Introduced explicitly as the title of two 1993 volumes by Re/Search, an avant-garde publication based in San Francisco. As covered in these books, this label includes everything from Exotica as described above to sound effects, serious and comic and unintentionally comic spoken word, and stag party records, to Moog synthesizers, to outrageous foreign covers of U.S. pop hits. The two ISM volumes helped spark current interest in exotica, though, with interviews that brought the names of Martin Denny, Korla Pandit, and Yma Sumac to a new generation, and led to release of two CD compilations of music mentioned in the book.

Championed by Irwin Chusid in his excellent book, Songs in the Key of Z, Outsider music includes anything that might be considered to fall outside the mainstream of popular musical. And here the mainstream applies on a global scale, so what's termed "World Music" doesn't pass the test in most cases because it's usually just mainstream pop music from somewhere else on the planet. Although the Outsider Music Mailing List page claims that lounge/exotica music does not qualify, I would beg to differ. Certainly many of the fans of one enjoy and collect the other. But more importantly, there is the fact that so much of the music and musicians covered on this site have been overlooked by the two primary indicators of historical memory: reference books and reissued recordings. Yes, there was a time when Ray Conniff was just a turn of the radio dial away, but now his music is relegated to die-hard fans and those who roam the beaches on which the detritus of the music marketplace washes up. Somewhere My Love is just as much a cast-off or exile from the mainstream as something by Shooby Taylor. No one can ever expect to collect all the music that has been carried away on the tides of the marketplace, but the act of remembering the forgotten is a fundamental refusal to surrender the future to entropy.

The rest is on here: http://www.spaceagepop.com/whatis.htm