SATURDAY 8 | Red Hot Chili Peppers. Bruce Springsteen. The Beatles. U2. Get your rocks off tonight with Sonic Detergent, freshly laundering rock hits past and present.
WHO: Sonic Detergent
WHAT: Rock covers
WHEN: 9:30pm February 8
WHERE: Slur Bar, #28 Street 172
WHY: Better the devils you know
SATURDAY 8 | The Underdogs specialise in time travel – specifically to the much-mourned ’60s, Cambodia’s ‘Golden Era of rock ‘n’ roll’. “Everyone knows Chnam Aun Dop Pram Moi (‘I’m 16’) and Svar Rom (‘Monkey Dance’), but there are many more songs that we play that are less well known,” says lead singer Sammie. “We want to introduce young people to more obscure songs that are just as good… We search YouTube, listen to old cassettes and we talk to the old people who remember the times. The new songs copy too much; they sound just like K-Pop. We want to make a real Cambodian sound.” The songs of Ros Sereysothea and Pen Ron are now widely known, but the band also plays tunes by the Elvis/Dylan/Sinatra of Cambodia, Sinn Sisamouth, as well as the wilder singers Yol Auralong, famous for Jih Cyclo and the drunken raving blues of Syrah Syrah, and the funky soul of Voa Saroun. Long may the dogs run free!
WHO: The Underdogs
WHAT: Energetic Golden Era rock ‘n’ roll
WHERE: Equinox, Street 278
WHEN: 9pm February 8
WHY: They bark, but they don’t bite
Before you head up the stairs to the Sugar & Spice Cafe at Daughters of Cambodia, make sure you’re hungry. A ravenous appetite will do nicely.
Sugar & Spice cafe is decked out in green and brown. Check the specials of the day on the board and then sink – literally – into the foam sofa and stools. The menu is totally Western without any hints of Khmer influence. Fancy a hamburger at $6.50? Eggs Benedict come in at $5. If you’re one of those North Americans who think pumpkins are for jack-o-lanterns at Halloween, try the soup for $3. The grilled pepper salad is a healthy choice at $5.50. For a caffeine hit, the short single espresso is $1 and packs a punch. Regular tea costs the same. Smoothies range from $2.50 to $3.25 depending on the flavour of choice. No beer or wine served here.
How anyone makes it to dessert after a meal escapes me, but if you want a cuppa and a sweet in the mid-afternoon there’s no shortage of choice: ooey gooey cakes and puddings and cookies that are bound to appeal to anyone looking for a sugar fix.
The portions are huge, the presentation is creative and the ingredients are fresh. We ordered the fish burger and chicken Caesar wrap to share. Both meals came with enough wedges to have saved Ireland from the potato famine back in 1845. I got through my half of the burger and the wrap, but went down in defeat to the wedges. The sauces – not sure exactly what they were for, so I tried them with everything – made dipping a taste-varying experience. One was like chutney, another like mayo, the third like Dijon mustard.
Besides the great food and relaxed atmosphere, another attraction is that Sugar & Spice is run by former sex workers. According to Breanne Orndorff, the outlet director, they range in age from 16 to their early 30s.The process begins with an interview to establish they were involved in the sex industry. Most worked in karaoke clubs and hostess bars in the red light districts of town.
The programme runs out of the Operations Centre in Stung Meanchey, and includes counselling facilities, a medical clinic and a day care. Girls decide if they would like to be trained in the sewing room, spa, cafe or kitchen. The boys do the silk screening for shirts, bags and ornaments that come out under the Sons of Cambodia label. Recyclable materials are used whenever possible. Don’t forget to stop in at the shop once you’ve sated your appetite for food. There you can fill up on hand-made items from pot holders to earrings and bracelets, safe in the knowledge their creators earned a fair-trade wage.
Sugar & Spice Cafe @ Daughters of Cambodia, #65 Street 178.
Where once squatted a dimly lit pool hall populated by the seediest of Street 51’s night walkers, there now stands a cavernous, big-enough-to-swallow-almost-any-band Temple of Boom. Oscar’s 51 is not to be confused with its smaller, slightly less salubrious sibling on Street 104. No, no. The ‘new’ Oscar’s is a gentrified nod to the gods of rock ‘n’ roll – many of whom have been immortalised, life-sized, on its walls. The live music stage is big; the bar even bigger and the resident sound engineer really is The Real Deal.
Oscar’s 51, Street 51 & 172.
FRIDAY 7 | New wave, post-punk, ’80s cheese: all grist to the mill for the inimitable Jaworski 7, fronted by the larger-than-life Jerby Salas Santo. “The band loves post punk, indie, new wave and everything in between,” he says. “We’re like a Pacific/Oceania band. We now have two originals on our set and we’re planning to add more.” Think The Cure, The Smiths and brace yourself for a fist-pumping, high-jumping flashback to your formative years.
WHO: Jaworski 7
WHAT: New wave, post-punk and ’80s cheese
WHERE: Slur, Street 172
WHEN: 9pm February 7
WHY: A fist-pumping, high-jumping flashback to your formative years
FRIDAY 7 | Near the city of León in Nicaragua is an impoverished 8,000-strong community of Subtiava Indians, forced onto inhospitable lands where the rate of teenage pregnancy is now twice that of sub-Saharan Africa. Most households have been robbed of their men by civil war. Those who remain labour in sugarcane fields doused in toxins, kidney failure accounting for more than 80% of deaths in men aged 35 – 45. Since 2007, photographer Martin Bandzak has been carefully documenting the cycle of poverty in Subtiava for his new exhibition, El Campo, which opens at Tepui tonight.
WHO: Martin Bandzak
WHAT: El Campo photography exhibition
WHERE: Tepui @ Chinese House, #45 Sisowath Quay (corner of Street 84)
WHEN: 7pm February 7
WHY: There but for the grace of God…
FRIDAY 7 | It would take Eric Clapton’s 1974 cover of I Shot The Sheriff to bring the music of Bob Marley – the dreads-sporting spawn of 1960s’ Jamaican ska and rock steady – to the rockers of the wider world, but when reggae finally made land, it made land in style. By 1972, this new rhythm had bubbled to the top of the US Billboard Hot 100, first with Three Dog Night’s roots cover of Black And White then with the gentle contemporary groove of I Can See Clearly Now, by Johnny Nash. From the loins of pioneers such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and King Tubby have sprung forth a new generation of lyrical Rastafarians who, like their forefathers, use the sacrament of music to promote everything from ganja to the unifying concept of One Love. Among their number are Kaztet D (MC, singer, activist, made in France), the creative force behind new reggae sound system collective Wat A Gwaan (‘What’s going on?’ in reggae lingo), who tonight is joined by DJs Polaak, Tonle Dub and Mercy.
WHO: Wat A Gwaan
WHAT: Reggae sound system collective
WHERE: Oscar 51, #29 Street 51 (corner of Street 172)
WHEN: 9:30pm February 7
WHY: Bob would approve
SUNDAY 2 | ‘In the colourful cabarets and sepia-lit dance halls of Old Shanghai, jazz was the background score to a fleshy world of mobsters, adventurers and sing-song girls. Old Shanghai was the uncontested jazz capital of Asia, where musicians from the world over tested their musical mettle nightly to the delight of enthusiastic audiences. In 1935, Du Yu Sheng, the notorious overlord of Shanghai’s ominous ‘Green Gang’, ordered into creation the first all-Chinese jazz group, The Clear Wind Dance Band, to perform at the Yangtze River Hotel Dance Hall. Critics called the music ‘pornographic,’ but the band played on just the same.’ So sayeth ShanghaiJazz.com of the era being channelled tonight by PP-based jazzophile Philippe Javelle to celebrate Chinese New Year in feather boa-ed style.
WHO: Philippe Javelle (keys)
WHAT: A night of 1930s Shanghai jazz
WHERE: Riverhouse Lounge, #157 Sisowath Quay
WHEN: 7:30pm February 2
WHY: Celebrate Chinese New Year in feather boa-ed style (if slightly late)
SATURDAY 1 | People of a certain persuasion insist the place is haunted. Others take one look and think: ‘PARRRRRTAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYY!’ So it is that the long-abandoned Riverside Hotel, which when you’re scrambling over mountains of long-unslept-on mattresses bears an eery resemblance to the Overlook in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, is to harbour life once more – albeit briefly. For one night only, the building’s otherwise deserted (save for the odd spook) ballrooms will swell with the sound of at least 10 international DJs and thousands of ravers – potentially saving the owners a small fortune when they finally unleash the wrecking ball next month to make way for something less Jack Nicholson-esque (bring your own sledgehammer?). Giving sermon at the lectern of sound will be DJ Devin (globetrotting Swiss-Indonesian psyche guru), Bart Ricardo (credited with bringing Chicago house to Belgium in the late ’90s) and Il Toro (classically trained Italian musician/minimal techno DJ who now lives on a remote beach in Thailand). Joining them are local likely lads Simon C Vent, Funkelastiks, Dr Wah-Wah, Wes-T, Dan Beck of the Kimchi Collective, Alan Ritchie and, last but not least, DJs Flo and Lefty in a full-on head-to-head. Seven floors, 180 rooms; hundreds of disused mini bars and mattresses: it’s all yours for the night. Literally: they’re braced to rage until long past dawn. You can check out any time you like, but will you want to leave?
WHO: Underground ravers of every hue
WHAT: Wake Initiated Lucid Dreaming (WILD) DJ party
WHERE: Riverside Hotel, #1 Sisowath Quay (cnr St. 94)
WHEN: 10pm February 1
WHY: RED RUM! RED RUM! RED RUM!
What to do with corrupt, ‘fattypuss’ politicians who grow ever plumper as they watch their people die? At a time when vast coils of razorwire still sit menacingly at many a street corner, watched over by uniformed minions brainwashed into bludgeoning first and questioning later (if at all), one band has the answer: “Fie upon dem!”
Dub Addiction, voted best band in The Advisor’s Best Of Phnom Penh awards last year, are solidifying their role as social agitators with the their latest EP, Cambodia. The five-track album, released by Hong Kong-based label Metal Postcards, is a tapestry of two very distinct sounds: Khmer saravan being the weave, Jamaican dub the weft. And the loom upon which the album has been crafted is one that transcends boundaries both geographic and political: liberty, that most precious and relentlessly exploited of all human rights.
Cambodia, the title track, is a seven-minutes-and-two-seconds lullaby of the most potent order. Farfisa organ bubbles over a lilting roots-reggae beat as French vocalist Khae Lassan sighs a single word, over and over, her voice gently rising and falling like the prow of a long-tail fishing boat in open water: “Cambooooooooodiaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh…”
Close your eyes and the music cocoons you like a sagging hammock, rolling you first this way then that. The voice of Nigerian MC Okoro Elias Jefferson is deep and resonant; DJ Khla’s dances high above it, his toast – delivered in Khmer – more nasal and piercing. At 02:50, Chenn Chantrea tears through the sing-you-to-sleep smog with a visceral guitar solo, the organ weeping and wailing in existential anguish alongside. French toaster Ras Simons poetically laments the status quo with the leisurely, loping gait of a heavily dreadlocked Rastafarian.
There’s more. The EP includes not one but three remixes of Cambodia: the Dubberman remix, edit version (short, Khmer only) and radio-ready master. Dubberman (real name: Cyril Boussais) is a French artist who puts a spaced-out, dubbed-up spin on the title track, making it sound as though it’s being stretched by the gravitational pull of a giant black hole that hasn’t eaten a decent meal in a few millennia.
And more. From Babylon To Saigon, the ‘bonus’ track, is a four-and-a-half-minute testament to the resilience of greater mankind in the face of official mismanagement. ‘Do what you will’, it warns the Powers That Be, but ‘Every day every day every day we uprise (not ‘eat rice’, as you could be forgiven for thinking on first listen). Here, East meets East: ‘Middle’ and ‘Far’, to be precise. A Japanese semi-acoustic harp conjures tendrils of smoke spiralling lazily into searing heat; camels sprawled beneath vast canvas tents; the sun-soaked cradles of much-needed acts of popular revolt.
The sound is equal parts ancient Mesopotamia and the Southeast Asia of today. Five MCs – Simmons (France), Sistaya (Switzerland), Jefferson (Nigeria), Phil Milkyway (Germany) and Professor Kinski (Germany) – and almost as many languages evoke an intoxicating blend of exoticism and Orientalism. The message is simple: from Babylon to Saigon, we’ve had enough political nonsense. It’s time The People took back The Power: ‘This is the sound of freedom: take care of your soul and soon your time will come.’
Cambodia, by Dub Addiction, is on sale now for $7 at metalpostcard.bandcamp.com.
WHO: Dub Addiction
WHAT: Jamaican dub vs Khmer saravan
WHERE: Otres Beach, Sihanoukville
WHEN: 9pm February 4
WHY: ‘This is the sound of freedom: take care of your soul and soon your time will come.’
