Hawaiian music in the Islands. Underlining his ‘invisibility’ in terms of dominant local histories is his omission from George Kanahele’s 543-page encyclopaedia of Hawaiian Music and Musicians.” Commenting on his use of bird calls and other “exotic” sounds in his live performances and on record Lyman said they were not “exotic” for him, they were all “…natural, the sound of the wind in the palms, the birds.” This collection is made from samples of some of Arthur Lyman’s records, deconstructed, treated and reconstructed with lap steel guitar and/or electronics played across the top. All the bird songs are live recordings that I made in Queensland, Australia.

Mike Cooper (IT) has for the past 40 years been an international musical explorer, performing and recording, solo and in a number of inspired groupings and a variety of genres. Initially a folk-blues guitarist and singer-songwriter his work has diversified to include improvised and electronic music, live music for silent films, radio art and sound installations. He is also a music journalist, writing features for magazines, particularly on Pacific music and musicians, a visual artist, film and video maker, collector of Hawaiian shirts and appears on more than 60 records to date. Ambient Electronic Exotica is the genre and subtitle of recent solo performances, often accompanied with film or video, and three CD releases, Kiribati, Globe Notes and Rayon Hula. Ambient recordings made in the Pacific, South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, treated electronically, combined with acoustic and electronic instruments and re-located to produce “virtual soundscapes”. In 2000 he started HIPSHOT to produce limited edition CDRs from his studio in Rome where he currently lives.