Those thirty second sound bytes that they let you download for free on Amazon: those tender little tastings of the songs, sometimes they can be a bit of a joke. Thirty seconds to decide whether or not to send an item hurtling across the screen and into your shopping cart - for a lot of albums, that's really not enough. It is particularly hard on slow-burn, post-everything types. For others: you don't need anything like thirty seconds, for those rare few the instant you hear the thing it's as if you connect with the music on a chemical level.
It was like that when I first heard the Californian/Cambodian band Dengue Fever.
Whether it was the rolling surf guitars, the surging brass, the driving rock-pulse rhythms or the deliriously beautiful microtonal singing of the vocalist, I was sold the second it hit my ears. If you could map the pleasure-centres of my brain as different blocks of colour, this music would have lit them up like a fireworks display. I hit the 'buy now' button so fast it was a wonder the keyboard didn't catch fire. Then there was the exquisitely torturous wait for the CD to ship all the way to me out here in isolated little New Zealand.
The genre is Cambodian rock, not something I'd heard of before. The sound is extraordinary: it is not completely new or unfamiliar, instead it does something far more magical. It takes the bones of American garage rock from the fifties and sixties and transforms it. It is as if the music has been reflected in some strange and fractured mirror. The guitars are rougher, lean and slightly unhinged. The brass has a point it damn well wants to make clear. The drums, the bass, the blissed-out farfisa, everything has been cleverly twisted into directions and shapes that no Western artist has thought to manipulate it into. And the vocals...dear lord, the vocals...
The vocalist of Dengue Fever is Chhom Nimol and she is, as far as I know, the only Cambodian member of the band. Her voice is an amazing, spiralling thing: birdlike, soaring to notes that seem impossibly high, swooping down into percussive volleys of Khmer. There is something so extraordinarily alien and, yup, exotic about her voice cresting atop those instrumental arrangements. It is traditional Cambodian folk music meeting psyched-out garage rock in a thick humid haze, as dense and overwhelming as incense smoke.
It is reductive to say that it sounds like it should be on a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack, but...still, it totally does.
And for a long time that's all it was to me: a cool new band playing some way-out parallel-retro style of music, and another win for the bloody impressive Web of Mimicry label (a label founded by Trey Spruance, best known as one of the founding members of Mr Bungle). You see, although not that far from Cambodia on a geographical level, it might as well have been another planet to me. I'd heard of the Khmer Rouge. I'd heard of Pol Pot. I knew the truth was terrible but I was vague on the details. So I did a little research ( and by research I mean surfing the internet, isn't that what everyone means when they say that?). And what I learned was appalling, a sickening genocide carried out against the people of a country by their own self-appointed leaders.
Cambodian rock music is, or has been for far too many years, a lost music.
The Vietnam War. American troops occupied Cambodia - there are folks that argue that this was the first time the musicians of Cambodia were exposed to American pop music, via the Armed Forces Radio, but this ignores the fact that Cambodia was a prosperous and highly-educated country prior to the Vietnam war and that it's musicians were a fairly well-travelled bunch. Substantial portions of Cambodia were extensively bombed in order to destroy trade paths and those areas deemed of strategic advantage to the enemy. The 'enemy' in question being determined by which side was doing the bombing at the time. Tensions were already high in Cambodia prior to this, but the partial devastation of the country left it in a very fragile state. It spiralled into a civil war. Emerging triumphant from this war was Pol Pot and his army, the Khmer Rouge: followers of the Communist Party of Campuchea. Pol Pot sought to cleanse Cambodia of the taint of Western influence, he also annihilated the middle class altogether in his bid to drive Cambodia into a sort of socially-engineered agricultural farming community. Any hint of intellectualism was punishable by execution or being sent to one of the many prison camps (which was execution of a slower sort) - and in case you're wondering, just wearing spectacles was enough to earn you this kind of punishment. It was genocide. You've heard of the killing fields, you've heard of people naked and dying beneath a burning sun, the war crimes, the tortures, the purges, countless dead and rotting in piles, you've seen the images of heaped skulls...
The Cambodian rock musicians, the original ones: Ros Sereysothea, Pan Ron, Sinn Sisamouth and many more besides, all the names that appeared in neat little type on the inside jacket of the Dengue Fever album booklet, all of these names tell of tragedies. Ros Sereysothea disappeared and is believed to have been buried in a shallow grave by the side of a lonely road. Sinn Sisamouth was executed by firing squad after being refused the chance to sing a final song. Houy Meas was gang-raped and mutilated. Another young woman: I read somewhere it was Pan Ron but perhaps it was another musician, was stripped naked and forced to run in circles while singing until the scalding sun boiled her brains.
Their crimes: the music they played demonstrated a strong Western influence.
All these reports are apocryphal. This is a history half-lost.
The songs survived the singers, passed around on bootlegged cassette tapes, the music choked beneath a haze of white noise and wear, but still extraordinary. In the last couple of decades these songs have begun to be properly resurrected. The Cambodian Rocks website cleaned up the found recordings as best they could and made them available in compilation form once again, Dengue Fever themselves did something similar with 'Electric Cambodia'. But now two wonderful bands have brought the sound back to life, re-recording the resurrected songs while adding originals of their own to the mix. Those two bands are of course: Dengue Fever, and more recently a thrilling and primarily-Australian band called The Cambodian Space Project.
Dengue Fever are the smoother ride of the two. Brass and psychedelic organs play a strong role, thick rolling guitar riffs crest and break like waves. Nimol's voice, on their earlier work especially, is slightly tweaked in the mix, giving it a hazy, far-away quality - like a heat shimmer on a sun-baked road. Their core vibe is very melodic and often playfully humorous, but there is a melancholy informing much of their work - particular on later discs. This lingering sadness is fitting. One of their finest tracks is 'One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula', it appears on their second disc: 'Escape From Dragon House'. It is an utterly hypnotic piece, riding out on a pulsing krautrock-inflected riff. The vocals have been electronically altered, giving them a surreal warbled quality as if they are dissolving into water. A baritone sax drone surfaces from the mix like a shark's fin breaking the surface of the ocean. It is dedicated to the memory of Ros Sereysothea.
Other influences creep into their music from time to time - all suitably retro. There is the odd hint of Ethiopian Jazz from time to time. One of the two originals on their debut: the magnificent '22 Nights' owes more to Ennio Morricone than any other composer - a swaggering guitar riff that evokes a vast desert of sun-shattered stone. 'Saran Wrap' is all creeping menace and serial-killer perversion, sounding more contemporary indie than many of their other tracks. 'Sni Bong' boasts scatter-gun, almost rapped, bursts of Khmer. The chorus is transcendent. 'Sleepwalking in the Mekong' is blissful and strangely heart-rending. One of the tracks on third disc: 'Venus on Earth' sounds for all the world as if it's going to turn into 'Hotel California' before veering off into a far more interesting direction. 'Seeing Hands' is underpinned by one of the damn coolest basslines ever laid down There is even a slight echo of the Carpenters to some of the other tracks on that album. Later albums feature more English-language tracks, about which I have mixed feelings. To my ears, Nimol's voice sounds far richer and more enchanting when singing in Khmer - the shape of the words better suits the microtones, the gliding notes, the glissando. A fourth disc - equally brilliant - 'Cannibal Courtship' rounds out their catalogue. All are essential titles, though sadly the first two have become quite hard to come by.
Beyond the superficial similarities The Cambodian Space Project are truly strong enough to stand on their own. Their only full-length to date is '2011: A Space Odyssey' and, like Dengue Fever's self-titled debut, it focuses mainly on the once-lost songs of Cambodia ('Wait Ten Months More' and 'I'm Sixteen' appear on both albums) with a couple of originals thrown in for extra spice. Their sound is scrappier, more boisterous than Dengue Fever's. The guitars are rough and jagged: snapping and snaggling with real bite. There is little or no brass, but instead a profusion of raucous harmonica and some other even more unexpected sounds. The drumming is excellent, loose-limbed and heavy. A bevy of fascinating Eastern instruments have been worked into the arrangements, giving the music a richly exotic sound. 'Tek Tum' is a stand-out track: a traditional piece reworked. It boasts unusual chord patterns: circular and oddly descending over a bed of strangely-tuned Eastern instruments and a vocal line that seems to fold into itself, drawing the listener deeper and deeper into the arrangement. It is the most mellow piece on the disc - hypnotic rather than inflammatory, but no less incandescent. Srey Thy is the vocalist here and her voice is sharper, more clipped and punk-inflected than Nimol's, but equally divine. Her past is a truly fascinating thing, often-times disturbing (she was almost sold into sexual slavery after answering an application to become a beautician). Their sound is an explosion of ragged, wild-eyed joy. '2011: A Space Odyssey' is unquestionably a party album. Thirty thrilling minutes of exuberant garage rock and roll gone far east.
Perhaps that is the most remarkable thing about this music. It sounds so utterly and completely alive: like a burst of laughter, a sudden fall of hot rain. It is a genre that has passed through the truest of hells yet it remains: still bright and propulsive, full of colour and power.
http://www.denguefevermusic.com/splash.cfm
https://www.facebook.com/DengueFever
http://www.myspace.com/thecambodianspaceproject
https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Cambodian-Space-Project/102538263132453
And this fantastic article from the Quietus about The Cambodian Space Project, that puts everything better than I ever could:
http://thequietus.com/articles/06943-cambodian-space-project-interview
There's a genre called "Ethiopian Jazz"? Wow, you really are very musically educated.
ReplyDeleteI remember you telling me about the tragedy of Cambodia on a Christmas day in years past. It is a truly tragic tale - not only for the lives lost, but also the vicious nature of their deaths and the huge impact it must have had on both the culture and the survivors.
I must look into this genre of music.