Special to Asia
Photo courtesy Tracy Blackburn.
Dengue Fever’s Cambodian rock is looming large these days. This rising alternative L.A. band has been touring, getting on film soundtracks and was recently featured on NPR. But the real fascination is their multi-faceted music, and its biggest influence: the sounds of 60's Cambodian pop singers Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth, and their Khmer spins on Western rock favorites.
After the takeover by the communist Khmer Rouge in 1975, Ros and Sinn, along with many other Cambodian musicians were tragically murdered or died in labor camps. The bloody Pol Pot regime left an estimated 1.5 million people dead; music was banned and many recordings destroyed. Cambodia's musical traditions were virtually lost.
In the moving documentary, “Sleep Walking Through the Mekong,” director John Pirozzi traces Dengue Fever’s 2005 musical pilgrimage to Cambodia, where they honored the music they had come to love so well, by letting the people of Cambodia hear it again. Band members Ethan Holtzman, Zac Holtzman, David Ralicke, and Senon Williams attended a recent screening at the Echo Park Film Center, to talk about their musical influences, and Cambodian adventure.
“The whole film was shot in 10 days, and it was this intense experience because we were doing so much every day,” said Willliams, the band’s bassist. “The word spread that we were there, and the Cambodian culture is real warm, so for us it was just exciting, and like open arms.” “It was like making an elaborate home movie,” said farfisa player Ethan Holtzman.
It was during a six-month backpacking trip through Southeast Asia in the 90’s, that Holtzman first heard Khmer pop music. He loved it. When he got back to L.A., he and his guitarist brother Zac decided to form a band based on Ros and Sinn’s musical style. They contacted their longtime friend, Williams to sit in on auditions for the lead singer. Williams, too, had visited Cambodia, back in 1995. “I got this panicked phone call from Zac saying, 'oh man, we've got all these singers lined up, can you play bass?'” Williams recalled. “And the funny thing was that I knew the tunes already. I had collected stacks of tapes. Next thing you know, I'm sitting in, and next thing you know, I'm in.”
The singer who won the audition was native Cambodian Chhom Nimol, whose lilting voice had made her a regular performer for the Cambodian King and Queen back home. She also had musical ties to Sinn Sisamouth: her father had performed with the “King of Khmer Music” himself.
Like their Cambodian mentors, Dengue Fever has taken the traditional vocal and melodic elements of Khmer brought in by Chhom, and fused it with 60's American surf music, R&B and the haunting distortions of psychedelic rock. To this mix they add a hodge-podge of international and 60's styles. "We're all into 60's,” said sax player Ralicke, “Ethiopian music as well,” he said. The songs are written mostly in English, translated by Chhoml and a Cambodian musician in Washington D.C. they found on the Internet who speaks fluent English. “We'll send him English lyrics and then he'll translate them into Khmer,” Williams said, “and then Nimol will chop those up again, and there you have it - a song.”
As the Cambodian audiences in the film heard their old familiar songs, they joyfully sang along, “We played everything over there,” said Williams, “but I think it was the old Cambodian stuff that folks really reacted to.” Ralicke helped put this into perspective. “It's like the equivalent of our Beatles songs, you know,” he said. According to the documentary, the music is ingrained in Cambodian culture, and represents a time for the people when life was good and prosperous.
The devastation left by the Khmer Rouge is freshly felt in the film, as the band explores the city of Phnom Penh, and visits a music school devoted to preserving Cambodian musical traditions and dances. The school was located in a ghetto apartment building. “It was basically a gutted building where it was just packed,” said Williams. “People were cooking in the hallways, and we go into this room, and it's all these little kids that are singing amazingly,” he said. “I don't know if the movie fully captures what it was like at [the school],” said Ralicke, “because they performed for a while for us, before we did anything. It was pretty overwhelming. They were exceptional,” he said.
The film also shows the band playing with some of the surviving music masters of Cambodia. With the DVD release of the film will come a soundtrack album. “Not all the master musicians we played with are in the film,” said Williams, “there's going to be a lot more of our collaborations with them on the soundtrack.”
Now the band is gearing up for a European summer festival tour to promote their latest album, Venus on Earth. Each song is like a wonderful 60’s “flashback.” The droning guitar and farfisa organ of “Seeing Hands” is reminiscent of the Doors, with echoes of Henry Mancini in the guitar and sax combo of “Sober Driver.” The toe-tapping duet between Chhom and Zac Holtzman in “Tiger Phone Card,” conjures pleasant images of Frankie and Annette singing in a beach party film.
An audience member remarked about a Cambodian man in the film who said Dengue Fever should play in all the different provinces. “He was saying how it was very important for their county, and it's very healing,” said Zac Holtzman, “and we're trying to act on that - that was one of the most important lines in the whole film,” he said.
For more information on Dengue Fever’s upcoming tours, or screenings at Echo Park Film Center, visit: http://www.myspace.com/denguefevermusic, and
http://www.echoparkfilmcenter.org/
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