Music to make out to: when Khmer sounds meet ambient electronica
Cambodian music is largely assumed by outsiders to be a rather clanky, traditional affair, most often enjoyed at special cultural events or inside tourist-driven restaurants. But what about a modern take on traditional Khmer sounds — and an outlet for ambitious young Cambodian artists who want to break with tradition?
This is the basic reasoning behind Krom Monster, an interesting new improvisational quintet featuring young Cambodian musicians trained in four traditional instruments, playing over distinctly new-era ambient, electronic sounds, re-sampled from both studio and field recordings by London-based digital musician David Gunn.
What does it sound like? Mentally combine, if you will, the creaky but compelling stuff one might hear piped into a restaurant staffed by waitresses dressed as apsaras with the smooth, somewhat surreal beats more common in a chic New York hangout, interspersed with the quintessentially Khmer sounds of a summer rainstorm, or the far-off beat of a gong. That’s Krom Monster.
The instruments you’ll hear include the xylophone-like roneat aek, the Chinese-violin-like tro sao, the gong thom (big gong), and the sonorous, slightly mournful, one-stringed kse diev — sometimes referred to as the ‘heart instrument’.
The Khmer-electronic collaboration produces soundscapes one can happily listen to while meditating, reading, cooking or making out, among other interesting applications. What it is is distinctly unlike Cambodian music you’ve heard before. And that’s the entire point.
Krom Monster was first set up four years ago by producer David Gunn, an international musician and sound artist who specialises in taking traditional beats in new directions. While travelling through Cambodia, Gunn found himself intrigued by both the country and its music — and decided he wanted to do more.
“The idea was to explore what would happen if we kind of sat down and just kind of broke down Cambodian music into its component parts, and then tried to put it back together,” says Gunn, who relates that Krom Monster’s growth was “quite an organic process”.
“We met with people from Cambodian Living Arts around four years ago and talked about doing a residency with them — basically a six-week residency with four musicians,” says Gunn, in a project initially conceived of as part of Incidental, his UK-based creative group.
Gunn eventually connected with the Khmer musicians through Cambodian Living Arts and the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, and thus the project was born in 2010.
The first Krom Monster album was released in late 2011, and a remix of that first recording will be released in 2013, says Gunn, with a digital pre-release available for download from The Advisor web-site.
Gunn, who has a background in new media and digital music, was in part responding to the lack of innovation in Cambodia’s music scene, partially spurred by the after-effects of the Khmer Rouge era.
Much money and effort has been poured into recreating Cambodia’s traditional music, but few organisations are devoting much attention to the creative, exploratory needs of a new generation of Khmer artists — kids who might want to do more with their musical careers then simply continue to recreate old and semi-lost forms.
Krom Monster, argues Gunn, gives these young creatives a rare chance to expand their horizons in a country where there isn’t much space for Khmer artists to perform live music that’s out of the norm.
“Compared to dance, which has a good infrastructure for support, there isn’t really an audience for experimental music and few venues to host that kind of thing, so a young Cambodian musician finding a way to do experimental music is difficult,” says Gunn, who suspects there’s an audience for such out-of-the-box work among both locals and tourists.
“A lot of the work we do in Cambodia is a reaction against how countries like the UK and the US and others tend to operate in countries like Cambodia, where there tends to be an attitude of either supporting really traditional arts, or bringing in artists from everywhere and having them teach Cambodian artists how art and music should be done. The idea was to create a bit more of an exploratory space. Collaborators, rather than someone teaching stuff.”
The Khmer members of Krom Monster include Phon Chamroeun, Pov Punisa, Lun Sophanit and Sour Vanna, all young musicians who had been trained in traditional Cambodian music and were itching to do something a little different with their talents.
“In Krom Monster I have learned how to create music pieces by myself, with my feeling, and I love this kind of music as contemporary music,” says roneat aek player Punisa Pov, who has been playing with Krom Monster since May 2010. Krom Monster, she says, gave her her “first chance to play around with electronic music”.
Gunn emphasises how the band members, although they didn’t exactly share much in the way of a common language, were able to connect with one another through the medium of music. “An interesting part of the process is how little you needed language to communicate and share ideas. It became a very free and easy process by playing together.”
Pov agrees with Gunn’s take on the Krom Monster effect: “If I couldn’t speak English, I couldn’t communicate well with people outside… But as a musician, we speak music language to communicate with other musicians. This is the big experience: how we get to connect with each other from one country to other country.”
“The reason I love Krom Monster is because this group is playing music by feeling,” says kse diev player Lun Sopanith of his experience with the group. “It seems like music that reflects life time, describing human action in society,” he muses — rather like Sopanith’s own instrument, the sound of which is sometimes likened to the sound of a thrumming heartbeat. “Every musician in the group is playing with their own feeling, responding to what they are hearing and mixing it with happiness or sadness from their own lives, and the people they know.”
Of the Krom Monster philosophy, Gunn says: “The Cambodian instruments are kind of weird in lots of beautiful ways, so we tried to make the most of that and create the record around that.” Gunn intends to stick with Krom Monster for a while yet, a departure from projects featuring international collaboration that wantonly (and at times confusingly) country hop. “Genuinely meaningful projects take a long time to grow. We’ve only been working out there [Cambodia] for three or four years and we’re only getting started on what we want to do.”
Krom Monster’s record is sold in Cambodia and all proceeds go to support the Khmer musicians. You can pick up a limited-edition pressing of the first album at roughtrade.com, and there are digital downloads on offer at iTunes and other popular digital music outlets.
