The Forbidden Sounds of Don Tiki
Don Tiki’s 1997 Tikiphonic Records debut—Lloyd Kandell and Kit Ebersbach’s Honolulu-based ten-piece-plus ensemble carrying the Shell Bar and Kaiser Aluminum Dome lineage forward by another quarter-century. The Hawaiʻi-based revival’s founding document and the closest the modern Exotica catalog comes to direct cultural continuity with the canonical era.
The Forbidden Sounds of Don Tiki is the album where the Hawaiʻi-based revival announced itself. Lloyd Kandell (performing as Fluid Floyd) and Kit Ebersbach (performing as Perry Coma) had been working in the Honolulu music scene for years—Ebersbach as a keyboardist and arranger with deep local-scene credentials, Kandell as a producer and longtime Exotica enthusiast—and Forbidden Sounds was the project they assembled to bring the genre back home. The album released on the band’s own Tikiphonic Records label in 1997, three years after I, Swinger had launched the East Coast revival, and the geographic and lineage contrast with the Combustible Edison / Tipsy revival is the album’s most useful frame.
The ensemble is the album’s defining feature. Where Combustible Edison was a six-piece studio band and Tipsy was a two-person production duo, Don Tiki assembled a ten-to-twelve-piece group at full strength: multiple percussionists, vibraphone, keyboards, guitar, bass, woodwinds, and a rotating cast of vocalists (Tiare Aguilar and Vavyne Pukai among them). Several members had played professionally in Hawaiʻi hotel-bar and showroom circuits—circuits that could trace direct personnel and venue lineage back through the post-Denny / post-Lyman Honolulu music scene to the canonical Shell Bar era. The geographic continuity isn’t mythological; it’s documented in working musicians’ biographies.
The arrangements lean into the larger ensemble. Where Exotica (1957) had been a four-piece working-bar combo, Forbidden Sounds is a full-ensemble production with multiple percussion lines, layered vibe-and-marimba textures, woodwind soloists, and vocal features. The result is closer to Baxter’s orchestral Ritual of the Savage register than to Denny’s small-combo Exotica—but with the deep Hawaiʻi-music inflections (slack-key guitar voicings, hula percussion patterns, occasional Hawaiian-language vocals) that no mainland-recorded record from the 1950s had access to.
The track list runs through a mix of recovered canonical material and original Don Tiki compositions. Several Denny covers appear in re-arranged forms that bring out the Hawaiʻi-music influences the small-combo Shell Bar recordings had only hinted at. Original compositions like Don Tiki Theme and Skinny Dip extend the canonical idiom with modern recording-production values and the larger ensemble’s capabilities. Vocal features by Tiare Aguilar and Vavyne Pukai bring a contemporary Native Hawaiian voice into the genre that the canonical-era records hadn’t had.
The cultural-respect framing on Forbidden Sounds runs differently from the other revival records. The Hawaiʻi-based personnel, the explicit Shell Bar lineage references, and the contemporary Native Hawaiian vocal contributions place the album inside actual Hawaiian cultural practice in a way that the East Coast and California revival projects couldn’t claim. The imagined-Polynesia tension that runs through all of Exotica is still present (the genre’s conventions are inescapable), but the album is also a real engagement with Honolulu’s music-making community rather than a recovery project performed from outside.
Start here: Don Tiki Theme for the canonical opener and the band’s signature large-ensemble sound. Tiki Romance for the slow-mood register with Hawaiian-language vocals. The album’s recovered Denny material for direct comparison with the canonical recordings.
Why it matters: Forbidden Sounds is the Hawaiʻi-based revival’s founding document and the album with the most direct claim on cultural continuity with the canonical era. For a Forbidden Altar reader building a serious Exotica revival shelf, Don Tiki is the band that most directly extends the genre’s actual Hawaiian lineage. The record sits at a different angle from the East Coast revival and is essential for that reason.
Related Forbidden Altar content: Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman. Taboo, Bahia—the Kaiser Aluminum Dome lineage Don Tiki extends. Exotica—the Shell Bar reference point.