by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
Khmer translation by SEK-LAVIE

Artists often have a “road to Damascus” experience that focuses and directs their creativity from that point forward, but that of Californian Farfisa player Ethan Holtzman took place nowhere near Syria. His happened during a trip through Cambodia in 1997, when he first heard the Khmer-language rock of the ’60s, the distinctive Cambodian variant of the Yankee soul, surf and psych-rock drifting over from American Forces Radio stations in Vietnam, championed by folks like Ros Serey Sothea (whose “New Year’s Eve” was Holtzman’s first Khmer-rock crush), Pen Ran and especially Sin Sisamouth.

“I’m not a huge Elvis fan,” says Holtzman, “but he’s that large. Elvis in America is like Sin Sisamouth in Cambodia. Everybody knows him. It’s sad that he perished with the Khmer Rouge—Ros Serey Sothea did too.”

In fact, the whole burgeoning Khmer-rock sound evaporated entirely when, in the mid-’70s, Pol Pot and his extremist Khmer Rouge insurgency seized power and began a campaign of mass extermination that took almost two million lives. By the time the Vietnamese invaded and deposed Pol Pot in 1979, the Khmer Rouge had left behind the notorious “killing fields” and a legacy of having perpetrated perhaps the greatest atrocity of recent history.

Sisamouth, Sothea, Ran, all of them are gone today. Gone, but not forgotten—not if Holtzman and his band Dengue Fever have a say in the matter.

“Over there, I heard some of the classics, like [Sothea’s] ‘New Year’s Eve’—that was the one that I clearly remember, I was going, ‘Wow, this is great, I gotta find this.’ But I didn’t find it over there. They told me, ‘Go to the Russian market!’ I looked around, but it was more pop, like karaoke.”

Upon his return, Holtzman and his brother Zac, a guitarist, began scouring Long Beach, California’s Little Phnom Penh neighbourhood for bootleg cassettes of the music they’d both fallen for. “There’s a store there, and they’ve duplicated every single album Sin Sisamouth has done, Ros Serey Sothea, Pen Ran—these are the best singers. So we gathered a lot of them once we knew what we were looking for.”

The next step was enlisting a band, especially a singer, and that took them to a restaurant called Dragon House, where they discovered Ch’hom Nimol.

Fever dreams

“I asked myself why Americans would be interested in Cambodian music,” recalls Ch’hom, a Cambodian-born 20-something from a celebrated musical family back home, who was working the Cambodian community’s wedding-singer circuit over here. “I didn’t think they were lying to me, though. They were the first to listen to and play a Cambodian style of music here.”

The newly-christened Dengue Fever (a name taken from the tropical illness that knocked out Holtzman’s Scottish travelling companion in Cambodia) debuted in 2002 with a Khmer cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” for Matt Dillon’s film City of Ghosts, and then a self-titled CD. Since then, the band has played up and down the West Coast, never to mention Moscow and Lisbon, but the real test came last year when the band traveled to Cambodia to perform and to shoot a documentary. Holtzman recalls how instantaneously they became bona fide stars thanks to the Cambodian Television Network, CTN.

“Once we played on the air, it was aired three times a day during our whole stay there, and they’ve only got four channels. Everywhere we went, they’d look at us and go, ‘Ah, CTN! Sing a song,’ and start singing one of the songs we did.

“I’m not positive, but we could have been the first Westerners to perform Cambodian music on CTN. I’d love for some Cambodian kids to form a band—inspire them and then come back and play a show with them.”

Ch’hom also feels the trip was a success—“To show that Cambodia has a true rock music, which was destroyed and lost during the time of Pol Pot, and to prove and show to the whole world that Cambodians know and understand real music, not just copying or stealing. That the two brothers don’t understand Khmer but play Cambodian music is a plus for encouragement and true pride, even more so if we continue to play outside the country, so that people the world over can get to know true Cambodian music.”

New sounds, old wounds

Thing is, Dengue Fever don’t simply play Cambodian music, or even just an Americanized hybrid. Bollywood glamour, spaghetti-Western cool, klezmer, ska and, thanks to sax-man David Ralicke, a heaping helping of Ethiopian jazz all flavour the band’s unique and exquisite sonic stew. “When you listen to them, there’s a weird similarity,” says Holtzman of the sonic qualities of both Cambodian rock and Ethiopian jazz. “When you look at them historically, there’s a similar story. I’m not rock solid on what happened in Ethiopia, but I’m pretty sure that it was during close to the same time, and there was also a lot of genocide going on.”

Dengue Fever’s self-titled 2003 CD was almost entirely covers of Cambodian pop classics, but the follow-up, 2005’s Escape From Dragon House, is mostly originals. It showcases not only the amazingly expressive and engaging sound they’ve achieved, but frequently a darker tone as well, such as on the eerily hypnotic “One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula.”

“It’s a song about a woman born in Battambang,” says Ch’hom, who’s from there herself. “A sad song because, ever since she was born, she’s experienced nothing but sadness and suffering. At the end of the song, this woman remains alone.”

Though perhaps not explicitly, the song seems to invoke the spirits of the many innocent artists slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge. It’s a sobering note that any exploration of modern Cambodian culture cannot avoid.

“It wasn’t that long ago,” Holtzman reminds us. “I’ve been to Cambodia twice, and going the second time, I could see that it’s changing. The people are starting to feel a little more at ease. It’s still a little frightening around elections, just because it’s Cambodia, but when I was there in ’97, it was still very unstable. People would tell me, ‘Oh, one year ago…’ and point across this lake and show explosions going off.”

Maybe it’s the Buddhist beatitude underpinning Cambodian culture, but the healing is happening. “They’re pretty good about accepting and saying, ‘Okay, this guy was part of the Khmer Rouge, but it’s over, it’s behind us,’ and they’ll give him a job. Even Pol Pot died naturally, of old age.”

With Asobi Seksu and the Diamond Sea at Green Room on Tuesday, Sept. 19, 9 p.m., $10

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