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Of grunge & meat grinding

On 8 April 1994, the day Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered in his Seattle home, local journalist Charles R Cross picked up the phone to hear CNN’s Larry King bellowing: “Tell me, what is ‘grunge music’?” It was – and still is – a bloody good question.

“Grunge isn’t a musical style. It’s complaining set to a drop D tuning,” DJ/journalist Jeff Gilbert once quipped to Mark Yarm, author of Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. The term, now wedded to the bleak sound of Seattle, appears as far back as on the sleeve of a 1957 Johnny Burnette rockabilly album. By April 1972, American rock critic Lester Bangs was using it in Rolling Stone magazine to describe the muddy, indistinct sound of a Count Five album. In 1988, Seattle music label Sub Pop used it to promote a Green River album: “Gritty vocals, roaring Marshall amps, ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”

Today, years after Cobain decried the wholesale export of the Seattle scene as a prefabricated trend, grunge still retains meaning. Unlike the sound of its hipster successors in the early 2000s, this stripped-back primeval rock music eschewed artifice in favour of grinding bass riffs, thrashy guitar and pictures-falling-off-the-walls drums.

Such is the sound of The Mincers, Tasmanian peddlers of grunge-inspired girl rock, here to promote their debut album and record new material with Professor Kinski of local raga-dub band, Dub Addiction. We caught up with lead vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Zoe Visoiu to talk Nirvana, environmentalism and Facebook relationship statuses.

The Mincers take me back to thrashing around in student mosh pits in the ’90s.

I also spent a lot of time thrashing around in student mosh pits in the ’90s! But I grew up in Tasmania in the forest valley of Jackey’s Marsh. I was quite isolated as a child and after having enough of art school, I moved to Melbourne, where I became drawn into an amazing spoken word scene there.

It was a very eclectic scene and I began to feel that my poetry would be more powerful if it were set to music. So I started teaching myself guitar and to consider the song-writing elements and never looked back once I discovered the three-minute pop song, which is a really powerful medium.

We’re not spoken word specifically, but that was the place where I took off from stylistically and have become more concerned with vocalisation as time has gone by. I plan to incorporate some spoken monologue into the shows. I move between speaking and singing, the melody comes and goes depending on the content, subject and emotion involved in my lyrics. A lot of my lyrics are very personal and almost diaristic in nature.

 

How so?

Some of my songs are inspired by relationships and some are like a diary. Some of the songs I write when I actually have something in my life that I can’t quite quantify and I feel like by turning it into a song, I can transform it into something beautiful when it hasn’t been beautiful. It’s existential in a way: by acknowledging the experience, it’s working it out.

Catharsis: poetic indeed. Are there any recurring themes?

Relation to self; relationships and self. My song Good Behaviour talks about not sacrificing who I am to become something for someone else. Industry Tool is about wanting to change my relationship status on Facebook; I’m interested in the impacts of the internet on people’s personal and public relationships.

Something about the Piano is a love song inspired by Pinky Beecroft. There’s something about musical communication and connection that affects people deeply. I’m aware of that, even on stage. And then some of my songs are so private that I never perform them.

Isn’t that a little unusual? 

Yeah, I’ve got songs that I’ve written about ex-partners who have died and out of respect I have shelved some material. Plus, it upsets me to sing them publically. It’s a personal thing. I generally don’t hold back.

You say you felt isolated as a child. What was it like growing up in rural Tasmania?

I grew up in a small logging community where my mother became very involved in local environmentalism. I was picked on at school because 80% of the other kids’ parents were employed by the logging industry and this forced me to become very independent and strong-willed.

I do have environmental concerns, though they might not be obvious; I’m more likely to speak in between songs about issues that I think are important. Growing up in the forest without power, TV or many other children around made me quite self-sufficient. Because I was so isolated, I had a lot of time to think and develop my own interests.

Discovering grunge rock, I felt liberated: suddenly a whole culture of people were wearing op-shop clothes, not conforming, and I felt like I was a part of that community. I owned Hole’s albums before I’d even heard of Nirvana.

The independence of my childhood has carried through into my art as an adult in the ways that I’m DIY. I’ve taught myself how to play guitar, how to sing, how to write songs, how to manage my band, and organise gigging and touring.

 

Song writing: do you have a process?

It tends to be different every time. Sometimes I’ll start with a guitar riff and then frantically search around for lyrics to put with it. Other times, I’ll write out whole pages of lyrics and then try to set them to music. Some songs come out of jamming at band practice and I always ask the guys for input on arrangements and hooks.

The last song I wrote is Good Behaviour, which I wrote because I was angry. I felt like I was in a really tough situation and I wanted to use the song to help make me feel strong. I started with the lyrics: it’s a series of statements and affirmations. It’s stuff that I wanted to say to someone but wasn’t able to. I feel like turning that situation into a song, I managed to turn that situation around, though my boyfriend hates it when I sing that song… [Laughs]

 

On the subject of partners, Industry Tool: there can’t be many souls on Facebook who haven’t agonised over their public relationship status at some point. 

I totally agree. These days, I choose not to have a relationship status because that’s too personal. Sometimes to have the public affirmation of love is comforting, but other times it’s such a major head-fuck that I can’t be bothered with it.

 

OK, the debut album: talk us through it.

Meet The Mincers is produced by Kramer, an ex-member of Ween who produced Lou Reed and Debbie Harry. Eleven songs ranging from country-grunge elements on Look in the Mirror, to Siouxsie Sioux-esque Shorts and a Skirt, with bits of classic rock and melodic pop in between. Look in the Mirror is featured in the climactic fight scene of an upcoming Tasmanian short film, The Jelly Wrestler, by award-winning director Rebecca Thomson. Some of the songs are quite short and punchy. I’m interested to see how the album will be received on tour by an international audience.

Skipping back for a sec to where it all began: was there ever a defining moment when you were able to vanquish your tormentors at school?

Hard question. I think actually I’ve only more recently overcome it. Reconnecting with old school friends via Facebook has given us a chance to see each other objectively. There was a defining moment, though: being successful with my music, being acknowledged, gaining a Hollywood contract for songs with my first band.

When that happened I felt I really did show the world that even as a female songwriter in an isolated community, you can still be bigger than your environment and expectations of you. I felt like I proved myself. But the strongest thing that I did was to realise that I could just walk away and that I didn’t have to justify anything to anyone or take on their limited mainstream perceptions.

WHO: The Mincers
WHAT: Grunge-inspired girl rock
WHERE: Equinox, St. 278 and Bodhi Villa, Kampot
WHEN: 9pm January 25 (Equinox) and February 1 (Bodhi Villa)
WHY: Grunge lives!

 

Dish: Under the awnings

It is possible to be a tourist in your own town. Since an influx of expatriates have adopted parts of the city as home, it’s easy to live in blissful ignorance of the ‘real’ Phnom Penh, still alive in the local markets and winding alleys. These are the sites which do not appear on your tuk tuk driver’s picture card alongside the National Museum and S21.

O’Russei Market is one of them. It might seem a little daunting at first: it’s the most densely populated market in Phnom Penh. The heavy concrete is absolutely necessary to the holding of this number of people, shoes and appliances. It’s not a place you would stop off for a quiet coffee and piece of cake, but don’t think that means you can’t get them there. You can. It’s especially worth a visit if you fancy fried crickets.

Starting on the west side of the market, opposite a line of fabric stalls where rolls of glittering, gaudy, then plain black and denim fabrics sit beneath canvas awnings, is the fruit market. A group of stalls create a walkway into the ground floor of the three-storey market. Before you are engulfed by the darkness, take a seat at the brohet stall.

If you have ever been wearied by the dull brown of beef or the yawn-inspiring off-white of chicken, this is the cuisine for you. Just don’t try to work out what you’ve ordered until you eat it. Pork (or crab) comes wrapped in a green coating which, when fried, becomes crispy and brittle; the traditional British rhubarb sweet seems to be the inspiration for one stick of rolled red and white meat and, of course, the platter wouldn’t be complete without the Angry Bird kebab (a local delicacy, don’t you know).

But don’t be afraid! It may look strange and vaguely dangerous, but the pork (or crab) balls are delicious, no matter what shape or colour they come in. At $1 for three kebabs and two fried vegetable sides, it’s a dish worthwhile experimenting with.

Head left before you reach the entrance proper and walk past the fruit stalls to the northwest corner of O’Russei. Nom banh chok awaits: a reassuringly recognisable dish of rice noodles and curry. This is great if your iron levels are running low: chunks of dark, jelly like chicken blood float beneath the surface of the immense curry pot on the table. A steal at $1 for your basic vegetable, carbohydrate and protein intake, you might be tempted to splash out on the prawn spring rolls: a mere 1500 riel each.

Now enter the belly of the O’Russei market beast. Apart from your daily groceries, sugared tamarind can be bought from a moving cart for $4 per kilo. As with most Cambodian market stalls, you can try before you buy.

Walking straight through to the east side of the market and into the light will arrive you at the jelly jah hoi stall. Those with an extremely sweet tooth will find their sugar cravings satisfied by a concoction of jelly, condensed milk, coconut milk and beans, which you can design yourself. It’s a bit like pick ‘n’ mix, but wetter.

The scariest things in life (and cuisine) are scary because they’re unknown. Spend an afternoon away from your favourite air-conditioned cafe, save a little money and face your fear: Angry Bird kebabs.

O’Russei Market (Psar O’Russei), north of Olympic Stadium.

 

Dish: To Sesame Street

As coffee shops spawn in the Wat Lanka area (even international coffee company Costa Coffee finally got the memo) and a plethora of bars spring up between the already densely populated Riverside and Street 51, it seems that the Russian Market is beginning to develop a specialty all its own. For small, independently owned cafes, bars and restaurants, you need to head to the south of the city.

In December last year, Russian Market locals welcomed the opening of Sesame Noodle Bar: a small restaurant whose culinary forte is a dish widely available in Cambodia. Noodles are not widely available like this, though. Set apart from the oftentimes warm, bordering on sauna-like covered market’s food stalls and the expensive Riverside hotspots is this little hideaway, located on street 460 amid private houses and a few beer gardens.

The building itself hasn’t been changed from its original layout. The Chinese-Cambodian-style ground floor still stretches out beneath the balcony of the first floor but the exposed light-bulbs and retro toys bespeak trendy London/New York drinking spots, and the posters which adorn the back wall, American canteen.

The hybrid of styles evinced in the decor is mirrored in the cooking, which takes inspiration from Japanese and Chinese cuisine and, like the restaurant, the menu is small but unique. Underscoring the whole is, unsurprisingly, noodles. The choice for the main meal is between one of two dishes, each of which contain pork. Vegetarians and observant Hebrews need not despair, however. The list of side dishes offers two vegetarian options and sesame chicken.

Sesame Noodle Bar is a great example of simple food, done to perfection. “If the menu can’t fit on an A5 paper, it’s too big,” exclaim the owners (via their well-maintained website, sesamenoodlebar.com). Ordering one of three lunch specials, the Pork Buns with Sesame House Noodle, proves that pork can be the highlight of a meal, twice. Tender, sweet and tangy, the meat reinvigorates an otherwise simple vegetarian noodle dish.

The driving concept behind Sesame Noodle Bar is to create food for the climate. Unlike larger restaurant and cafe chains, the owners of Sesame Noodle Bar allow the location to define what’s served. Noodles are served chilled and the side dishes are light. In fact, one diner likened her experience of the Mighty Thor Buns to “eating little clouds”.

Not to make Sesame Noodle Bar appear too distant from its counterparts, the owners have also taken inspiration from their neighbours, who have been serving nom banh chop in the Russian Market for decades. Food is prepared behind a high counter, but in the same space as the customers. It is fast, but it is also fresh.

A word of warning: the decision to maintain the original architecture means that seating space is limited, but the open-plan bar/kitchen/restaurant lends a sense of intimacy rather than claustrophobia, and solitary diners wouldn’t feel awkward sitting at the bar with a book (or a copy of The Advisor). Go with a friend or go alone, but go, if only to play with the toys which sit atop the bar.

Sesame Noodle Bar, ‘The Real’ #9, Street 460 (just east of the Russian Market)

 

The fine art of being fabulous

Speculums, lampshades, earrings crafted out of castrated dog’s testicles: hardly your average drag queen props, but then Holestar is hardly your average drag queen. Billed by Time Out magazine as “London’s favourite tranny with a fanny” (Americans, please note: this does not mean quite what you think it means), she emerged from the world of dandyism-as-performance-art created in the 1980s by avant-garde fashion designer Leigh Bowery – he of latex dress/teetering platforms fame. Today, in day-glo wigs, vertiginous heels and impossibly long eyelashes, Holestar occupies similar cult status as a cross-dressing curio a la RuPaul and Divine. There is, however, one rather notable difference.

This former soldier with a degree in photography and masters in fine art from St Martins isn’t simply a man dressed as a woman. An altogether rarer breed, she is in fact – following the grand tradition of Julie Andrews in Victor Victoria – a (gay) woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman. Her modus operandi: “Reclaiming camp femininity from drag queens and glorifying it.”

“I never had a drag mother,” she says from a Bangkok cafe, en route to Phnom Penh. “Lots of drag queens combine forces but no one ever taught me. I just came up with the idea as an art project. It was supposed to be a one-off: me lip-synching to Shirley Bassey as a video piece. I moved to Vienna and met this DJ at a big Aids benefit, The Life Ball. A lot of my artwork at the time was to do with sexuality and gender, flamboyance and questioning those things. It was the perfect time to workshop it in front of an audience. The DJ didn’t know I was going to turn up in the worst drag ever; I had no idea what I was doing. I had a feather boa wrapped around my head; drew big lines across my forehead and put glitter on. It was just an art idea in a club and people liked it. The next thing I know I’m travelling around central Europe and making a living out of it.”

When central Europe proved too passé to contain her gender-bending persona, Holestar – real name Julie Hole (“It’s a joke but I say it because it’s true: I was Private Hole. That’s not made up. It’s my real name and it’s much better than being Private Arse.”) – gravitated towards the Big City of London where she performs everywhere “from bright stages to dingy basements” and hosts gay dating show, Take Me On. But daring to be different – to embrace the ‘other’ – isn’t without its drawbacks, even in London’s relatively liberal metropolis. Clients have cancelled gigs on discovering Holestar is genuinely female, and on New Year’s Eve she was punched in the face for intervening in a ‘queer bashing’.

“Hideous. Even in London, somewhere that’s supposed to be so open-minded. It’s New Year’s Eve, we’re all dressed up and this guy took offence to someone wearing a dress. And this is the thing: he wasn’t pretty drag; he was alternative drag, which is kind of where I’m coming from. The guy who got attacked is very avant-garde. He had these big black square eyes and a big red mouth down to his chin and he had a beard. It was quite obscure drag and this guy went ‘Eurrrghhh! What’s that?!’ and beat him up. I got a punch in the face for it as well. Absolutely disgusting.” After a complaint was lodged with the authorities, Westminster Police failed to turn up for a scheduled interview then made Julie wait 50 minutes to give a statement about the attack while they busied themselves processing someone who’d lost their keys.

“We think people are groovy and accepting of different types of people but they’re not. There’s still a lot of hatred and fear. I get people grabbing my tits and my crotch because I’m questioning their sensibilities and they can’t quite comprehend that. Don’t touch the freak! I’m here for entertainment. Something in their brain doesn’t compute what they’re looking at so they freak out. It’s rude. I’m still a human being. Come and talk to me and I’ll have a conversation with you; I’ll tell you why I do what I do. In the West, there’s a very binary sense of gender – the extreme male and female – and if you’re playing in between those roles, however temporarily, people still can’t decipher it. I like to think/hope that by the time I leave this mortal coil those boundaries will have been broken down a bit more. There needs to be more of us visible in the mainstream, which is why I believe in art and pop culture. Society is influenced a lot by pop culture.”

As an artist, Holestar deliberately sets out “to blur the boundaries between the avant-garde and mass entertainment, pop culture and the underground; indulging both those who worship at the altar of the contemporary art gallery and at the bowels of mass media”. But can such disparate forces ever be reconciled? “It took me a long time to accept that I fall in between the two. The mainstream side doesn’t get me; the avant-garde arts side doesn’t get me and I don’t really care. I know where I’m coming from and I know my intentions are good.

“There’s snobbery about what I do from certain sections and a lot of misogyny as well. It’s about accepted norms; that idea that anyone dressing up and playing gender roles is going from one to the other. It’s the fact they want a straightforward male-to-female or female-to-male. They don’t want people playing with those gender roles. Even in England, what I do is confusing for people and a little bit racy. We have so-called equality in terms of being gay or whatever but we’re still a long way off that and gender is a big taboo. People don’t want to acknowledge that there are people who play with that.”

Our conversation returns for a moment to the fusion of high and low culture, her boldest would-be act of which revolves around a tale of two testicles – those of her pet dog. The plan was to give these severed orbs a new lease of life as earrings, a plan that induced a state of near-apoplexia in animal rights’ activists. “I didn’t do it in the end but only because I moved house recently.” She lets loose a gleeful snigger. “They were in the freezer for a long time and I didn’t have the chance to put them in another freezer while I was moving. And I was getting abuse from animal rights people. It’s interesting that people think I’m doing these things to aggravate them but really it’s just the way my brain works. I’m not interested in shocking people. I don’t think it’s weird but I forget that my normal is very weird for other people. I Googled it and thought it was quite obvious. I just thought: ‘Well, no one has done it before.’”

Besides, how does that differ from fellow British artist Damien Hirst’s predilection for pickling everything from sharks to sheep? “Exactly! And this is MY dog. He’s fine; he’s not being attacked by other dogs now because he’s lost his testosterone. Otherwise, they’d just go in an incinerator. The people who attacked me for it, they just wouldn’t come round. I’ve come to the realisation that anyone who’s militant about anything, you can’t talk them out of it; whether they’re militantly religious or militant about animal rights. I don’t care. I just do what I do – and I do regret not doing it. This is my normality and it’s not freaky or weird but when I occasionally look at the world through my parents’ eyes – they’re very conventional; they read the Daily Mail, unfortunately – to people like them I’m odd but I don’t think I am at all.”

It’s Holestar’s resolute sense of self that has led her to lecture in the subject of alternative drag at several British universities, including Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance – something she intends to replicate here in Phnom Penh, in between scripting a new hour-long show and revelling in the success of her latest EP, Queen Of Fucking Everything. “I’ve done quite a few lecturing courses in alternative drag because there’s a history of queer studies and I was asked to do a drag queen workshop. I wasn’t really interested in the old theatrical side of things, so I did a post-Divine alternative new gender identity course and it was fabulous. It was really interesting to see people who’d never done anything at all with drag before just fall into it. There was one girl with a shaved head; a biker, really butch. By the end of it we’d put a wig on her, put some heels on her and she was fabulous!

“I felt like a mother hen with her little chicks, setting them free – ‘I’m so proud of my babies!’ It’s nice to show people there’s a new style of drag and it doesn’t really matter what’s in your underpants. It’s just about expressing yourself, so if you want to wear a lampshade on your head and have a beard and wear a pair of panties and lipstick, that’s completely fine. From what I understand about this part of the world, drag and gender are very tied up in romanticised ideas of being a pretty female lip-synching to romantic love songs, which is fine, but there are other options.”

The two-day workshop will include an introduction to the work of avant-garde pioneers Divine and Leigh Bowery – “the innovators of alternative styles of gender bending, fashion and art” – and culminate in what promises to be a deliciously flamboyant Paris Is Burning-style alternative drag pageant. “There are lots of pseudo-political things going on but ultimately it’s about having fun and being positive and empowered no matter what your gender is. I get people contacting me, especially biological women, and saying: ‘Oooh, I really want to do this.’ Well, do it! Express yourself. It’s about playing with gender roles and what people expect them to be. I don’t believe gender is binary.”

Any final words of advice? Holestar laughs her raucous, throaty laugh. “Just be fabulous, darling!”

WHO: Holestar
WHAT: A woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman
WHERE: Pontoon, St. 172
WHEN: 9pm January 24
WHY: Explore the fine art of being fabulous

Mr Out Of The Ordinay

Scott Bywater is nothing out of the ordinary. Ordinary height, ordinary blue eyes, ordinary greying hair. Just your average espresso-drinking kind of guy. At least, that’s what the self-effacing Tasmanian would have you believe. 

The fat biography of Muhammad peeping from under one arm tells a different story. So do the two volumes of Bywater’s own poetry crammed under the other, the latest of which, one sky/many skies, launched last week. As does his position in Phnom Penh rock ‘n’ roll history as one of the original line-up of the Cambodian Space Project, soloist in his own right and newly recruited frontman of the Lazy Drunks. “Poet of the bar-room”, thoughtful musician and ceaselessly rolling stone, it’s safe to say Bywater is probably one of the most extraordinary ordinary guys around.

That’s not what he tells people, of course; ‘(kind of a music guy)(writes a bit)’ his card advertises apologetically. “I got sick of reading on everyone’s cards ‘CEO this, Master of the Universe that,’” he says in explanation. “That’s what I am, and it doesn’t get anyone’s hopes up too much.” He laughs quietly.

So did he always want to be a music guy who writes a bit? “The first thing I ever wanted to be was a writer, when I was so high,” (indicating something not very high at all). “In my family, that’s what you aspire to. We’re not taught to be engineers or doctors or lawyers; the high ideals are the arts.”

However, the siren song of convention proved irresistible and for the earlier part of his life Bywater eschewed Art, labouring instead on the treadmill of domesticity in his home town of Hobart. But something wasn’t right. “I don’t know, sometimes I talk very negatively about Tasmania and I don’t want to do that… I had to get out of that regular kind of life. I thought I could get more from it, and it turned out I just… I just couldn’t.”

Wary of openly criticising domestic bliss, he need not be so cautious; his poems do so for him. Both volumes (available from under Scott’s arm at $5 a piece) are paeans to adventure, to the open road and its freedoms. Little mention is made of home or hearth, as Bywater’s poetic world is that of the outdoors, of a boundless sea and sky through which the narrator roams ‘in pursuit of the unlimit’.

Bywater readily admits to a fascination with the unlimit as both an artist and as a man. “It appeals to me, to be always moving. At this stage I’m down to a suitcase and a guitar or two. It’s the idea that the journey is more important than the destination. Arrival is always the same but the journey is always different.”

His creative process is similarly spontaneous; akin to the improvisation of a jazz tune, with big ideas bubbling away below the surface of his consciousness before bursting forth almost fully formed. Bywater just has to “improvise on a theme I’ve had in there for a while. That’s when spectacular things happen.”

Realising that the description of his work as ‘spectacular’ is rather uncharacteristic for someone normally so self-effacing, he politely back-peddles. “But I’m never sure about my stuff. It’s not academic poetry,” he says, layering ‘academic’ with fake import. “I think that my writing appeals to people who don’t like poetry; I’m not so much a poet for the poetry society as for the bar. A poet for people who don’t read poetry.”

Whatever kind of poet he is, Bywater’s fascination with being on the road has led him to adopt the kind of peripatetic lifestyle that would leave a younger man (he was born in 1967) begging for a break. “Because I don’t have other routines, I have to listen to my underlying rhythms. Without getting too hippy trippy about it I think, ‘What shall I do next?’ and something comes up.”

Since 2011 those rhythms have taken him to Phnom Penh, France and then back again, sometimes writing a bit, touring Europe with the Space Project, sometimes going solo. Then there was the Krash Project, a two-man endeavour on French island La Reunion, which saw Bywater and his Space Project companion Alex playing to “fresh audiences in tiny bars overlooking the Indian Ocean”.

His musical style is multifaceted enough to encompass such different gigs, audiences and locations, redolent of chansonniers like Jacques Brel as well as Anglophonic troubadours Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. Bywater of course sidesteps such laudatory comparisons: “It’s not like I see any link at all between what I do musically and Dylan. People see the harmonica rack and the guitar and assume my stuff is like Dylan, but I don’t think it’s anything like him.”

That isn’t to say Dylan hasn’t been a huge influence on Bywater. Bywater acknowledges he “fell pretty hard for Dylan” in his mid-teens, working his way through the classics onto Dylan’s obscurities and albums of the last decade, which Bywater considers among his best works. And like Dylan he delights in not playing by the rules, experimenting with electronica and dub, then going back to his acoustic roots before jumping off into spoken word poetry. “I’ll give everything a shot; there aren’t any rules. I’m just as comfortable playing solo at Riverside Bistro as I am playing rhythm with the Space Project.”

Bywater was there at the very beginning of the now legendary Cambodian Space Project. A compatriot of co-founder Julien Poulson, Bywater found himself sitting in behind Poulson and Srey Thy on their first gig more than three years ago. Since then he’s played regularly with the band, finding himself at the helm for a while at the close of 2010 (which he describes as “an interesting time”) and touring with them in 2012.

Since returning to Cambodia from the Krash Project, Bywater says he’s “rarely been so active, without having to hustle or anything!” The astonishment in his voice is audible. Taking advantage of this good fortune he’s accepted the gauntlet thrown down to him by The Lazy Drunks, the first band he ever played with in Phnom Penh, to become a bona fide frontman. “Their lead singer suddenly went back to England, and I already knew all the songs. I thought about it and I thought, ‘Here’s a real challenge, to be a real lead singer’. To connect with the audience on that level, I’ve never been very good at it. I always feel very self-conscious, but this is a chance to bring out the Steve-Tyler-Mick-Jagger thing inside.” And how is he working on bringing it out? For a moment Bywater looks nonplussed, then brightens. “Well, I’m going to wear a pink shirt…”

Scott Bywater: musician, poet, and definitely one of the least ordinary guys you’re likely to meet this year.

WHO: Scott Bywater
WHAT: Kind of a music guy. Writes a bit.
WHERE: Riverside Bistro, Sisowath Quay, and Rubies, St. 19 and 240
WHEN: Thursdays from 8pm (Riverside Birsto) and Sundays from 6pm (Rubies)
WHY: He’s extraordinary

 

 

Dish: Doggie style

A quick online search (keeping it investigative here at The Advisor HQ) makes shocking reading for dog-loving Phnom Penhites; there are, putatively, no dog-friendly eating establishments in the city. Apart from PyongYang North Korean Restaurant, of course, but that’s a whole different food review right there.

“Sorry!” gushes bringfido.com, with the kind of pseudo-chagrin in which the North American service industry specialises. “There are no pet-friendly restaurants in Phnom Penh. If you happen to know of a dog-friendly restaurant in Phnom Penh, use the form below to tell us about it and you could win a $25 restaurant.com gift certificate good at nearly 10,000 restaurants nationwide!” Unless you eat that $25 gift certificate, it looks like you and Fido might starve in this town.

But as Henry, Charles and Claude breakfasted at Brown Coffee and Bakery this week, things looked very different. Henry is a Brown regular, accompanying his human Laura Joy Kiddle almost daily for a cappuccino and a dandyish flirtation with fellow canines. Brown staff draw the line at letting animals inside their hallowed AC-ed halls, but they do smile kindly at your caffeine-crazed canines and exclaim ‘So cuuuuute!’ just enough to ensure you leave feeling like some sort of blushing bride from the censored pages of the Bestiary.

The Shop on Street 240 is Claude and Charles’ regular breakfast haunt, where they’re often joined by Subi, a matronly spaniel. Once again, the dogs are technically restricted to the outdoor area, although it’s not unknown for Claude to be found in dangerous propinquity to the patisserie counter. Staff are dog lovers and will tell you tales of their own much loved pooches; recklessly pretty Rithy has five dogs of his own and lavishes so much attention on the doggie diners that he has been known to leave Claude and Charles’ owner wishing momentarily she were less human and more canine.

Java is a terrific lunch option for you and your dog, because you can sit upstairs on the balcony and therefore cease to feel as though you’re spending your life in some sort of patio-ed purgatory. It’s the unending patience of the staff which makes your doggie dining experience here so charming: waiters run and chase your manic poodle progeny, remembering their names from visit to visit, solicitously enquiring after their health if you appear without the fluffy ones in tow, and assiduously providing drinking water and shady places for puppies to nod off.

If you feel like a more solitary lunch (let us not beat around the proverbial shrubbery: if you lunch at Java you may – nay will – have to converse with every single person you know and have ill-advisedly snogged at some point) then Nature And Sea on Street 278 welcomes dogs and people equally. Dogs more so in fact because the waitress is mad about them, and slightly less mad about having to schlep up and down in the tropical heat carrying cheese crepes all day. Doggies love to torment the resident cats up here overlooking Wat Langka, and since the kitchen is on a different level all those Health and Safety bores can rest assured there will be no ‘dog germs’ (which are in fact mythical) near your food.

Should you be lucky enough to score a date with a human in this town and would like to take your dog along to emphasise your fun and frolicsome nature (or just for protection; one never knows, after all) there are plenty of options. Local legend Yumi provides romance, Japanese izakaya-inspired delicacies and lashings of banoffie pie. Chef/manager/owner/all-round good-egg Caspar Von Hofmannsthal says: “As Yumi is a casual dining restaurant, we have many customers who bring their dogs with them. We do ask them to be on a lead so as not to disturb other guests and only dine in the garden for hygiene purposes. We are, however, happy to provide cool water for the dogs to wash down their meals with.” Charles disregarded the water rule entirely, but luckily the photographic evidence of his whisky sour rampage has been destroyed by his judicious mother.

Le Jardin, recent winner of The Advisor’s first annual poll of Best Place To Take Your Kids, is in fact also the best place to take your dog. That baby gate and sand pit were in fact (probably) put in place to keep your doggies safe and sabay while you quaff French wines, pretend to read Le Figaro and pretend, for some precious time at least, that you are not responsible for dogs.

If you’re in the mood for something a little more formal, Deco on Street 352 fits the bill of fare. Its large outdoor area and coo-coo-ca-choo ambience make it an equally good option for dogs and dating. Charles and Claude poodled their way inelegantly through succulent lamb burgers, sticky toffee puddings and negronis decadently, before falling off their bicycle in a totally unrelated incident on their wobbly way home. Deco was charming to the canine reprobates from start to finish and, once they’ve recovered from the Campari, Charles and Claude will certainly be returning for more.

So, we expect you shall at this moment be frantically taking up your pens and writing to bringfido.com to correct their errors. After all, folks, those $25 gift vouchers may be limited.

 

Portrait of a lady

“I would like to have been together with my family. I would like to have seen my sons growing up. But I don’t have doubts about the fact that I had to choose to stay with my people here.” – Aung San Suu Kyi

In April 1988, at the English home she shared with her Tibetan scholar husband Michael Aris and two young sons, Aung San Suu Kyi received an unexpected phone call from her native Burma. Khin Kyi, her mother and a former ambassador to India and Nepal, had fallen critically ill. By December 28, Khin Kyi was dead and a new military junta had seized power, slaughtering thousands of people in the process.

Faced with the extraordinary choice of continuing as an Oxford housewife or sacrificing her family life to serve her country, Suu Kyi had returned to Rangoon. There, amid unprecedented political upheaval, the daughter of independence hero General Aung San became the de facto figurehead for the pro-democracy movement. Her destiny to become a Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident was sealed.

Twenty-three years later, on the eve of historic by elections, Marc Eberle – a German filmmaker based in Phnom Penh – secured unprecedented access to ‘The Lady’ as she took the dangerous step into everyday Burmese politics. The resulting BBC documentary, Aung San Suu Kyi – The Choice, captures how Suu Kyi chose to remain imprisoned in her Rangoon home rather than rejoin her family in Oxford for fear of being banned from ever returning to Burma. And for the first time, in her own words, she offers a glimpse into the “personal regrets” she has had to endure as a result. The Advisor met with co-director Eberle, who will be on hand for a Q&A at the film’s Meta House screening in January, to talk military dictatorships, the dark art of resistance and what it was really like meeting ‘Mother Suu’.

How did the idea for the film first come about?

I met Burmese comedian Zarganar here on his first ever trip abroad in December last year. He had some questions about film festivals because he was organising the first ever film festival in Burma, the Freedom Film Festival. I thought ‘This is incredible! I have to go over for that.’ But at the time it was still very tricky as a journalist to travel into Burma. Only the month before, Zarganar had been released after 11 years, on and off, of imprisonment. He said: ‘We’ll help you. Don’t worry.’ I had to get my camera in; I had to get a tripod, equipment, radio mics and all that. It was obvious I wasn’t a tourist, yet I was coming in on a tourist visa. They didn’t even look at my equipment. And Zarganar was escorted out of the airport by the secret police, the same security guys who formerly were spying on him. Now they’re carrying his bags. This is how the change happens. So I was filming this festival with one of Zarganar’s friends who happens to be the son of Aung San Suu Kyi’s chief of security. That was the ticket in. Access all areas. Incredible!

Sounds like the way the authorities treated Aung San Suu Kyi during her years of house arrest. At one point in the film she says of the street outside her compound: “It was like this: open, shut, open, shut, open, shut…” 

It was a very conscious practice. In the version we did for HBO, which is 10 minutes longer than the BBC version, we have more from this former military intelligence guy and he explains it’s like a pressure cooker: ‘If there’s too much focus on the lady by the international community, we take the lid off and put it on the other pot, which is the national situation. And if because she’s got too much freedom that creates too much pressure, then we put the lid back on the original pot.’ So that’s how they do it: rice cooking, Burmese-style.

The first thing Suu Kyi said to me – I didn’t ask her any specific question, I just said’What do you want to talk about? Fill me in. What’s happening in Burma?’ – she started by saying ‘Well, it’s not what you think. You…’ – meaning the West, represented by this whitey in front of her – ‘you all romanticise way too much about this.’ And she was completely right. She’s just a lady and Burma is just a country in transition. ‘What is happening here is just another election.’ Maybe we are romanticising too much, because she’s made this transition from icon and human rights activist to an actual politician. She’s gambled away a lot of her political credit over the last few months with this political mess: the Rohingya and all of that.

You get the sense that some people aren’t entirely comfortable with the compromise. 

Hillary Clinton directly says that. ‘She’s got to get into this business of rolling up her sleeves, and getting into the dirty business of politics,’ which is very funny, I thought, coming from Hillary Clinton. That’s why she’s in the film.

Do you feel the way Suu Kyi is viewed, not just by the West but by her own people, is going to change?

It has changed already. There are lots more voices now in Burma that are critical of her – in her own ranks, her own party, too. U Tin OO, deputy leader of the NLD, says in the film that she’s made a deal with President Thein Sein, not the government. I know that when she met the president’s wife, they hugged and were crying. The president’s wife said ‘It is so good to finally have you with us.’ Suu Kyi really trusts the wife; that’s why she trusts Thein Sein. But as U Tin OO says, she still doesn’t trust the government. What remains is this toxic legacy of 40 years of totalitarian dictatorship. And like the Khmer Rouge here, it was a senseless dictatorship that completely wrecked the state for the people, who have to fend for themselves.

Does the film have special relevance to Cambodian audiences?

What’s interesting is that the Burmese could learn from Cambodia because Cambodia is ahead in terms of opening up and changing this whole system of governance and society in a very quick, dynamic transition from the Untac days until today – the advance of democracy and freedom. That’s why Zarganar came here: to look at what these guys are doing and learn. What the Burmese can learn is, of course, dependent on your point of view. The government can learn how to get away with shit because the international community won’t act in time. They’re learning already; this is their very clever way of getting Suu Kyi on board their ship then managing to reunite all the ethnic minorities across the board, except the Muslims, of course. Now everyone’s pointing the finger at the Rohingya and saying ‘Out!’ They’re scapegoats. It reminds me of Germany in 1933; the Nazi party coming to power and suddenly passing these race laws – completely unacceptable, especially if you’re a human rights activist who’s been campaigning for the past 20 years. When asked whether the Rohingya are Burmese, Suu Kyi said ‘I don’t know.’ That was her official response and that’s a very troubling answer for me. But what they can learn is that now that she’s part of the government, they’ve changed the press law and there has been a lot of reform; Burma is now one of the freest countries in Southeast Asia.

How long did you spend on location?

It took three trips, totalling more than a month of filming in Burma. That’s very quick for a documentary like this. We knew the cut-off point would be April 1, the by election, because we don’t want to get into the news story at all. We’re not interested in politics; we’re interested in her. We had wanted to make a film about her piano, but she wouldn’t let us upstairs; she wouldn’t let us film the piano, she wouldn’t let us film her playing the piano. She was very uncooperative; didn’t help us in any way.

In one scene, when Suu Kyi opens her compound to the press, you film her protesting that people are geting too close without permission. Behind the public image is a very private woman, it seems.

She’s a human being; very vulnerable, very scarred and traumatised. Her housekeeper says that every year, on her father’s birthday, she laid out all the silverware and looked at it, and she would never go out into the garden during her whole time under house arrest. Imagine! And she would never talk about private things to her housekeeper because if she opens that door just slightly, she’ll collapse. There’s so much weight and personal cost she’s suffered. She can’t really give in to that kind of emotion; be a mother, or a wife.

A vital survival mechanism, but it must have taken its toll.  

It’s a very Asian way of dealing with these things. She’s much more Asian than we would like to think by taking her Oxbridge accent into account. The way she runs the show in Burma, and her party, the whole thing is a lot further away from our Western references than we would like to think, most of the time. Between the lines in the film, for example, U Tin Oo, deputy leader of the National League for Democracy, says they weren’t entirely for this election at all. She was, but the old men around her in the NLD didn’t want to sell out for such little power gain – only 43 seats out of a total of 640-plus. If you give away your hand of cards for these 43 seats, they say it’s not enough; we’d rather wait for the next general election in 2015. I don’t want to judge that – it’s their decision – but what’s interesting is that all these guys around her say no, but she says yes and then they’re in.

In one sequence, you show Burmese cartoons suggesting the generals fear her. 

In the rough cut, we had a super funny scene showing a Burmese government initiative. They’re all so superstitious; they changed which side of the road they drive on from left to right so everyone’s steering wheels are on the wrong side now, and they didn’t manage to change the traffic signs in time so they had lots of accidents and many people died. And they changed the numbers on the currency denomination to nine, wiping out people’s savings overnight. What they did in the sequence was a tree planting initiative across the whole of Burma; every commune was forced to plant this particular kind of tree called Kyat Suu, which is the inversion of Suu Kyi. They wanted to negate her power using black magic by planting this tree across the country. This is how far they go in order to keep her powers at bay.

Former military intelligence officer Major Aung Lin Htut says General Than Shwe and Khin Nyunt “were inexperienced and not clever enough; they were not capable of negotiating with Suu Kyi”.  

Than Shwe lacked the necessary sophistication to deal with this woman who was so stubborn; fighting for her stance. I’d imagine anybody would have a hard time dealing with her.

Did you have a hard time dealing with her?

[laughs] Yes, very much so.

But you’ve had what many people haven’t – access to this extraordinary icon. What impressions were you left with?

Like every human being, the personal image is much different than the iconic image. How can you be an icon in the first place? You can’t. It’s not fair to the person, because you can never live up to the expectations the world has. As I said, she doesn’t like to talk about private things such as her family, yet she agreed to the first interview – which we use throughout the film, the one where she’s in the yellow dress – where she says it all. Never, before or after, was she willing to reply to any question directed at her private life. ‘If it’s not about politics, don’t even ask me.’

You can sense the pain she’s had to endure in her personal life.

I understood where she was coming from, being so hardened and difficult to deal with, or very grumpy towards us at times. We asked her to tell us some personal stories about what it was like returning to Burma in 1988, but she said: ‘No, this is far too serious. This is politics and I will not tell stories.’ We did three interviews with her, but could only really use one.

Much of the film seems more about what isn’t said, most notably the interview with her youngest son, Kim, who – and I hesitate to say this – seems damaged.

I had the same impression. We approached him and he was very shy and at first reluctant to meet. He eventually met with BBC director Angus McQueen and was a genuinely nice guy. He lives on a barge in Oxford. That moment when he stands up and walks out of the frame, this is so strong because it gives you the sense that there are gaps and pain. That’s why this film is so interesting. That’s the story: the human drama. It’s something tragic.

WHO: The face of Burmese democracy
WHAT: Aung San Suu Kyi – The Choice film screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd
WHEN: 7pm January 6
WHY: “People ask me about what sacrifices I’ve made. I always answer: I’ve made no sacrifices, I’ve made choices.” – Aung San Suu Kyi

 

Dish: Edible India

Food arrives as soon as you sit down – a glass of chilled water, baskets of poppadoms and Indian chips, and relish pots of spicy, green raita, pickled radish in mustard oil that is pleasantly bitter, jam-like tamarind relish, and pickled shallots the colour of cochineal

IT seems only fitting that a country so historically influenced by Indian food should have its fair share of decent curry houses. But if only that were true. There are many Indian restaurants – or, far worse, Western eateries that claim to serve authentic Indian curries – here in Cambodia. But most of them have as much in common with the distinctive aromas and flavours of the Indian subcontinent as a whelk stall in Bognor Regis.

Thankfully there is a place, just off Riverside on Street 130, that could hold its own in Mumbai or London, and I’ve eaten there many times and never been disappointed. It might not have the catchiest name – Sher-E-Punjabi – but my word it does some great dun-coloured, spice-packed stews.

It’s a small, welcoming space, with labial pink decor and Chinese prints on the wall. The service is always excellent and friendly, and there’s often a TV in the corner playing Indian soap operas with the usual pantomime acting.

Food arrives as soon as you sit down – a glass of chilled water, baskets of poppadoms and Indian chips, and relish pots of spicy, green raita, pickled radish in mustard oil that is pleasantly bitter, jam-like tamarind relish, and pickled shallots the colour of cochineal.

The manager always asks whether “you want spicy or not” and even if, like me, you say very spicy, there‘s never such a punch of heat that you can’t taste anything else. The menu is long, with traditional curry house favourites such as vindaloo, madras, and roasted meats from the tandoor oven, sitting alongside more unusual Indian and Mughlai dishes.

The last time I went, our party ordered the meat thali – six dishes on a metal tray – which is excellent value at $7. It included a splendid thick daal, an ode in praise of the lentil, smacking of cumin and ginger; a delicious but small portion of chicken curry, expertly cooked and packed full of flavour; basmati rice; thick slices of raw onion and cucumber, and onion raita. The only downside was the rather sickly pea-strewn vegetable offering swamped in cream and tiny pieces of paneer curd cheese made by heating milk and lemon juice.

Of the mains, the best of the lot was the mutton curry, in which long-braised bits of meat had flaked into a thick, toothsome sauce. Sadly, the chicken vindaloo was not so good, with pronounced but not completely unwelcome sweet notes. It was far removed from the legendary sour, tomato-packed Goan dish, and there were more potato chunks than chicken. The naan breads were the size of saucepan lids though, thin and crisp and nicely scorched in the tandoor.

A group of Indian businessmen walked in and were soon tucking in merrily while discussing the merits of curries in luxury restaurants in Delhi. “I didn’t get much lamb, man; they’re not very generous with the meat,” said one of them afterwards.

And that is the one criticism of the place. The meat curries are delicious but rather stingy. But the food is marked by a skill that I’ve only seen matched in Cambodia by Siem Reap’s original India Gate restaurant, which considering its chef-owner spent 22 years cooking in a five-star hotel in India is quite an accomplishment. You emerge light, and the freshness and vivacity to the cooking means you don’t feel, as you can in many Indian restaurants, that there is an anvil loitering in the bottom of your stomach, waiting to enact its revenge.

Sher-E-Punjabi-I Restaurant, #16 Street 130; 092 992901 or 023 216360.

 

The colour of music

The artist sweeps one arm over a canvas unrolled on the studio floor like a psychedelic welcome mat – a vast technicolour mash-up of lively forms and textures. From the next room, the dull rhythmic thud of bass bins threatens to stir the sticky air. “I will do something connected to his music, to show the rhythm of the sounds, the movement,” she says, nodding towards the door. “I use colours to express emotions and shapes to show the mood. You can see the DJ’s hands moving here, and over there is the sound.” An index finger jabs at enamel that’s been dribbled over acrylic like the zigzag of a hospital heart monitor. “And here you can see the equaliser, like the sounds that come out of the speaker when Warren’s playing.” More pointing, this time at a bright swirl of paint: “This sound here is like a DVD spinning. Each shape expresses an emotion: happiness, excitement…”

Chhan Dina and Warren Daly are daring to tread in some of history’s most well-heeled footsteps. The duo – one a classically trained Cambodian artist; the other a DJ from Ireland – are redefining for the 21st century the complex relationship between sound and vision. They’re in fine company. In Book X of his 4th century BC Republic, Plato describes the ‘music of the spheres’ – the poetic notion that the spinning of the planets generates a sort of celestial harmony. Pythagoras went a step further, musing that these heavenly tones had “a visible equivalent in the colour spectrum”. At the time, only seven planets had been discovered. Two hundred years later Aristotle applied seven numbers to the seven tones of the musical octave, the distinguished foundation of the sound-colour relationship. By the 18th century, Newton’s experiments with prisms seemed to prove its existence through the laws of physics.

And that was just the theorists. Legend has it that Leonardo da Vinci was the first to experiment with the projection of coloured lights, which spurred would-be inventors into trying to make instruments that could spew out coloured lights and sound at the same time. By the time the 20th century rolled around, Alexander Wallace Rimington’s ‘colour piano’ had been seen in public, spawning new oddly named contraptions: Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux, the Optophonic Piano created by Russian painter Baranoff-Rossiné, and Alexander László’s Sonchromatoscope. Their creators had just one thing in common: they were trying to create a new artistic genre.

Dina and Daly, who met three years ago when he trampled her foot during a swing dance class at Equinox, are 21st century László’s, merging electronic dance music with live instruments and artists and audience participation to create a multisensory experience – a trip without a trip. Led by Daly, who in 2000 co-founded online record label Invisible Agent, they’re building on the work of 1960s San Francisco arts collectives that used disco balls and light projections on smoke to produce trip-like sensations (The Brotherhood of Light, which toured with The Grateful Dead, was inspired by the Beat generation and Ken Kesey’s ‘expansion of consciousness’ Acid Tests).

From acid to aciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid: enter electronic dance music, 20 years later. It’s had a hard time matching the visual spectacle of screaming singers, windmill-armed guitarists and feral drummers thrashing about on stage. In 1992, British chart show Top Of The Pops hit a record low when The Orb’s ‘performance’ amounted to nothing more than the pair playing chess while their single Blue Room was piped through speakers. With more DJs using software to play mixes ‘live’ on computers, there’s been criticism that the act (some might say art) of physically choosing and mixing records has been replaced with someone simply pressing play and standing back. But as Peter Walker writes in The Independent, “For those acts that can’t get away from being a couple of blokes twiddling knobs – Underworld, The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk and Orbital – an arms race has ensued to offer fans something to look at while they play. The art of visual entertainment has come a long way, with all of the above using successive albums and tours to test out new on-stage theatrics, from Daft Punk’s pyramid to Underworld’s towering tubes of light and the Chems’ song-specific graphic spectaculars.”

Daly, who has played at Ireland’s famous Temple Bar Music Centre, is well aware of Orbital, famed for their visuals (“The visuals are kind of our lead singer; they’re the lead singer jumping around and pulling faces”, Phil Hartnoll has said). “I was just in time for when Orbital and all the parties were happening in the early ‘90s in Western Europe,” says Daly. “We were putting raves on in fields and getting chased around by the cops.” (Did they ever get caught? “Yes, quite a lot, but let’s not talk about that.”) “You’d have quite a mix there: people DJing; people doing poi; tents, people making food. There was a real community feel to it. You didn’t just come along and watch one guy banging tunes out; there’s a number of different activities going on. We’d make fluoro backdrops, back in the days when fluoro was still cool – the days of glow sticks and Vicks VapoRub.

I started to do visuals at these events in the late ’90s, going out with a camera, making videos of the city and countryside, things happening and people doing things, cutting them all up and splicing it live on screen – putting effects on it, exploding and imploding it, putting colour layers over it; effects that would probably look really cheesy right now, but back then it was like ‘Wow! How’s this guy doing that?’ Now you’ve got software you can just download with all the clips already installed, but we were using two VHS recorders with a cord plugged into the decks.”

In a new series of events at Meta House, December 22 being the soft launch, Daly is fusing pop culture, high culture and low culture by hooking up painters, musicians, graffiti artists, digital artists and DJs into one big psychedelic show. “There will be three DJs playing back to back, each with our own set-up. It’s going to be like a nerd’s dream: a table full of flashing lights and different equipment, but we really want to take it away from where it’s just people looking at us. It’s not about me. I want to play quality tunes, expose some artists and get a buzz going out there in the place. We want to hang canvases up on the walls and get people in the crowd involved; give them a paintbrush.

“We want to mix it up. One example would be Scott Bywater, part of the Cambodian Space Project. He made some electronic tracks and we released them. He played guitar and read poetry over it and some of us have done remixes. When I first heard it, I wasn’t sure – guitars, poetry; am I going to be able to listen to this? Then I heard it and was like ‘Wow, this is ace. This guy really knows what he’s doing.’ He’s using Garage Band on a Mac and asking me all these questions about getting new sequences in there and putting drum beats over them. I thought ‘You’re the singer, you’re the guitarist; you’re the glue on stage for this band and now you’re interested in all these things that DJs and electronic producers use.’ He’s really starting to harness it, too.”

Such experimental fusion is, he says, the future of live electronic music. “There’s a huge lull. You had this massive surge starting in the late ’80s right up to the millennium, when dance music was at its peak. You had big names filling out stadiums – The Prodigy, Leftfield, Massive Attack; commercial, but with underground sounds bubbling up underneath. Then live bands took over for a while and now people like Scott Bywater are saying ‘I’m going to get a laptop.’ And the people with laptops are saying ‘There are guys over there who can play instruments. I’m going to talk to these guys, take some samples and reverse them, and do stuff together.’ We want to make a new form of music.” And it sure beats the hell out of watching two blokes playing chess.

WHO: The sonically and visually open-minded among us
WHAT: Swagger
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd
WHEN: 9pm December 22
WHY: It’s the future, man

 

Dish: Out of the frying pan

My muscles ached and my stomach rumbled as I collapsed into the chair to admire the fruit, or fish, of my hard labour. Before me sat a plate of Cambodia’s prize dish, an aromatic golden amok, delicately decorated with coconut cream and shredded lime leaves and red chilli, served up in a banana leaf bowl. It looked and smelt great.

Being a ‘probably could cook but can’t be bothered’ type of person, cookery classes aren’t my thing. But in the short time I’ve been in Cambodia, I’ve been won over by the cuisine and was keen to find out more about what sets this country apart from the more well-known foods of neighbouring Thailand and Vietnam.

So I signed up to Frizz restaurant’s cookery class and started the day with a colourful trip to Kandal market to source

our ingredients amid the chaos of swaying, sweating slabs of meat and flapping fish heads taking their final gasps for air before landing at the rooftop terrace kitchen. Here, we spent the next five hours tirelessly shredding, squeezing, chopping, crushing, pounding, slicing and grinding as we worked up an appetite fit to scoff the food we served ourselves along the way.

First up was chaio yor, or fried spring rolls made with carrot, taro and peanuts – a dish that’s easy to make, right? Wrong. The key ingredient here is the taro root, which in its raw form is toxic, triggering a harsh itching in the throat.

After shredding it into strips, heaps of salt were added, the moisture massaged out and the taro pressed into small balls to be washed in clean water. To be sure, this was done not once, not twice, but three times.

Next was for me was the dish of the day – amok. Sold as Cambodia’s national dish, amok is a zesty, flavoursome steamed curried fish cooked in a banana leaf and involves enough gruelling grinding in the heavy mortar and pestle to make even Popeye break out in a sweat.

Finally finished, I tucked in, reluctant to ruin my creation, and, boy, was it worth the slog. With each chew came a new surprise. Smack, pop, pow: the sharp lemon grass, the sweet spice of the galangal and coconut juice, the tingle of the garlic, the bite of the salt, the spice of the chilli, the sour kick of the fish paste.

Then there’s the tigerfish that fell apart on my fork and melted in my mouth. Lip-smackingly delicious just doesn’t do it justice, and I’d actually created it – with a little help.

Feeling good, I ground my way through the afternoon to rustle up banana blossom salad made with mint, basil, fishwort, Asian coriander and chicken, followed by sticky rice and mango dessert, draped in palm sugar syrup.

But it was the amok that stayed with me and it was so damn good I’ve been craving it ever since. In fact, I ordered it the other day and it just wasn’t the same so it looks like I’ll have to get myself in the kitchen after all.

Cambodian Cooking Class, Frizz Restaurant, #67 St. 240 ($23 for a full day, $15 for a half day).