He has dined on rats, been slashed with thorns and turned his penis inside out. But next week Bruce Parry, who embedded himself with indigenous communities in four continents for the BBC’s Tribe series, enters the bearpit that is the UK music market with an album featuring a mixture of artists almost as exotic as the places he has visited: Yusuf Islam, will.i.am, K. T. Tunstall and Johnny Borrell.

With proceeds going to Survival International, which campaigns for tribal people worldwide, Amazon Tribe: Songs for Survival is made up of songs inspired by tribal themes and electronic tracks built around samples that Parry recorded during Tribe.

It might seem a departure for a man who has specialised in cheerful acts of masochism. But, although Parry is no musician, he is inordinately fond of letting his hair down. During his spell with the Royal Marines he earned a reputation as “a terrible p*** head”.

Single, and a big fan of electronic music, he lives in Ibiza, one of the most hedonistic places in Christendom. And several of his experiences in Tribe have erred on the, erm, narcotic side, from munching hallucinogenic tree bark to having vision-inducing resin blown up his nose. Even his worthier Amazon series detours away from the ravages of drug trafficking and deforest-ation so that Parry can gulp down more intoxicating gunge and drift off on another pan-dimensional excursion.

Seated in the West London studio where much of the album was recorded, he is as relentlessly friendly as he appears in the field. There are “amazing similarities” between tribal music and Western dance music, he says. The tribe that proved most popular with the artists were Gabon’s Babongo, who gave him “a three-day hallucinogenic experience” in which he was carried around, never touching the ground, and “reborn” in a river.

They were “the most musical group I’ve lived with, very percussion-based. During that particular trip, if you want to call it that, people were at the top of a hill with their drums and branches dipped in water. They ran down towards me, so the drums got louder and it went from warm to cold because they sprinkled water over me. My senses were going ‘Wooah!’ We think we’re at the pinnacle of the dance music experience with lights and smoke, but that’s nothing compared with this.”

He is 39, but there is still something of the goofy teenager in this former boarder at Wells Cathedral School. Parry has been criticised for not putting his experiences into geopolitical context, but he insists that “we always just talked about what we saw on the ground”. That changed when he was approached by the Penan of Borneo, whose homeland was being destroyed by loggers. “All these people had been trekking for days to say, ‘Help us: we’re losing our land and no one cares.’ ” The last episode of Tribe publicised the Penan’s plight, and there was a big public response: “People were asking, ‘What can we do for these people who have have taught us so much about stress-free living?’”

Inspired by his music-rich Balearic home, Parry decided to put together a CD based on the Tribe recordings, which featured single voices, ensembles, and instruments including dried calves’ hoofs and gourd flutes. The project was overseen by Molly Oldfield, the daughter of Mike, who sent off the samples to artists.

Some contributors were friends: Parry is mates with the ambient-house outfit the Egg, while Oldfield was at Oxford with Joe Goddard of Hot Chip. She also recruited her father,

Main Pic: Parry joins the Matis tribe in the Amazon in 2007. Below: With Molly Oldfield who did his cosmic thing around a choral recording by the Anuta of Polynesia. Some offerings were less successful: Carrickfergus, Borrell’s attempt to fuse the folk musics of Ireland and Ethiopia, was described by one critic as “magnificently awful”. To his credit, Borrell has rerecorded it, and take two is a big improvement.

“Each of those samples takes me straight back,” Parry says. “It’s not just a voice, it’s a friend. For the sample used in Molly’s father’s song, I held the mike as they sang.” Other samples evoke more sinister images. Bluestates use the haunting music of Papua’s Kombai tribe, some of whom are “proper headhunters. If you heard that and knew they were around the corner, you would run a mile.”

Does Parry worry about copyright-conscious cannibals demanding royalties? “No, we got consent from the chiefs,” he says – plus each tribe was paid for participating in the programmes. Mindful of the controversy over Deep Forest, who sampled tribal music to multimillion-selling effect in the 1990s and were criticised for not returning enough of their profits to indigenous communities, he insists all the album’s proceeds will go to Survival International.

In the meantime, he is looking forward to getting together with the Western musicians, many of whom he hasn’t met. There will probably be a party, he imagines. He likes parties; they’re far more pleasurable than turning one’s penis inside out.

Amazon Tribe: Songs for Survival is released on Oct 13 (Kensal Town). Parry speaks about it and his book, Amazon, at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival (cheltenhamfestivals.com 0844 5768970), Oct 11 2008

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