Byline: Phoenix Jay

Mak Therng: And justice for all

Stolen wives, Machiavellian princes and a lesson in morals for the ruling elite

…..

From the skin of the giant skor drum comes a thunderous tribal beat. Palms slap rhythmically against synthetic hide; now fast, now slow, now staccato. This Morse code of sorts, emanating from the impenetrable darkness of the theatre’s right wing, coaxes into life the crouched figures occupying centre stage. Each has been teased, squeezed and ultimately stitched right into the most elaborate of costumes, their heads bowed before an expectant, near-silent audience.

Prostrate on a midnight-blue carpet, six heavily rouged young women with raven tresses tumbling almost to their waists begin to snake their wrists in time with the pounding of the drums. A chorus of Cambodian voices floats up, over rapt heads and out into the starry night air among the leafy grounds of the National Museum. Tailored swathes of coloured silk rise and fall like a fabric wave, the women’s bodies twisting and turning in front of a crimson backdrop.

Here, on the gold-trimmed all-weather stage built quite accidentally by Cambodian Living Arts to house its Plae Plakaa (‘Fruitful’) performances, ancient history is repeating itself – only this time, with one very notable difference. While the kohl-rimmed eyes peering out from beneath gilded headdresses may belong to characters from a time-honoured operatic form, the central message of this otherwise traditional show has the socially conscious modern viewer very much in its crosshairs.

Mak Therng, one of 20 traditional Khmer operas known collectively as yike (pronounced ‘yee-kay’), sounds at first not unlike the basic plot of many a Western soap opera/Shakespearean play: girl loves boy; girl gets stolen by another boy; original boy attempts to reclaim girl; something goes horribly, horribly wrong. In fact, and particularly in CLA’s interpretation, it’s a brilliant piece of social critique examining a) how power corrupts, and b) Everyman’s oft-tricky pursuit of justice.

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The precise history of the yike genre depends entirely on who you ask. Some scholars say the opera, which involves singing, dancing, acting and drumming, originated in the eighth century. Others claim it dates back even further, to the fifth-century Cham Empire. The Cambridge Guide To Theatre, edited by Martin Banham, contains the following entry: ‘Yike developed in response to tours by Malay bangsawan troupes in the late 19th century. The art also parallels likay of Thailand in its mixture of classical and modern features. The introduction of wing-and-drop scenery, the rough approximation of classical dance used for entrances and exits, the humorous burlesques of classical legends and the introduction of new plots coupled with witty improvisation by performers helped yike gain wide popularity among the populace. Performances were even staged at court.’

Ask CLA’s Marion Gommard, perched on a stone bench 20 metres from the stage and struggling to make herself heard above the drums, and she answers thus: “We lost a lot of information about its creation; there are different stories about how yike was created. Some researchers believe it was created by the Cham during the Angkorian period and when they fought against the Khmer, the Khmer took that from them and made their own version. Another version of the story is that a Khmer king from that time made it and another says it comes from an Indonesian art form practiced by people on islands and in boats, speaking what is now a lost language.

“In every yike performance you have an introduction piece. In a lot of traditional Cambodian art forms you have to pay respect to the ancestors so that the spirits don’t cause any problems during the performance and everything goes smoothly. You have that in yike as well; it’s called [says something indecipherable] in that original language – they kept the word, but we’re not quite sure of the exact meaning! So we have these different theories that we can put together to find the history of yike, but it’s still quite unsure. It started in the 12th or 13th century and involves acting, theatre, singing, a lot of drumming. We could actually call it opera, a kind of musical theatre. It’s very traditional, very ancient.

“This one is called Mak Therng, which is the name of the hero. It’s an ancient folk tale. Originally it wasn’t part of the yike repertoire, but in the early 1970s it was adapted. In 2011 we had the idea to remake it again, so we invited American director Robert McQueen – a well known dramaturge – to work with our teacher, Uy Ladavan, and the troupe to make an improved theatre performance.

“It’s a social piece, really. Basically the story is that Mak Therng – the hero – is quite old, but has a younger wife. Very nice! [Laughs] They’re very much in love with each other, but then one day the prince comes in and he finds her very nice so he kidnaps her and brings her to the royal palace. The piece follows Mak Therng’s quest to take her back: it’s a social quest for justice. He goes in front of the king and asks for justice. It’s interesting because the original ending of the story is different than ours. The original end was the king saying ‘No’ and Mak Therng’s wife then kills herself because her reputation has been tarnished: the prince has already had his way with her.”

So why tamper with the end of such a time-honoured tale? At a workshop staged by CLA during the early stages of the artistic process, a conversation was had about what message the troupe – many of whom come from The White Building, the capital’s most famous artistic community – wanted to give people about women in society. Says Marion: “Uy Ladavan, the show’s director, told me she wanted to change the ending because she wanted to make people feel that justice is possible. The king can say ‘Yes.’”

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The story as told by Ladavan, noted at the Anachak Dara awards (the Cambodian Oscars) for her script-writing and dramaturgy, is deliberately different than the version taught to her more than 40 years ago. In the original, the king takes no action against his wayward son, with tragic results. In Ladavan’s interpretation of Mak Therng, the ending has been changed: the king acknowledges his son’s crime and duly sentences him, a demonstration to modern audiences that fairness is not out of reach and justice can always be brought, whether in family, at work, or in civil society.

“When I was young, I saw yike performances directed by a very well known yike teacher, Grandfather Khy,” says Ladavan, who began studying the art form in 1972. “The first time I saw the performance, I fell in love! I registered to learn yike opera with the Royal University of Fine Arts under Grandfather Khy. I’m in love with yike because it’s one of the oldest among the 20 kinds of Cambodian opera. In yike, the music sounds very nice and also the way the actors dance is very soft and interesting. The music makes the characters seem not so cruel.”

Ladavan acknowledges theatrical traditions by keeping the set as simple as possible – a throwback to the past, when operas were performed on bare ground. In a video clip on CLA’s website, celebrated yike master Khy Mom, born of a famous pre-war opera family, describes a typical scenario: “My father and my grandfather were yike performers. In the past they performed on the ground. They just put mats down and there was no electricity so they burned wooden torches or lamps to play. I saw them and I loved it. My father was teaching them, so I asked him to teach me too. I love it because it is inherited from our ancestors and I am afraid of losing it. That’s why I am trying to persuade the young generation to try hard to keep it going so that it won’t be lost.”

And what of today’s young cast? “Some of our dancers come to us because their parents want them to and think it would be a good idea for them to be trained in a classical art form,” says Frances, also of CLA. “Some people come because they’ve seen it on TV or they know friends who are doing it and they’re keen to learn too. One of my favourite students grew up in the provinces and while he was tending his water buffalo he would hear people singing yike songs and he learned to love it. There are some terribly romantic stories like that.

“The subtext of this play is really, really accessible to audiences. The first time we went to watch the troupe practice at a school in front of regular classes, they were just blown away. At that point we didn’t have any subtitles and one of our questions had been would foreign audiences who didn’t speak Khmer actually get the performance? It’s so easy, even without subtitles, to follow the plot. A lot of Cambodians cry at it. We had one staff member who I caught running out and I thought what’s happened? She was in floods of tears and just couldn’t watch any more. It’s very powerful.”

Her words are echoed immediately by Ladavan, now occupying Marion’s space on the stone bench. “The story of Mak Therng plays a very important role in Cambodian society because the purpose is to educate people to love justice, to have high morals in society, to be good and to stand up for their rights. A lot of the artists in Cambodia have to be very careful about following political trends because of the pressure applied by high-ranking officials when actors represent the people in society. In traditional stories, the king is wrong, but he punishes innocent people. We changed the ending to show society that, in the story, the prince has to take responsibility for his actions. The king and the prince both represent people in power, the ruling elite. There are two main messages: one is that innocent people should stand strong and fight for justice. The other is that people in positions of power should take responsibility for their actions.”

CLA’s new season, which marks the organisation’s 15th year, is now open 7pm Monday to Saturday at The National Museum. Mak Therng is staged on Tuesdays and Fridays; Children of Bassac dance shows are held on Mondays and Thursdays; Passage Of Life, a journey from birth to death, is staged on Wednesdays and Saturdays (details at cambodianlivingarts.com).

WHO: Cambodian Living Arts
WHAT: Plae Plakaa performances
WHERE: The National Museum, Street 178
WHEN: 7pm Monday to Saturday
WHY: Ancient wisdom for a modern world

Dancing on air

When more than a dozen khaki-clad dancers air stepped, jitterbugged and boogie woogied their way through a 30-second commercial for global thread-peddlers Gap in 1998, they unintentionally turned a new generation of rug cutters not onto affordable casual-fit pants but a certain something called ‘swing’.

Jazz – a form considered sacred by the world’s most po-faced musicians (even Russian classical composer Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, of habitually high brow, saw fit to approve) – had by the early 1930s birthed its most errant offspring. The traditional two-beat sound of New Orleans had given way to smoother, four-beat syncopated melodies and a dance craze instantly demonised as [GASP!] ‘light entertainment’. By 1935, despite much huffing and puffing on the part of moralistic types, the Swing Era had officially cometh… and would grip the US for a further decade.

Swing, which abandoned the string-heavy orchestration of the ’20s in favour of edgier horn and wind arrangements, was born of the African-American community (as indeed was its forebear), but swiftly transcended racial boundaries. Called on to define this Harlem sound by Bing Crosby on national radio, Louis Armstrong replied thus: “Ah, swing. Well, we used to call it syncopation then they called it ragtime then blues then jazz. Now it’s swing. White folks, y’all sho’ is a mess.”

It was a view Armstrong shared with author Norman Mailer. In his 1957 pamphlet The White Negro, Mailer charts the emerging philosophy of racial role reversal, describing folk “with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm.”

And who could blame hep cats and hipsters for yearning to go the way of such hedonism? Even before Cab Calloway’s 1939 Hepster Dictionary defined them as one ‘who knows all the answers, understands jive’, swingers were speeding up the waltz, cannibalising classic ballet manoeuvres and jabbing a much-needed shot of adrenalin straight into the heart of the Great American Songbook.

Legend has it that sometime in 1927, a year after the Savoy Ballroom in New York first opened its doors, what is today the world’s most famous swing dance was christened quite by accident. A newspaper reporter watching couples swing dance in the Savoy, which occupied an entire block, asked local enthusiast George ‘Shorty’ Snowden what the dance was called. On the bench next to the two men was a newspaper article about American aviator Charles Lindbergh’s record-breaking flight to Paris, bearing the headline: ‘Lindy hops the Atlantic’. George turned to the reporter, said simply ‘Lindy hop’ and then set about creating the world’s first lindy hop dance troupe.

A fusion of jazz, tap, breakaway and Charleston, the lindy hop shot to prominence in the mid-’30s when a swift-footed chap by the name of Frankie Manning joined the ranks of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a dance troupe resident at the Savoy. Deploying hitherto unseen ‘air steps’, in which at least one foot departs solid ground in zany acrobatics, Manning raised the dance bar a considerable margin. Perhaps nowhere is this more brilliantly evidenced than in the 1941 film Hellzapoppin’, where Manning and his fellow dancers catapult each other into the air in a series of torso-tossing moves. These Hip to Hip, Side Flip, Over The Back, Back Flip, Over The Head and The Snatch were, at least at the time, the wildest dance manoeuvres ever conceived.

In actual fact, so wild was the lindy hop that Nazi Germany furiously outlawed it, not that this could of course halt the explosion in German swing bands. Eventually the German authorities relented and created their own Nazi swing band, Charlie And His Orchestra. The band recorded entire albums of swing songs with lyrics ridiculing the Allied nations, which the Nazis promptly then parachuted behind ‘enemy’ lines.

It would take a further 40 years and the advent of break-dancing before anything came close to swing in terms of sheer power, strength and energy. In the meantime, arrangers such as Nelson Riddle and pop vocalists Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Dean Martin and Nat King Cole made sure it was etched onto the global consciousness. By the late 1990s, when Louis Prima’s 1956 song Jump, Jive An’ Wail became forever wedded to the image of Gapsters in khaki-coloured cargo pants, a revival was long overdue.

Today, swing having been immortalised for the 21st century masses first by JXL in Little Less Conversation then by Robbie Williams’ Swing When You’re Winning and later by Marilyn Manson in Mobscene, it’s even on the rise in the steaming urban jungles of Asia. “It’s massive in Korea and China, especially Beijing,” says Richard, a psychologist and long-dancing member of Phnom Penh’s premier swing dance club formerly known as PPPSwings but now poised to relaunch with a weekend-long extravaganza September 27 – 29, followed by weekly classes, as Swing Penh. “Most major cities have swing events. With salsa, it’s a cultural thing, it’s part of an ethos, but with swing it’s just about the dance and you get to choose from a huge set. I got called as a reluctant stand-in and felt a bit awkward, but then it became like a problem to solve: how do you do this? We don’t do too much of the ‘throwing around’ stuff. We’re middle aged, you know…” [Laughs]

The crotchets and quavers (quarter and eighth notes) associated with African-American music trip lightly out of the speaker, translated into nifty toe-heelery by the assembled swingers as a series of ‘triple steps’ and ‘steps’. Part Elvis, part rockabilly, Berlin neo-swing group The Baseballs, backed by an upright bass, punch out a swing-style cover of Rhianna’s Umbrella, replete in upswept quiffs, upturned collars and rolled-up denims.

“This is the one everyone wants to swing dance to,” says Kat, a fellow Swing Penher, as her dance partner Richard spins her away from him and then snaps her body back to his in a move called ‘the quick stop’. “You can swing dance to all sorts of music, including a lot of modern stuff.” Says Richard: “We use Morcheeba, all sorts. I like that you’re not held to one genre. In one night, you can have the whole range of music from the 20th century, which is really good fun.”

Janice Wilson, Swing Penh’s resident instructor, has performed, choreographed and taught dance in 11 countries, touring with Michael Buble and Wynton Marsalis and opening for Bill Cosby at Disney World. “Swing allows for full immersion. You’re not just listening to the music, you’re living it; breathing it,” she says in what might just be the shortest interview in the history of The Advisor.

But before you launch yourself full pelt into the whip, the push, the Carolina shag or the pony swing, you’d be well advised to watch Groovy Movie, from 1944, a gloriously tongue-in-cheek guide to the lindy hop. Also, try to avoid a ‘swungover’: the mental and physical results of binge jitterbugging, as defined by author Bobby White.

And remember, say the word ‘swinger’ in certain circles and you can expect to be met with a snigger: the phrase can also refer to spouse-swapping. “Someone posted this advert on Expat Advisory Services a while back looking for swingers in town,” says Kat. “This nice little old lady wrote back saying how happy she would be to welcome them to Phnom Penh. It was so sweet! I don’t think she had any idea…”

WHO: Hep cats and hipsters
WHAT: Swing Penh Launch Weekend
WHERE: Phnom Penh
WHEN: From 9pm September 27
WHY: “Swing allows for full immersion. You’re not just listening to the music, you’re living it; breathing it” – Janice Wilson

…..

Swing Penh
Launch Weekend

Swing with DJ Invisible Agent
9pm September 27 at the Village, #1 Street 360

Swing Brunch
10:30am September 28 at Comme A La Maison, Street 57

Swing Workshops
2:30pm – 6:30pm September 28 at Doors, Street 84 & 47 (beginners) and The Exchange, Street 84 & 47 (intermediate)

Swing With Kin
9pm September 28 at Doors, Street 84 & 47

Poolside Lindy Grub
10:30am September 29 at The Quay Rooftop Bar, Sisowath Quay

Dancing on air

When more than a dozen khaki-clad dancers air stepped, jitterbugged and boogie woogied their way through a 30-second commercial for global thread-peddlers Gap in 1998, they unintentionally turned a new generation of rug cutters not onto affordable casual-fit pants but a certain something called ‘swing’.

Jazz – a form considered sacred by the world’s most po-faced musicians (even Russian classical composer Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, of habitually high brow, saw fit to approve) – had by the early 1930s birthed its most errant offspring. The traditional two-beat sound of New Orleans had given way to smoother, four-beat syncopated melodies and a dance craze instantly demonised as [GASP!] ‘light entertainment’. By 1935, despite much huffing and puffing on the part of moralistic types, the Swing Era had officially cometh… and would grip the US for a further decade.

Swing, which abandoned the string-heavy orchestration of the ’20s in favour of edgier horn and wind arrangements, was born of the African-American community (as indeed was its forebear), but swiftly transcended racial boundaries. Called on to define this Harlem sound by Bing Crosby on national radio, Louis Armstrong replied thus: “Ah, swing. Well, we used to call it syncopation then they called it ragtime then blues then jazz. Now it’s swing. White folks, y’all sho’ is a mess.”

It was a view Armstrong shared with author Norman Mailer. In his 1957 pamphlet The White Negro, Mailer charts the emerging philosophy of racial role reversal, describing folk “with a middle-class background (who) attempt to put down their whiteness and adopt what they believe is the carefree, spontaneous, cool lifestyle of Negro hipsters: their manner of speaking and language, their use of milder narcotics, their appreciation of jazz and the blues, and their supposed concern with the good orgasm.”

And who could blame hep cats and hipsters for yearning to go the way of such hedonism? Even before Cab Calloway’s 1939 Hepster Dictionary defined them as one ‘who knows all the answers, understands jive’, swingers were speeding up the waltz, cannibalising classic ballet manoeuvres and jabbing a much-needed shot of adrenalin straight into the heart of the Great American Songbook.

Legend has it that sometime in 1927, a year after the Savoy Ballroom in New York first opened its doors, what is today the world’s most famous swing dance was christened quite by accident. A newspaper reporter watching couples swing dance in the Savoy, which occupied an entire block, asked local enthusiast George ‘Shorty’ Snowden what the dance was called. On the bench next to the two men was a newspaper article about American aviator Charles Lindbergh’s record-breaking flight to Paris, bearing the headline: ‘Lindy hops the Atlantic’. George turned to the reporter, said simply ‘Lindy hop’ and then set about creating the world’s first lindy hop dance troupe.

A fusion of jazz, tap, breakaway and Charleston, the lindy hop shot to prominence in the mid-’30s when a swift-footed chap by the name of Frankie Manning joined the ranks of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, a dance troupe resident at the Savoy. Deploying hitherto unseen ‘air steps’, in which at least one foot departs solid ground in zany acrobatics, Manning raised the dance bar a considerable margin. Perhaps nowhere is this more brilliantly evidenced than in the 1941 film Hellzapoppin’, where Manning and his fellow dancers catapult each other into the air in a series of torso-tossing moves. These Hip to Hip, Side Flip, Over The Back, Back Flip, Over The Head and The Snatch were, at least at the time, the wildest dance manoeuvres ever conceived.

In actual fact, so wild was the lindy hop that Nazi Germany furiously outlawed it, not that this could of course halt the explosion in German swing bands. Eventually the German authorities relented and created their own Nazi swing band, Charlie And His Orchestra. The band recorded entire albums of swing songs with lyrics ridiculing the Allied nations, which the Nazis promptly then parachuted behind ‘enemy’ lines.

It would take a further 40 years and the advent of break-dancing before anything came close to swing in terms of sheer power, strength and energy. In the meantime, arrangers such as Nelson Riddle and pop vocalists Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Dean Martin and Nat King Cole made sure it was etched onto the global consciousness. By the late 1990s, when Louis Prima’s 1956 song Jump, Jive An’ Wail became forever wedded to the image of Gapsters in khaki-coloured cargo pants, a revival was long overdue.

Today, swing having been immortalised for the 21st century masses first by JXL in Little Less Conversation then by Robbie Williams’ Swing When You’re Winning and later by Marilyn Manson in Mobscene, it’s even on the rise in the steaming urban jungles of Asia. “It’s massive in Korea and China, especially Beijing,” says Richard, a psychologist and long-dancing member of Phnom Penh’s premier swing dance club formerly known as PPPSwings but now poised to relaunch with a weekend-long extravaganza September 27 – 29, followed by weekly classes, as Swing Penh. “Most major cities have swing events. With salsa, it’s a cultural thing, it’s part of an ethos, but with swing it’s just about the dance and you get to choose from a huge set. I got called as a reluctant stand-in and felt a bit awkward, but then it became like a problem to solve: how do you do this? We don’t do too much of the ‘throwing around’ stuff. We’re middle aged, you know…” [Laughs]

The crotchets and quavers (quarter and eighth notes) associated with African-American music trip lightly out of the speaker, translated into nifty toe-heelery by the assembled swingers as a series of ‘triple steps’ and ‘steps’. Part Elvis, part rockabilly, Berlin neo-swing group The Baseballs, backed by an upright bass, punch out a swing-style cover of Rhianna’s Umbrella, replete in upswept quiffs, upturned collars and rolled-up denims.

“This is the one everyone wants to swing dance to,” says Kat, a fellow Swing Penher, as her dance partner Richard spins her away from him and then snaps her body back to his in a move called ‘the quick stop’. “You can swing dance to all sorts of music, including a lot of modern stuff.” Says Richard: “We use Morcheeba, all sorts. I like that you’re not held to one genre. In one night, you can have the whole range of music from the 20th century, which is really good fun.”

Janice Wilson, Swing Penh’s resident instructor, has performed, choreographed and taught dance in 11 countries, touring with Michael Buble and Wynton Marsalis and opening for Bill Cosby at Disney World. “Swing allows for full immersion. You’re not just listening to the music, you’re living it; breathing it,” she says in what might just be the shortest interview in the history of The Advisor.

But before you launch yourself full pelt into the whip, the push, the Carolina shag or the pony swing, you’d be well advised to watch Groovy Movie, from 1944, a gloriously tongue-in-cheek guide to the lindy hop. Also, try to avoid a ‘swungover’: the mental and physical results of binge jitterbugging, as defined by author Bobby White.

And remember, say the word ‘swinger’ in certain circles and you can expect to be met with a snigger: the phrase can also refer to spouse-swapping. “Someone posted this advert on Expat Advisory Services a while back looking for swingers in town,” says Kat. “This nice little old lady wrote back saying how happy she would be to welcome them to Phnom Penh. It was so sweet! I don’t think she had any idea…”

WHO: Hep cats and hipsters
WHAT: Swing Penh Launch Weekend
WHERE: Phnom Penh
WHEN: From 9pm September 27
WHY: “Swing allows for full immersion. You’re not just listening to the music, you’re living it; breathing it” – Janice Wilson

 

The only light is darkness

A journey through the dimly lit recesses of the human soul, Krom’s new album, Neon Dark, somehow manages to find light in the darkness. The interleaving of delta blues guitar with the breathy ethereal sighs of two opera-trained Cambodian sisters (nota bene: this is not ‘fusion’) creates an otherworldly signature sound capable of stirring the most jaded of souls.

Poised for release at a performance featuring Cambodia’s most revered master musician, this 12-track follow-up to the group’s first release, Songs From The Noir, is possibly even darker of hue than its forebear. This is not to be underestimated: Krom’s debut album, says widowed founder, joint songwriter and guitarist Chris Minko, was one of “very personal love songs by a man deep in grief”. “I must have been born dark or maybe that’s where I’ve been living for a while now,” he notes of the forthcoming release.

This voyage through the neon dark of the human soul begins with the purposeful strumming of the chapei, a long-necked, two-string Cambodian guitar which somehow seems to fit the contours of Kong Nay’s body as he tucks his feet up and under him on a stool, cradling the instrument in his arms. At a recent rare appearance with Krom during the Vibe Festival at Doors, this sightless visionary reduced the clank and clatter of Big City Bar-Chat to barely a whisper.

Seconds after the chapei comes the throaty, visceral vocals of the master himself. It was Master Kong Nay who composed the opening track, entitled The Creation Of Krom and sung exclusively in Khmer. The master opens his throat and lets loose a guttural wail. Fuzzy strings vibrate warmly at the touch of wizened, expert fingers. The sound is raw, powerful; not polished. Something about his intonation, like the sacred tradition of Gregorian chant, suggests the passing on of great – possibly universal – wisdom.

The Haunted, which follows and was commissioned for the soundtrack to In Search Of Camp 32, conjures dramatically different emotions. Against the stark background of delta blues guitar, which ebbs and flows between bass line and melody, Sophea Chamroeun slowly empties her lungs in a series of long, wistful sighs. Not a single coherent word is spoken; only soft ‘ahhhhhhhhhhhhs’ rise and fall in minor keys. Vocals swan-dive into eerily low registers, a rare feat for female Cambodian singers; spines tingle as mournful exhalations float disembodied above the rhythmic plucking of strings.

Before the hairs on your neck have a chance to return to the horizontal, Rain begins with the gentle plinking of guitar strings imitating falling water droplets. Every now and then the guitar emits a loud squawk, like the calling of a vast-winged albatross. Sophea’s deep vocal masteries pour out of the speakers in ever-more-complex layers over an even more complex jazz riff before slowly receding again in the passing of a stirring sonic storm.

Passion, fourth in line on the album, introduces Sophea’s younger sister, Sopheak. A fellow graduate of Cambodian Living Arts, Sopheak’s voice possesses an almost angelic purity. Where Sophea swoops, Sopheak soars into melancholic upper registers; the two sisters are the very embodiment of Yin and Yang. Not a word is sung in anything but Khmer, but the emotion Sopheak conveys transcends any language barrier.

Much has already been written about Seven Years Old, which debuted earlier this year on Mark Coles’ BBC Radio programme, The Shed, and was inspired by a news report Minko read in the Cambodian press. Like the grinding of continental shift next to the sisters’ otherworldly sighs, Minko slowly, deliberately spits forth the album’s most disturbing lyrics like the voice of Judgement Day itself: “She’s seven years old, her body sold. She’s chained to a bed; a shackle for a virgin head. It’s so bad; so very, very sad. In a world where humanity has gone stark raving mad.” He enunciates every syllable with excruciating slowness, damning the worst of mankind: ‘Sexpat; paedophile, deluded old fool. The rape of a child, it really isn’t cool…” Even more chilling, if that’s possible, are the eerie, endlessly looped English-language moans of Sophea and Sopheak: “Hush, little baby; don’t you cry. Hush, little baby; Don’t you cry…”

Before you reach for the nearest sharp implement with which to cut short this voyage into a very specific Hell, Night Moods provides a little light relief. Jimmy B on saxophone paints a dreamy backdrop against Minko’s guitar picking, while Sophea’s seductive vocals flutter like long eyelashes encircling innocent eyes. The Wire, by contrast, deploys Jimmy B on slide guitar, teasing forth recognisable country and western twangs that occasionally pierce Sopheak’s slow, hypnotic vocals.

Fractured Fragrance, the eighth track, features vocals by both sisters and Chris, the latter having spotted the title phrase in a book and decided he liked how it sounded. “Broken perfume. Shattered glass. A certain loss of innocence and the future is now the past… It’s fractured fragrance, left of side. And all I ever asked of you Is why don’t you come along for the ride.” Sadness is exactly as the song title suggests: one of only two instrumentals on the album, its long exhaled notes waver like tears about to fall. But wait? What it this? Could it be… country?! Life And Music could perhaps best be interpreted as a hint of things to come: Krom, at least one of whom is a die-hard Johnny Cash fan, have vowed to experiment with the country genre in their next album. Watch This Space.

But back to Neon Dark and Down Sukumvit Road, the album’s longest track which clocks in at seven-and-a-half minutes. A light-footed vocal pas de deux between Minko and Sophea, the song nonetheless details the horrors of Bangkok’s most notorious red light district – a district in which Minko intends to get as much air time as possible amid the resident sexpats and paedophiles, and rightly so.

Finally, bringing this epic journey of emotions full circle, comes a song entitled Dancing With Krom – the second track on the album scored especially by Master Kong Nay, this time singing in tandem with Sophea. A rousing toe-tapper, it’s precisely the antidote to the existential terrors that precede it, the joyous plink-plonk of the chapei’s duelling strings providing the platform for Sophea’s soaring harmonies.
And out of the darkness, came light.

WHO: Krom and Master Kong Nay
WHAT: Neon Dark album launch
WHERE: Doors, Street 84 &47
WHEN: 9pm September 21
WHY: Sometimes, the only light is darkness

The banality of mass murder

A potbellied, ponytailed man in grey suit and tie plops a floppy pink cowboy hat on the head of a much leaner accomplice. “This one’s for the Big Boss.” The slender figure clad in cream suit and brown shirt nods. “Yep, it’s perfect for me.” Gesturing to a wooden picnic table, he describes in detail – a point here, a hand motion there – how he positioned one leg of the table on a man’s throat, bouncing up and down on the table top and singing until the victim’s skull collapsed. As he demonstrates for the camera how he committed first degree murder, pink Stetson perched absurdly on head, this man – who beat to death, strangled or decapitated more than 1,000 Indonesians with his bare hands – claps his hands and laughs.

When veteran director Werner Herzog describes a film as the most “powerful, surreal and frightening in at least a decade”, you know you’d better steel your nerves before the opening credits start to roll. The Act Of Killing, for which Herzog later signed on as executive producer, isn’t the imagined stuff of nightmare peddlers Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino; it’s actual documented history, which is what makes its horrors that much harder to bear.

First-time director Joshua Oppenheimer, who will be staging a live Q&A session via Skype after his film screens at Bophana Centre this week, deals not in fiction but in fact. Eight years, 25 awards and one very surreal journey ago, he set out to make a documentary about ‘the second greatest crime of the 20th century’: the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, in which gangsters hired by General Suharto’s military dictatorship systematically tortured and murdered more than half a million people.

As with atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge here in Cambodia a decade later, the word ‘genocide’ doesn’t quite cover it. These were human beings bound, gagged and beaten to death – or worse – not on the basis of their race, creed or caste, but for the simple act of failing to support a political institution built on fear. Genocide in the strictest sense it may not have been; mass murder it most certainly was.

And it was to those responsible for these mass murders in northern Sumatra that Oppenheimer went with what some might consider an indecent proposal: re-enact the killings you committed, on camera, in the style of your favourite movie genre. Absurd it may sound, but the resulting 157 minutes of footage – edited down from thousands of hours gathered by Oppenheimer and his crew in situ between 2005 and 2011 – are among the most disturbing you will ever see. They document not only the process of producing said dramatisations, but also the inevitable consequences.

Anwar Congo, he of the pink Stetson, peers intently over the gold rims of his glasses. Now dressed in green Hawaiian shirt, with trousers that match his white hair, he raises one arm in slow motion. He’s standing on a white-walled roof terrace, the kind ubiquitous in Asia, with square mesh windows and barred metal doors. “At first we beat them to death, but there was too much blood. There was so much blood here so when we cleaned up it smelled awful. To avoid the blood I used this system. Can I show you?”

This small-time crook who went on to lead North Sumatra’s most lethal death squad holds aloft for the camera a piece of wood about 50 centimetres long and a few centimetres wide. A long piece of wire trails from its centre, one end of which Anwar ties to a pole. He then orders another man to sit, wrapping the remaining wire around his throat and slowly pulling it taut. The man makes an exaggerated choking sound, grinning. Anwar, wire still in hand, turns to face the camera. “This is how to do it without too much blood…  I’ve tried to forget all this with good music, dancing, feeling happy, a little alcohol, a little marijuana, a little… what do you call it? Ecstasy. Once I’d get drunk I’d ‘fly’ and feel happy.” Anwar dances an enthusiastic cha cha on the spot where hundreds died at his hands. His ‘victim’ laughs: “He’s a happy man.”

From hawking dodgy cinema tickets to movie-goers hungry for the latest Hollywood hit in the early ’60s, Anwar rose – via extortion, torture and murder – through the ranks of Indonesia’s gangster elite to occupy what is today a privileged place in the political hierarchy. Despite committing what the Geneva Conventions would define as crimes against humanity (or rather because of that), he’s revered as the founding father of Pemuda Pancasila, the right-wing paramilitary mob spawned by the original death squads.

And what a mob it is, counting among its three million members everyone from henchmen to government ministers. Their bravado knows no bounds: in frame after frame, they boast about their parts in the ‘extermination of communists’; a politically motivated massacre, in short. They laugh and cajole, even as they extort money from Chinese market-stall owners right in front of Oppenheimer’s lens (the director hung back after several such incidents to apologise and assure people he wasn’t filming on the thugs’ behalf). In several particularly excruciating scenes, these bold-as-brass killers bully the families of their victims to take part in their dramatic re-enactments.

‘Why?’ one might very well ask, not least at the sight of bewildered children being bullied to tears by obese serial killers. What could possibly be the point of such a traumatic cinematic exercise? Because, answers Oppenheimer, the regime still ruling Indonesia to this day was founded on crimes against humanity, yet has never been held accountable. “The film is essentially not about what happened in 1965, but rather about a regime in which genocide has, paradoxically, been effaced yet celebrated in order to keep the survivors terrified, the public brainwashed and the perpetrators able to live with themselves… It never pretends to be an exhaustive account of the events of 1965. It seeks to understand the impact of the killing and terror today, on individuals and institutions… When I was entrusted by this community of survivors to film these justifications, to film these boastings, I was trying to expose and interrogate the nature of impunity. Boasting about killing was the right material to do that with because it is a symptom of impunity.”

There is no shortage of such material. In one scene, an Indonesian governor proudly declares: “Communism will never be accepted here because we have so many gangsters, and that’s a good thing. The word gangster comes from English: ‘free men’. Thugs want freedom to do things, even if they are wrong. But if we know how to work with them, all we have to do is direct them.” In another, this time shot on the golf course, more thugs ruminate on the appeal of their unusual career choice: “Gangsters are free men. They want to enjoy life in their style. Relax and Rolex…” One then turns to his pretty, smartly attired female caddy and makes a lewd comment about her genitalia.

And therein lies the rub: these notorious mass murderers, infamous exterminators of their fellow men, appear throughout as alarmingly normal – a phenomenon Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt described in her 1963 book Eichmann In Jerusalem as “the banality of evil”. Oppenheimer’s monsters pester one another for shoulder massages at the bowling alley; can’t remember their lines at political rallies; smoke weed and drink beer to silence their demons. At one point, a frail-looking Anwar chastises a young boy – a nephew, perhaps? Grandson? – for breaking the leg of a duckling. “Say ‘Sorry, duck. It was an accident. I was scared and I hit you.’”

In Eichmann In Jerusalem, Arendt reports on the trial in Israel in 1962 of Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (‘lieutenant colonel’) Adolf Eichmann, one of the main orchestrators of the Holocaust. During the proceedings, after which he was hanged for crimes against humanity, he showed neither guilt nor hatred. In words eerily reminiscent of those of Kaing Guek Eav or Comrade Duch, the man who oversaw the notorious Khmer Rouge interrogation centre S21, Eichmann stated he was simply ‘doing his job’.

The link between the protagonists in Oppenheimer’s film and Arendt’s theory has been explored by at least one Indonesian academic. Soe Tjen Marching, writing in the Jakarta Globe, questions whether the perpetrators are banal, noting that “These people may merely have been at ease performing their unawareness (or denial) of their crimes in front of a perceived ally. Later, Anwar shows remorse as he becomes aware of Oppenheimer’s true intentions. Was Anwar previously really unaware? Or has Anwar’s awareness of Oppenheimer’s political stance somehow led him to demonstrate his awareness and his remorse concerning the crimes that he has committed? After all, we represent ourselves differently vis-a-vis different people.”

As the film progresses and the re-enactments become increasingly elaborate (think potbellied murderers dressed in full drag), so Oppenheimer’s nightmarish vision intensifies. Indonesia’s banal culture of impunity – the kind of culture to which Cambodia is no stranger – is a haven of horrors in which killers joke about war crimes on TV chat shows and celebrate moral disaster with the ease and grace of a soft-shoe shuffle. In front of thousands, a paramilitary leader announces: “This country needs free men. If we all worked for the government, we’d be a nation of bureaucrats. We’d get nothing done. We need gangsters to get things done. Muscles aren’t for beating people up… although beating people up is sometimes needed.” His visibly enthused audience laughs and cheers.

In a recent interview with Amnesty International, Oppenheimer says: “The justification and even celebration of mass killings seems in the film like a sign that they feel no guilt. I think it’s the opposite: it seems that they’re inhuman; on the contrary, killing is a human act, only human beings do it, we’re the only species that does this and to justify it and celebrate it is also human. Normally when we hear about perpetrators in film, they’ve already been removed from power, so they can’t justify it anymore. These are people who can justify it and so they do justify it, and the justification is actually a symptom of their own conscience and their own humanity. That’s the paradox in the film; it’s what allows the film to develop into what it develops to and leads to that climax. But it’s also the tragedy, because once you’ve corrupted yourself by killing somebody or killing many people and then justify it, the justification allows you to commit further evil, it allows you to kill again, it allows you to extort your victims, to blame them for what happened, intimidate them so that they don’t accuse you and make you feel guilty, and so that they stay silent, and it allows you to extort money from them, to kick them off the land, and it almost demands that you kill again.”

Anwar, of course, is by no means a lone operator. Also prominent in The Act Of Killing is Herman Koto, the aforementioned potbellied/ponytailed henchman, and Adi Zulkadry, the main driving force behind Pancasila Youth. Filmed fishing together, Adi dismisses Anwar’s lingering nightmares as “just a nerve disturbance”.

At one point Adi, ever remorseless, says on record: “Killing is the worst crime you can do. The secret is to find a way to not feel guilty. It’s all about finding the right excuse… All morality is relative.” Later, pressed by an unseen interviewer to explain his war crimes, he replies: “I don’t necessarily agree with those international laws. When Bush was in power, Guantanamo was right… The Geneva Conventions may be today’s morality, but tomorrow we’ll have the Jakarta Conventions and dump the Geneva Conventions. ‘War crimes’ are defined by the winners. I’m a winner, so I can make my own definition.”

The same could surely be said of Evil.

The only light is darkness

A journey through the dimly lit recesses of the human soul, Krom’s new album, Neon Dark, somehow manages to find light in the darkness. The interleaving of delta blues guitar with the breathy ethereal sighs of two opera-trained Cambodian sisters (nota bene: this is not ‘fusion’) creates an otherworldly signature sound capable of stirring the most jaded of souls.

Poised for release at a performance featuring Cambodia’s most revered master musician, this 12-track follow-up to the group’s first release, Songs From The Noir, is possibly even darker of hue than its forebear. This is not to be underestimated: Krom’s debut album, says widowed founder, joint songwriter and guitarist Chris Minko, was one of “very personal love songs by a man deep in grief”. “I must have been born dark or maybe that’s where I’ve been living for a while now,” he notes of the forthcoming release.

This voyage through the neon dark of the human soul begins with the purposeful strumming of the chapei, a long-necked, two-string Cambodian guitar which somehow seems to fit the contours of Kong Nay’s body as he tucks his feet up and under him on a stool, cradling the instrument in his arms. At a recent rare appearance with Krom during the Vibe Festival at Doors, this sightless visionary reduced the clank and clatter of Big City Bar-Chat to barely a whisper.

Seconds after the chapei comes the throaty, visceral vocals of the master himself. It was Master Kong Nay who composed the opening track, entitled The Creation Of Krom and sung exclusively in Khmer. The master opens his throat and lets loose a guttural wail. Fuzzy strings vibrate warmly at the touch of wizened, expert fingers. The sound is raw, powerful; not polished. Something about his intonation, like the sacred tradition of Gregorian chant, suggests the passing on of great – possibly universal – wisdom.

The Haunted, which follows and was commissioned for the soundtrack to In Search Of Camp 32, conjures dramatically different emotions. Against the stark background of delta blues guitar, which ebbs and flows between bass line and melody, Sophea Chamroeun slowly empties her lungs in a series of long, wistful sighs. Not a single coherent word is spoken; only soft ‘ahhhhhhhhhhhhs’ rise and fall in minor keys. Vocals swan-dive into eerily low registers, a rare feat for female Cambodian singers; spines tingle as mournful exhalations float disembodied above the rhythmic plucking of strings.

Before the hairs on your neck have a chance to return to the horizontal, Rain begins with the gentle plinking of guitar strings imitating falling water droplets. Every now and then the guitar emits a loud squawk, like the calling of a vast-winged albatross. Sophea’s deep vocal masteries pour out of the speakers in ever-more-complex layers over an even more complex jazz riff before slowly receding again in the passing of a stirring sonic storm.

Passion, fourth in line on the album, introduces Sophea’s younger sister, Sopheak. A fellow graduate of Cambodian Living Arts, Sopheak’s voice possesses an almost angelic purity. Where Sophea swoops, Sopheak soars into melancholic upper registers; the two sisters are the very embodiment of Yin and Yang. Not a word is sung in anything but Khmer, but the emotion Sopheak conveys transcends any language barrier.

Much has already been written about Seven Years Old, which debuted earlier this year on Mark Coles’ BBC Radio programme, The Shed, and was inspired by a news report Minko read in the Cambodian press. Like the grinding of continental shift next to the sisters’ otherworldly sighs, Minko slowly, deliberately spits forth the album’s most disturbing lyrics like the voice of Judgement Day itself: “She’s seven years old, her body sold. She’s chained to a bed; a shackle for a virgin head. It’s so bad; so very, very sad. In a world where humanity has gone stark raving mad.” He enunciates every syllable with excruciating slowness, damning the worst of mankind: ‘Sexpat; paedophile, deluded old fool. The rape of a child, it really isn’t cool…” Even more chilling, if that’s possible, are the eerie, endlessly looped English-language moans of Sophea and Sopheak: “Hush, little baby; don’t you cry. Hush, little baby; Don’t you cry…”

Before you reach for the nearest sharp implement with which to cut short this voyage into a very specific Hell, Night Moods provides a little light relief. Jimmy B on saxophone paints a dreamy backdrop against Minko’s guitar picking, while Sophea’s seductive vocals flutter like long eyelashes encircling innocent eyes. The Wire, by contrast, deploys Jimmy B on slide guitar, teasing forth recognisable country and western twangs that occasionally pierce Sopheak’s slow, hypnotic vocals.

Fractured Fragrance, the eighth track, features vocals by both sisters and Chris, the latter having spotted the title phrase in a book and decided he liked how it sounded. “Broken perfume. Shattered glass. A certain loss of innocence and the future is now the past… It’s fractured fragrance, left of side. And all I ever asked of you Is why don’t you come along for the ride.” Sadness is exactly as the song title suggests: one of only two instrumentals on the album, its long exhaled notes waver like tears about to fall. But wait? What it this? Could it be… country?! Life And Music could perhaps best be interpreted as a hint of things to come: Krom, at least one of whom is a die-hard Johnny Cash fan, have vowed to experiment with the country genre in their next album. Watch This Space.

But back to Neon Dark and Down Sukumvit Road, the album’s longest track which clocks in at seven-and-a-half minutes. A light-footed vocal pas de deux between Minko and Sophea, the song nonetheless details the horrors of Bangkok’s most notorious red light district – a district in which Minko intends to get as much air time as possible amid the resident sexpats and paedophiles, and rightly so.

Finally, bringing this epic journey of emotions full circle, comes a song entitled Dancing With Krom – the second track on the album scored especially by Master Kong Nay, this time singing in tandem with Sophea. A rousing toe-tapper, it’s precisely the antidote to the existential terrors that precede it, the joyous plink-plonk of the chapei’s duelling strings providing the platform for Sophea’s soaring harmonies.
And out of the darkness, came light.

WHO: Krom and Master Kong Nay
WHAT: Neon Dark album launch
WHERE: Doors, Street 84 &47
WHEN: 9pm September 21
WHY: Sometimes, the only light is darkness

 

Organic grooves & multi-textured smoothies

A bicycle bell tinkles high above muffled chatter and the distant swoosh of street noise. A single note rings out, slowly reverberating into silence. A second note, lower this time. The pitch drops again, followed by… the rush of wind? The splash of waves, perhaps? A lone voice with sing-song lilt echoes the same tonal arc: ‘Heat… Light… Weight… I am woken by the amber chants of bald men… and ecstatic squeals of children… and the mysterious banging and grinding that will miraculously turn into a new storey on a house across the street… or a new building on the next street down the block… once I have the energy to walk past it…’

So begins Triptych, the first album poised for release by WASH – an eclectic quartet of sound wizards who between them span spoken word, electronica and live instrumentation. Triptych is no ordinary album, but then WASH is no ordinary group. Flyers promoting WASH’s new live performance, The Next Horizon, frame it thus: ‘Electronic music meets poetry and they get along pretty well.’ Confused? They’re braced for that. ‘Or, if you prefer, beats, bass lines, melodies and blank verse are thrown into a blender to make a multi-textured smoothie.’

That’s that cleared up then. Or is it? “We find it very difficult to explain what it is that we do,” says Scott Bywater, spoken word artist, singer and the ‘S’ in ‘WASH’. The ‘A’ is Dublin-born sound engineer Alex Leonard: “We do! People say: ‘So, what is this?’ It’s, errrr, electronics and… spoken word and… soundscapes and guitar. But I’m just listing what everyone does in the band!” He laughs raucously.
Let us turn for a moment, then, to the custodian of said guitar, Hal FX (the ‘H’): “WASH is basically comprised of one poet and three music producers, so our attitude to putting the music together is probably quite different from most groups. It’s more about considering the overall sound, thinking about what we can introduce to the vibe and how the audience is going to find the experience. Maybe I drew the short straw with playing the actual instruments: I don’t really consider myself a guitarist or keyboard player. First and foremost I’m a music producer, so this gives me quite a different approach to playing those instruments live. For me it’s about adding tones and textures to the rhythms and sounds that Warren and Alex put together. The guitar and piano melodies form a counterpoint to Scott’s voice and join the electronic world with the more natural.”

Anyone who has ever sat through a ‘traditional’ poetry reading, sans live instruments and electronic soundscapes, might find their fists starting to twitch. The experience can, on occasion, be uncomfortable. At worst it’s like watching the shifting of tectonic plates – something Scott is all too aware of. “I’ve always had this difficulty with reading poetry aloud. I’ve not felt comfortable with it; it seems bare. Then I got involved with a reading at Java and there were two guys jamming while I read. Having that base was a revelation for reading; having something to work with that really brought out the singing in it all. At another launch, where there wasn’t going to be any music, my buddy came in and said: ‘Gee, if I had a couple of brushes, I could play a cardboard box.’ I said: ‘I’ve got some brushes.’ He said: ‘Well, I’ll go and find a cardboard box!’ That started a wonderful collaboration at Rubies every Sunday, where he’d come in and play the cardboard box. After that I really wanted to do something extended: more electronic, more of a soundscape.”

Enter Warren Daly (the ‘W’), intrigued by Scott’s first book of poems, A Certain Flow. In the process of recording different bits and pieces, he asked Scott to read aloud some of his work and upload it to SoundCloud. The four human elements of what became WASH came together over lunch, passing the book back and forth. “Everyone knew instinctively what we were going to do, even though we didn’t know how we were going to do it,” says Scott. “There was no sense of general bewilderment and everyone had something to bring to it. It was easy for me: ‘Well, I’ll read. You guys can sit around and do… stuff.’ To this day, that’s pretty much what it is.”

The poems fell naturally into three suites: the first about Cambodia, the second about travel, the third about what Scott calls “The art of living.” It was the ephemeral nature of the latter that prompted Alex, Warren and Hal to do something Alex describes as “a bit out there”. “The first musical composition that occurred with me was sitting down with Warren and going: ‘OK, let’s have a look at these poems. He’s saying these words. Let’s think about sounds that we can put behind them,’” says Alex. “Warren and I sat down and jammed one night with laptops connected to a speaker. We got lost in it. Suddenly it was 3am, which was great because it had organically started to happen. Warren would play some drum beats then I’d start layering a sort of drone sound on and we’d bring in some recordings from the street: background layers.

“One of the first pieces of electronic music I really got into was an album by The Orb, called Orbus Terrarum. It’s still one of my favourite electronic albums. As a complete piece, the whole album sounds like you’re in a bio dome with a jungle and animals everywhere and water trickling. It has this very organic feel, but there are so many layers in it and it’s just wonderful to listen to. I’ve always enjoyed making sounds and trying that immersive thing, where you step into it and you get transported away from where you are now.”

Yet with Triptych, at least initially, the journey is a local one suffused with the sounds of life on the streets of the Cambodian capital. “A lot of the stuff I’ve done here was to capture the sounds of Cambodia, putting a recorder out on the balcony or wherever just to get an ambience. Some of the recordings you capture are happy coincidences. For instance, there’s one sound in the first piece and it’s the sound of a child going: ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!’ [Fades to silence then laughs]. He’s just making a noise and it was perfect! It fades off into the distance and it’s beautiful, because it’s a sound you do hear every day. Random clanks and bangs: all of the things that mean that I don’t sleep very well! At the moment I’m waking up at 5am going: ‘Yep, there are the dogs and oh, there’s the baby crying, SCREAMING, for half an hour…’ One of the things you get here is, at dawn, the bird song, which is interesting. There’s this cacophony of noise all around and it’s a gorgeous sound. Some morning, when I’m lying in bed going ‘Bleuurrgggh!’, I must get up and do something constructive, like record it!”

In Kirirom National Park, on the hunt for more ambient sound bites, Alex and Warren rode dirt bikes deep into the forest and did precisely that: they left a recorder on the forest floor for half an hour, capturing the gentle swish of swaying trees. “I also try to make a few sounds: going through the undergrowth, that sort of thing,” says Alex. “That’s something I’ve always incorporated into my music. One of the things about electronic music is to generate a truly organic sound, which is very difficult. I’ve experimented with synthesisers, trying to get this truly random sound of something you might, for example, say sounds like rain, but it’s actually a synth and I’ve tried to create a rain sound, or I’ve taken a recording of rain and turned it into something else. Most of the sounds have effects on them. I don’t just play them straight. In the second section of Triptych, which is about travel, there’s a sound in there that’s a train, but I didn’t just want a train sound so I put it through a variety of different effects to create something that had a rhythm and had this sort of… I don’t think you’d listen to it and go ‘That’s a train.’ It’s a different effect. That rhythmic feeling is what I was looking for. In terms of where the WASH sound comes from, it’s very much an organic process: ideas play off each other. It’s a very slow, changing, morphing sort of thing.”

In the lofty rehearsal space in Tuol Tom Pong, which doubles as Warren and Alex’s home, a large coffee table is piled high with banks of electronic equipment. Laptops, midi controllers, keyboards and sound cards compete for space among the discarded coffee cups and empty beer cans. Warren and Alex sit hunched over their monitors, each screen an endlessly scrolling dashboard of flashing lights, knobs and sliders. Both men rock in time with the ambient soundscapes spooling out of the speakers, Scott draped over a chair opposite them, microphone cradled in hand.

“I write a text, give the boys a copy and make a recording of it straight into Garage Band and send them an MP3,” he notes. “They then scratch their heads a bit and say: ‘Hmmm. One hundred and ten beats per minute; A minor.’ It’s a very long process. They’ll say: ‘I think we need a bass line in here, or something else there.’ Each part is now a song on its own. There’s a certain melody or atmosphere around each poem then we move onto the next one and there’s a new atmosphere. It’s quite staggering. It’s like working with a constantly shifting plane, but everyone’s always feeding off what everybody else is doing. It never sounds the same twice.”

But back for a moment to being hunched over a laptop, a visual crime many electronic artists stand accused of committing against audiences. Warren: “With bands, you have your guitars, your drums, your vocals. People can see what you’re playing. With electronica, there’s the layering: it’s a mesh of the two. There’s a certain amount of production involved in the live set, but there is a band element to it as well. One thing that intrigued me was after one show, two people I know really well said: ‘What are you DOING on your laptop? What are you looking at?’ I’m sending Tweets: come to our gig! [Laughs] Someone else said: ‘You’re in a band. What do you play?’ About five instruments, but you’ll never really see me play them live. You can key in melodies, work on chord progressions. Alex, Hal and I work on them on the keyboard, but people who see us on stage think we’re just triggering a single track.”

Alex nods vigorously. “Presenting electronic music has always been a problem. People would come up to me and say: ‘Could you just look up every once in a while, to see what’s going on?’ I used to spend the entire show with my head down; this look of serious concentration. ‘You look like you’re constipated, you knob twiddler!’ But you don’t actually have any time, because it’s like you’re conducting a whole orchestra. We know there are certain sounds we want to bring in at certain points: in Wild Horses Of Namibia, we know we want tribal drums. Hal on guitar plays on top of what me and Warren are doing. We’ll have certain loops and certain instruments we can trigger and keys that we hit play melodies over specific bits. ‘OK, Wild Horses Of Namibia is coming in so I’m going to start bringing in a tambourine, change that rhythm around, start layering up a set of congas…’”

“It’s an electronic version of an orchestra,” says Warren. “We’re introducing more equipment that allows us to do different things so that you can see movement and if artists want to come in and paint or play the didgeridoo, they can.”

WHO: WASH
WHAT: The Next Horizon performance plus Triptych album release
WHERE: Meta House, #56 Sothearos Boulevard
WHEN: 7pm September 14
WHY: “I surf on what they’re serving up. There are times when I’m thinking: ‘How does this start?’ Then the sound rises and I know where I am. I get to walk through this jungle they’ve created. It’s wonderful.” – Scott Bywater

Seeking words of wisdom

“Drawing is my livelihood; nature my refuge, culture and history my addiction, and spirituality a way to make sense of it all.” – Joshua Chiang

A tusked elephant in billowing saffron robes dances lightly atop blades of emerald-green grass, small raccoon-like pilgrim trailing doggedly in its wake. Floating on a white page behind these watercolour animal characters are the musings of Buddha himself: “The path of the enlightened one leaves no track – it is like the path of birds in the sky.”

Joshua Chiang, a self-taught illustrator/scriptwriter from Singapore “who happens to also love the Great Outdoors and finding out about our true purpose in life”, has chosen an unusual vessel for elements of existentialism. In his new book, Trackless Paths, the author – who ‘sold’ the only copy of his first hand-drawn comic The Adventures of Hercules and Odysseus to his mother for a meal at the age of nine – pairs a menagerie of cartoon critters with notable quotes from sages and literary figures, polishing the exercise off by offering up his own reflections on each.

Nota bene: if you’re the sort who breaks out in boils when confronted by Buddha Botherers and Jesus Freaks, fear not. Preaching isn’t the point here. The intention, says Chiang, is to impart words of wisdom which, hey, even the Hell-bound and Godless among us might find comfort in. “The sayings which inspired the illustrations in this book come from a diverse range of spiritual (and the occasional non-spiritual) sources from different cultures and time periods, covering themes from love to courage to coping with grief, and are chosen for their ability to inspire, heal and challenge. The diversity is intentional; Wisdom and Truth are not confined to any creed or denomination and there is always beauty in every spiritual tradition. It is this universal beauty that I hope to share.”

The 84-page book contains 36 illustrations hand-drawn in pencil and then painted over with digital watercolour brushes. Every illustration is accompanied by the quote which inspired it, juxtaposed with Chiang’s notes and reflections. In one, a pair of grinning dogs dressed in woolly jumpers bound across a lawn, tugging behind them colourful balloons on string. Between the balloons nestle the words of martyred Beatle John Lennon: “Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted.” On the facing page, in discrete text, Chiang offers the following thoughts: “One of the hardest things for us to do as adults is to completely forget ourselves and surrender to the moment. For this piece, I wanted to express that feeling of uninhibited exuberance and genuine enjoyment, and at the same time convey that child-like innocence found in Lennon’s drawings.”

Trackless Paths is available now at Monument Books for $15.

 

Seeking words of wisdom

“Drawing is my livelihood; nature my refuge, culture and history my addiction, and spirituality a way to make sense of it all.” – Joshua Chiang

A tusked elephant in billowing saffron robes dances lightly atop blades of emerald-green grass, small raccoon-like pilgrim trailing doggedly in its wake. Floating on a white page behind these watercolour animal characters are the musings of Buddha himself: “The path of the enlightened one leaves no track – it is like the path of birds in the sky.”

Joshua Chiang, a self-taught illustrator/scriptwriter from Singapore “who happens to also love the Great Outdoors and finding out about our true purpose in life”, has chosen an unusual vessel for elements of existentialism. In his new book, Trackless Paths, the author – who ‘sold’ the only copy of his first hand-drawn comic The Adventures of Hercules and Odysseus to his mother for a meal at the age of nine – pairs a menagerie of cartoon critters with notable quotes from sages and literary figures, polishing the exercise off by offering up his own reflections on each.

Nota bene: if you’re the sort who breaks out in boils when confronted by Buddha Botherers and Jesus Freaks, fear not. Preaching isn’t the point here. The intention, says Chiang, is to impart words of wisdom which, hey, even the Hell-bound and Godless among us might find comfort in. “The sayings which inspired the illustrations in this book come from a diverse range of spiritual (and the occasional non-spiritual) sources from different cultures and time periods, covering themes from love to courage to coping with grief, and are chosen for their ability to inspire, heal and challenge. The diversity is intentional; Wisdom and Truth are not confined to any creed or denomination and there is always beauty in every spiritual tradition. It is this universal beauty that I hope to share.”

The 84-page book contains 36 illustrations hand-drawn in pencil and then painted over with digital watercolour brushes. Every illustration is accompanied by the quote which inspired it, juxtaposed with Chiang’s notes and reflections. In one, a pair of grinning dogs dressed in woolly jumpers bound across a lawn, tugging behind them colourful balloons on string. Between the balloons nestle the words of martyred Beatle John Lennon: “Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted.” On the facing page, in discrete text, Chiang offers the following thoughts: “One of the hardest things for us to do as adults is to completely forget ourselves and surrender to the moment. For this piece, I wanted to express that feeling of uninhibited exuberance and genuine enjoyment, and at the same time convey that child-like innocence found in Lennon’s drawings.”

Trackless Paths is available now at Monument Books for $15.

DJ Cuppa Tea: Beating the Mekong blues

Spacey guitar chords rise and fall like a gently cresting sonic wave. A man clad inexplicably in white open-face crash helmet picks tenderly at individual strings, vibrations mingling in mid-air with the slow rhythmic roll of the drums. Centre stage, long upward slashes of black eyeliner accentuating her exotic looks, a young woman in silver and blue snakes her arms from fingertip to shoulder in a physical prayer to invisible gods. Rising high above the Khmer lyrics, a single whispered phrase penetrates English ears: ‘Whiskey CambOOOOdiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh…’

Chanthy Kak, also known as Srey Thy and DJ Cuppa Tea, flaps her hands in delight. The long black tresses that tumbled over her shoulders during a performance at Equinox are today swept upwards and tucked neatly under a towel. The front woman of Cambodian Space Project slides off her seat in the salon and ducks back into neighbouring art store Sticky Fingers, a tiny shrine to the swinging ’60s deep in the bowels of Golden Sorya Mall. Kaleidoscopic album covers adorn the walls, a line-up of guitars standing proudly beneath a black and white drip painting of this engaging chanteuse, which, she gently points out, isn’t for sale.

And neither is she, although in the past that hasn’t prevented people from trying. Promised a job as a masseuse when she moved from rural Prey Veng to Phnom Penh at the age of 19, she instead found herself lashed to a brothel bed with electric cable. “I had stayed with this girl for three months and then one day she said to me: ‘Do you want to change jobs? You will make more money.’” Thy’s face darkens. “She said she knew my village and lived there when she was young, so I thought she was a good person. She said if I got a job in massage I could make good money. I thought she meant a nice place, like this [gestures to neighbouring salon], but no. She meant sex.”

It was a horror she hasn’t been shy in reliving, if only for the sake of other Cambodian women. “Some people, when they read my story on the internet, they ask me: ‘Why do you tell everyone about this? Are you stupid?’ Why? If you are too scared to tell anyone, nothing will ever change. I’m not shy. I want to tell everyone! I want to tell mothers and fathers too, so that they know what could happen if they send their daughters to Phnom Penh. I am not ashamed; I am not bad. This has made me strong. I was playing at Equinox and a Cambodian girl, who had a similar experience but is now married, said: ‘I love your story. Thank you so much for showing everyone. I want everyone to know. I work hard as a cleaner now so that I can go to school and learn. It’s so hard when you try to tell people what happened because they don’t want to hear.’ So long as you bring money to the people back home, they’re happy. They don’t want to hear how you got it.”

Now 33, the Space Project’s cosmic vocalist today has two albums to her name – 2011: A Space Odyssey and Not Easy Rock ‘n’ Roll – plus a third in the making; is lauded internationally as ‘the voice of free Cambodia’ and is the subject of a forthcoming BBC documentary by locally based director Marc Eberle. Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly says Thy’s voice is “one of those that give you the shivers”; Nick Cave, who she met at the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival in Bali last year (Mick Harvey produced the band’s second album), describes her cross-cultural performances with the Space Project as “very affecting”.

Quizzed about her brush with the Bad Seeds front man, she giggles. “He likes my music very much! Some people told me: ‘Be careful. Nick Cave has four wives already! Maybe you’re number five!’ When everyone sat down, Nick looked at me and said: ‘Hey!’ I thought maybe he wanted to talk to someone behind me, so I turned around. Then he said: ‘You!’ I didn’t understand that Nick Cave was a big star. He came over and took my hand; he was very strong and I was laughing. People kept saying: ‘Careful! He has four wives already! You’ll be number five!’ Maybe… [Laughs]”

Other brushes with stardom have followed since, not least Motown musician Dennis Coffey. This Michigan master of distortion, Echoplex tape-loop delay and wah-wah hosted Thy last month in Detroit to produce the Space Project’s third album, on which one of the tracks is Whiskey Cambodia. “You want some now? I have!” Thy orders her younger brother out of the shop to fetch the necessary mixers and slams a pair of glass beer mugs on the table, grinning wickedly. “Don’t drink a lot! Three days ago I went back to my village and was drinking Cambodian whiskey and I got drunk! I don’t know what happened. In the song I talk about barangs; the first time a foreigner went to my house. I was so scared: I didn’t have pizza, didn’t have hamburgers, didn’t have red wine. I was very worried. I couldn’t really speak English and didn’t know what to say. I had Cambodian whiskey so we all drank together. Happy, happy…”

While she talks, Thy flips through the images on her iPad: a small rural house with woven bamboo walls; a line of ducks trailing a disinterested water buffalo; gaggles of nieces, nephews and neighbours. In one shot, a frail-looking woman with silver hair sits with her head bowed in smiling contemplation over a Cambodian Space Project album cover: Thy’s mother. Unable to read or write, she took great delight in the covers documenting her daughter’s stratospheric rise before tuberculosis cut life short in 2010. “I can still feel her,” says Thy. “I think she’s happy. When I’m in Cambodia I don’t miss her so much, because I can feel her close every day.”

Diluted Cambodian whiskey pours down parched throats, the bite of the alcohol prompting the sucking of breath through clenched teeth. The new album, says Thy, is inspired in part by traditional arts, as evidenced in the socially conscious track Mountain Dancing. “When I was young I lived in Kampong Cham province and some people who had money, good cars and good clothes would go to the mountain to dance. The poor people who live near the mountain don’t look like this but they want to go dancing too, altogether. Some people would say: ‘Oh, you’re no good. You don’t have a good smell; you don’t have good clothes. You don’t have good skin: you’re dark. Don’t stand too close to me because I look nice.’ But we are all one Cambodia; one people. We can be happy dancing altogether; don’t think about your skin or your clothes or whether you have money. Some people don’t have money but they are happy enough to dance. They have a good heart.”

Ten tracks were recorded in five days in Detroit, fitting considering the reverence with which Thy regards all things Motown. One of her favourite songs is Hit The Road Jack by “the guy with the glasses” [Ray Charles]; another is Summertime, George Gershwin’s 1935 aria from Porgy and Bess, and her nine-year-old son, Makara, has apparently developed quite the thing for Aretha Franklin. “I’m so happy!” she says of her time in Kid Rock’s motor city studio. “We had a big studio and old-style microphones, with an old-style piano. I want to make more music there.”

But who is her audience? “I think it’s mostly barangs. For Cambodians, it’s very hard when I show people what I’m doing now. People only like traditional music, like Sinn Sisamouth, or new music like K-Pop. They sing about broken hearts and fast cars and dying. I cannot listen to that. Sorry! It’s not bad, but it’s not for me.”

Much has been made of Thy’s voyage from brothel to world stage, but what of any return to her sun-baked home province? “Now I don’t want to go to Prey Veng because some people make me feel down. They just think that I have money. Sometimes I tell stories about going to Europe, about going to Australia, the US. There, money! Everyone just thinks: ‘What happened? Don’t talk. Shut up, because I can’t see anything.’ Everyone wants to see me have a good house, diamonds and cars. Some friends say: ‘Now you have money, please change your skin! You can cut your eyes to look like Michael Jackson.’

“I care about money too, but when I work I understand why I’m doing it. I learn a lot from going outside Cambodia: why people work; why people travel. To begin with I was thinking: ‘Wow! If I go to Europe, maybe I will have money too,’ but when I went there was none. The sun burnt my skin like this [gestures and wails] and it was very cold. ‘What do I do now? I’m so very cold! Where’s the rice? There’s no rice!’ But I hope to change people. I’ve changed a lot. Since I started going away on tour, I understand more and more. The more I see, the more I want to see. Before, I was shy, but now? I’m Chanthy Cuppa Tea!”

WHO: Srey Thy & Cambodian Space Project
WHAT: Tripped-out ’60s psychedelia
WHERE: The FCC, Sisowath Quay
WHEN: 9pm September 7
WHY: She’ll take you into orbit