Byline: Robert Starkweather

Bourbon and bad acid

Loud, fast and slightly out of tune, the new EP from Tango & Snatch is a squeaky old farm truck sprinting perilously down the back roads of hillbilly country under a moonless sky.

Such will be the legacy of Tango’s front man Ziad Samman, who after four years in the Kingdom is finally moving on. On June 21, the Australian native returns to Hong Kong with a sack full of tales and what’s left of his sanity.

“Cambodia has been a wild ride,” the 27-year-old guitar player says, christening the sunset with his first bourbon and Coke of the evening. “I feel like I have post-traumatic stress.”

Four years ago Samman took over day-to-day operations at the Cambodian Acid Survivors Charity, a group that helps victims of acid attacks with legal, medical and emotional support. Samman often met victims in the hours after their assault and followed them through years of recovery. “It can be a very lengthy process, so you really get to know people.”

A bass player since his teenage years, Samman turned to music to help ease the job’s heavy emotional trip. “I needed a release and for me the best way to do that was to channel it into the music.”

He picked up a no-name acoustic six-string from a shop near Central Market and began learning. “I’d come home and it would be dark, late and I’d be buggered,” he recalls, stubbing another cigarette into the ashtray. “That’s when I really learned how to play guitar. I just sat in my room and played. I wrote and recorded like 300 songs.”

It was a crude set-up, just the guitar and a laptop, and most of what he recorded was junk. “Out of all of those songs, out of hours of material I had recorded, there was probably like a good half hour that you were like ‘oh, that’s all right.’ The rest was dog shit.” But it didn’t matter. The music kept him sane.

Then his laptop got stolen. It seemed like a disaster. But possessed with the same unstoppable determination that he infused into the charity, Samman tossed his guitar over his shoulder and headed down to open mic night at Paddy Rice, determined to keep playing. He met Melanie Brew, a rock ‘n’ roll kindred spirit, and the pair immediately connected. Tango & Snatch was born the next week with Samman on guitar and Brew on drums. Bass player Kate Liana joined the band about nine months ago, and the trio hit the studio in March to record the group’s second and presumably final album.

Snagglepuss is unlikely to win any awards. Recorded “live” in the studio, the sound is raw and unvarnished, devoid of the post-production polish typical of a properly mastered effort. The album’s eight tracks took just four hours to finish.

Compared to the band’s first album, Rock ‘n’ Roll Machine Deathmatch, the songs on Snagglepuss are generally faster and mark a subtle yet noticeable shift away from Deathmatch’s straight-ahead rockabilly sound toward something more in the spirit of the Sex Pistols or The Clash.

On the album’s second track, The River Song, Samman’s distorted guitars and raspy vocals are reminiscent of early Nirvana, and the song sets the tone for the rest of the album – a wild, full-throttle midnight ride through cow pastures of angst.

On Street 178, brooding guitars and dark vocals crescendo in coarse, raspy wails.

I been drinking all night and day
Make this feeling go away
Looks like it is here to stay for a while

“I’m not a singer,” Samman says. “I don’t have a pretty sounding voice, [so] I’m probably better off working with what I do well, which is sort of like snarl.”

The snarl works and Snagglepuss, like Kentucky bourbon, definitely gets better with age. Each listen seems to sand the sharp edges into something smoother yet more potent.

Download Snagglepuss and Rock ‘n’ Roll Machine Deathmatch at: http://artefracture.bandcamp.com/.

A fighter exposed

Even the most loquacious fighters turn pensive in the dwindling hours before a contest. They stare vacantly into the distance. Wrap their hands. Shadow box. As hyperfocus sets in, ambient chatter is quieted by the sound of a boxer’s heart, the roar of screaming fans silenced by the instinct to survive.

In Khmer Boxers, a series of portraits on exhibit at the French Cultural Centre, Antoine Raab attempts to capture that tense, almost meditative state that fighters attain during combat. The challenge, Raab says, was to photograph boxers while “they are still in the mood of the fight”.

After some experimentation, Raab set up a portable studio next to the ring and photographed boxers in the minutes immediately after a bout. He used a black backdrop to hide the ringside cacophony of fans, coaches and corner men. “I wanted to focus on the fighter, not the fight.”

Raab captured young fighters and old, the famous and the unknown. The portraits that emerged were greatly influenced by the five rounds that preceded the shutter snap.

In the faces of older veterans – Sao Bunoeun, Nuon Sorya – we see the unshakable confidence of experience and age. Sao Bunoeun poses with his heavily wrapped hands down at his waistline, elbows back, chin stuck forward, like a shirtless soldier standing to attention. Beads of sweat glisten against his dark torso. Nuon Sorya, the ‘Old Tiger’, stands expressionless, hands akimbo, wholly unfazed by fights or photos.

Many fighters seem older in Raab’s portraits – the boyish smiles of Sen Rady and Kim Dima are replaced with mature and menacing stares; Pao Phuoek and Chey Vannak, their spirits flagging, appear aged with exhaustion and the scars of previous battles. And then there are the kids, the under 14s; their skinny, under-developed frames supporting expressions far older than their years. “It’s not like football,” Raab says. It’s most certainly not.

A Paris native, Raab began photographing boxing three years ago, but he couldn’t decide on the best way to approach his subjects. “The strength of the fighters attracted me,” he says. “I wanted to show that.” The concept finally came to him while standing ringside at a Nuon Sorya fight.

Between rounds, Sorya, who Raab had encountered previously in France, stood staring at the crowds below. Their eyes met. “I could see that he saw me, but he didn’t see me,” Raab says. “It’s like he was floating.” Upon discovering that altered state of consciousness commonly referred to as ‘battle trance’, Raab set about trying to capture it on film.

The result, however, is far from an unflattering collection of blood-thirsty brutes. In some sort of delicious paradox, Raab’s pursuit of the warrior’s savage essence captures not only their strengths, but also their frailties. And, at last, we understand why, in the dwindling hours before a fight, they go quiet.

WHO: Antoine Raab
WHAT: Kun Khmer fighters
WHERE: French Cultural Centre, St. 184
WHEN: March 7
WHY: Far from an unflattering collection of blood-thirsty brutes

Street study

Few can ignore the metre-high images of men in tight-fitting dresses. They provoke giggles, questions and uncomfortable sideways stares.

If indifference is the enemy, Dareth Rosaline is winning. Her series of portraits along Sisowath Quay, part of the week-long Photo Phnom Penh festival, explores identity, sexuality and the cultural perceptions connected with appearance.

Other exhibits address weightier concerns. For the festival’s opening at the European Commission on December 7, giant images of Cambodian trees will cover the commission’s exterior wall on Norodom Boulevard, a not-so-subtle nod to the ecological necessity of greenery and, perhaps, the country’s inability to better protect its dwindling forest cover.

“I don’t care if people like it or not,” says Christian Caujolle, the festival’s curator. “If they are astonished, love, hate – that means they have seen something and that they have reacted.”

In all, more than 100 photographers from around the world will take part in 26 exhibits across 16 locations – not including the outdoor installations along the quay and other events, which all in account for more than 1,000 photographs. Disbelief settles over Caujolle as he assesses the scope of it all. “We are crazy,” he says.

Caujolle is no stranger to photography, or big ideas. After university, where he studied Spanish literature, he joined the left-wing newspaper Liberation, founded in 1973 by Jean-Paul Sartre and others. He began covering art and photography in the mid-1970s and became the paper’s picture editor in 1981.

In those days, Paris had only one photography gallery: Agathe Gaillard. “I was going to that gallery every Saturday,” Caujolle told FK Magazine in August. “I was spending my afternoons there and I met Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Bill Brant, Ralph Gibson, Larry Clark, Brassaï, Robert Doisneau, Izis, Edouard Boubat.”

Caujolle began teaching photography at the French Cultural Centre in Phnom Penh in 1995, and many of today’s established and rising stars – Mak Remissa, Tang Chin Sothy, Kim Hak, Sovan Philong – came from his programme, Studio Image.

By the mid-2000s, Phnom Penh’s small but growing community of photographers needed an outlet to show their work. They longed for a platform to exchange ideas with shutterbugs from elsewhere. In 2008, the French Cultural Centre asked Caujolle if he could put something together. He didn’t hesitate. “The concept was immediately very clear for me,” he says.”The idea is one of exchange between Europe and Asia, with mostly young artists.”

This year’s festival presents an A-list of overseas talent. Michael Ackerman will make his first appearance in Asia, showing images from his next book at Java Café. French photographer and artist JR will create a Phnom Penh installation of his worldwide exhibit Inside Out, which comprises series of oversized black-and-white portraits hung in local communities. Isabel Munoz, the Spanish photographer known for her exquisite studies of the human form, will present a series on apsaras. Georges Ruosse, the space-bending anamorphic artist, is currently constructing images scheduled for unveiling on the wall of the French Embassy.

“If only a small minority of the Phnom Penhites will really grasp the subtleties of the proposed exhibitions, it will at least confront them with something unusual,” says John Vink, whose works on the late King Father Norodom Sihanouk will be presented on opening night.

The need to provoke runs deep through photography. But conversations cannot exist where knowledge of the form is absent. In Phnom Penh, as in most cities, educating a wider audience means getting images outside the galleries and into the street, where pictures can pose for everyday people. “We will not change the world with Photo Phnom Penh,” Caujolle says, “but the education purpose is part of the product.”

A natural teacher, Caujolle’s desire to share drives not only the festival’s outdoor agenda, but its commitment to keeping access free and open to all. The festival remains dedicated to the local public, he says, and while interaction between locals and foreigners is useful, it’s the exchange between countrymen that carries the greatest significance.

“There was a generation born around 1980, where in each field you find between one and five people who have that strong necessity of expression and who are talented and who have things to say. I am deeply moved by that,” Caujolle says. He hopes you will be too.

WHO: Cambodian and international photographers
WHAT: Photo Phnom Penh, international photo festival
WHERE: Across Phnom Penh (see institutfrancais-cambodge.com/ppp for details)
WHEN: December 7 – 12
WHY: World-class photography at your disposal

 

Seizing the moment

The gritty side streets. The gilded temples. The markets. The people. The faces. Phnom Penh is a street photographer’s fantasy, an unlimited supply of intriguing scenes and standout locations.

For Dutch photographer Eric de Vries, who lives in Siem Reap, the capital offers a never-ending canvas of urban jungle, an unvarnished Asian metropolis in all its bustling splendour.

“Something is happening on almost every street corner,” he says. “It’s hectic; it’s the big city.”

De Vries – who leads a street photography workshop this weekend in Phnom Penh – works primarily in black and white. His images are moody and rich with contrast. He seems innately drawn to the existential struggle, making pictures infused with emotion and laden with multiple meanings.

“It’s all about timing,” he says. “Sometimes you’re in a good spot and have to be patient for the things to happen. In that case, you have time to frame the pictures right. Sometimes you shoot from a distance, to get the complete scene. Sometimes, you go up close and approach your subject in a sneaky way.”

As a genre, street photography is defined by its candid capture of life in public, unscripted and unrehearsed. The late French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was perhaps street photography’s greatest practitioner. Born in Seine-et-Marne in 1908, Cartier-Bresson was first a student of fine art, then a soldier and a hunter, before he turned to photography. As an artist, he came of age with the Surrealists, who embraced artistic rule-breaking and the free, uncontrolled flow of ideas.

In his first Surrealist Manifesto, published in 1924, Andre Breton defined Surrealism as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”

It’s not hard to image Breton finding comfort in the chaotic hustle of Phnom Penh. The capital at times seems like a river of uncontrollable expression crashing against the steadfast barriers of first-world pretensions.

De Vries says that unruliness makes Phnom Penh a refreshing place to take pictures. “My favorite places are the local markets – Kandal, Olympic – because of the occasional chaos. The Building at Sothearos is also a very nice spot. It’s an old building, and it shows. Busy 24/7. Great for street photography.”

Cartier-Bresson called it “capturing the moment,” and during his workshops de Vries attempts to impart his experience not just identifying it, but learning to anticipate it. “Sometimes you catch the moment; sometimes you have to wait for it.”

A moment too soon and the facial expression isn’t right; the composition is off; the light is too harsh. Luck and natural talent are surely involved. Critiques from more experienced photographers help. But nothing can substitute for experience.

“Photography is not like painting,” Cartier-Bresson explained in a 1957 newspaper article. “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera… Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

WHO: Photographer Eric de Vries
WHAT: Street photography workshop
WHERE: The streets of Phnom Penh
WHEN: June 9 & 10
WHY: Learn to take pictures that don’t suck

 

Stories to tell

A book could never hold all the images that John Vink amassed during 12 years of photographing evictions in Cambodia. Nor could a lorry contain the outrage.

Suspicious fires gutted some communities. At others, there was little left for guesswork – police came with torches and set the places alight. In a single week in November 2001, two large Phnom Penh neighbourhoods went up in smoke, displacing more than 2,500 families.

The worst was Sambok Chap, a half-dozen hectares of crumbling shanties otherwise situated on primo capital real estate.

“[Homeowners] took sledgehammers to demolish their homes of corrugated iron and wooden posts before the flames consumed them. They would need these materials to rebuild,” writes journalist Robert Carmichael in John Vink’s new iPad app, Quest for Land. “Soon sirens punched holes in the smoke-filled air as the men of Phnom Penh’s fire brigade arrived, sweating in donated jackets and bulky helmets, to aim jets of water from leaky hoses. They would focus on saving one house before moving rapidly onto another, the beneficiaries of a desperate bidding war between the better-off homeowners.”

And on it goes: 20 chapters, some 700 photographs and 20,000 words of more outrage.

Quest for Land, available on iTunes, represents more than a decade of work for Vink, a member of the prestigious agency Magnum Photos. The app delves into more than just evictions. In photography and prose, Vink and Carmichael explore the significance that land holds in Cambodian life, and the profound upheaval that is caused by losing it.

Born in Belgium in 1948, Vink moved permanently to Phnom Penh in 2000, and almost immediately set upon covering forced relocations – first in Poipet, where casino heavies were pushing the poor onto minefields, then in Phnom Penh, where those newly displaced families came seeking redress from a tin-eared government.

A working photo-journalist since the early1970s, Vink says the iPad not only represents a new medium to conquer, it offers a superior way to tell the story.

A book, he says, represents the quintessential way to complete a project, the “perfect balance between content and intention”. But with print publishing, there are always compromises to be made.

“The publisher has a say,” Vink explains. “He will say ‘No, I don’t want that cover, because it’s not commercial.’ He will say ‘Sorry, you want 180 pages? No way. It’s going to be 120, for economic reasons. You want paper that thick, no, sorry, cannot. It will be a soft cover.’ And you end up with a crappy little book.”

An app offers far greater creative control and far fewer constraints. “I feel much freer here than in a book. In a book, you really have restrictions because of the technique of printing. Here, the restrictions are the ability to programme; it definitely offers much more possibility than a book.”

Sound, video and slideshows all represent new media frontiers for the modern photographer. But ultimately, it is the plight of other humans that compels Vink to risk his safety for the sake of making pictures.

“Probably to do with my past, I guess, my childhood. I am not happy when I see injustice.”

WHO: John Vink, Magnum Photos
WHAT: Quest for Land, iPad app
WHEN: Now
WHERE: iTunes, johnvink.com/quest
WHY: Best app yet by a Magnum shooter

The first casaulty

The stack of human skulls piled high at Choueng Ek stands as gruesome testimony to the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. Thousands of black-and-white portraits at Toul Sleng offer yet more affirmation of the regime’s brutality. Then there is the court. The testimony. The tears.

Proof, it seems, could not be more conspicuous. But for the post-holocaust generation born after 1979, the stories of their elders are often too horrible to believe. Questions linger.

Is it really true?

That is the question posed by a group of Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP) students from this year’s graduating class. In a collection of short films of the same name, students from the department of media and communications explore life after the war, as lived by survivors.

“I would like to show these films abroad,” says Dr Tillman Baumgärtel, a visiting professor at RUPP Department of Media and Communications. “They give a different picture. It’s not the international filmmaker who comes here and shoots a movie in three weeks. It’s an on-the-ground perspective.”

For years, talk of the Khmer Rouge remained taboo. Prime Minister Hun Sen famously said the country should dig a hole and bury the past. The Extraordinary Courts of Cambodia, for all its failures, brought conversations about the country’s past into the fore. It proved a catalyst for bringing Khmer Rouge history into the high-school curriculum. The first history books to include Democratic Kampuchea landed on school desks in 2010. Until then, students had learned nothing of the brutality their parents endured.

Is it really true? answers the question not with documentary reportage but with short feature films. Some last only a few minutes, others longer. They strive for the same unbiased tone of television news, while tugging to unwrap the humanity of their protagonists.

In Grandma’s Story, the filmmaker’s grandmother tearfully recounts the day four Khmer Rouge soldiers came to take her husband away.  They said he could have the same job he held under the Lon Nol regime. He left in a horse cart, and she never saw him again. Not all of the stories are so heart wrenching. Two films explore music, Khmer Music After Year Zero and The Chapei Saved My Life, which tells the story of chapei master Prach Chhoun.

In A Concrete Memory, filmmakers Ith Sothoeuth and Em Sopheak travel with historian Henri Locard to the abandoned airstrip at Kampong Chhnang, where they find an old-timer by the name of Som Chhamom. He is thin with sharp features and thick, calloused hands. In deliberate, unemotional sentences, he recounts the airport’s construction with the unhurried pace of the old. “Those soldiers still did most of the work manually,” he says, a long ribbon of concrete runway stretched out behind him. “They cleaned up everything here and filled in the holes.”

Under Chinese direction, Khmers built the 2,400-metre runway plus an elaborate underground tunnel network and above ground water storage facility – virtually all of it by hand. Estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to 50,000 – no one knows for certain. “The Chinese had further ideas about this place,” explains Locard. “We suspect it was to be not just a Khmer Rouge air base but a Chinese air base.” Some speculate that it was the nearing completion of the runway that finally prompted Vietnam to invade in early 1979, thus bringing an end to Pol Pot’s era of homicidal mania.

Only recently have Khmer artists, and the country at large, began to address the past in earnest. “I think the students learn a lot from it,” says Dr Baumgärtel. “Their generation already talked about this issue in school, but not at great length, so for them, they learn new things.”

Speaking from the runway in Kampong Chhnang, Som Chhamom offers his own ruminations. “[The] next generation should take care and keep it for future interest,” he says, the red krama around his neck fluttering gently in the afternoon breeze. He is talking about the airport, and the toll it took to build, but he could easily be talking about the modern state and its caretakers.

“Don’t let it get more damaged,” he says, “because this was not an easy thing to build.”

WHO: RUPP Department of Media and Communications graduating class
WHAT: Short films exploring life after the Khmer Rouge
WHERE: Meta House, 37 Sotheros Blvd.
WHEN: Friday May 11
WHY: KR tales told by survivors, not outsiders

Band of Kok Thlok musicians mark latest evolution in modern Khmer rock fusion

The music sounds like something discovered in the lost archives of Kampuchea radio – smoked-out ‘70s-era jungle rock laced with Khmer instruments and melodies. The sharp, plink-plink sounds of the Khmer xylophone bounce against distorted guitar in brooding, Grateful Dead-esque sonic landscapes. The tro – a single-stringed Khmer violin of sorts – screams along to funky bass lines and moody, expressive breaks.

The music spilling from the Kok Thlok house in far west Phnom Penh is the latest collaborative effort of Gildas Maronneaud, a pre-school music teacher and instrumental force in the local music scene. His band remains nameless, and others involved remain coy about the “contemporary experimental” project built on Khmer and Western instrumentation. The nucleus comprises Kanika Pheang on drums and tro; Phat Sothlideth on the roneat, or Khmer xylophone, Adrian Jayraed on guitars, and Maronneaud on bass.

“It’s not about me,” says Maronneaud, the group’s uncomfortable French-Khmer spokesman. “It’s about the Khmer musicians. They are really, really good. They are masters.” The capital will get its first taste of the band on May 5, when the group and friends descend on The Alley Cat Cafe for a Cinco de Mayo party. “I will invite many artists from Kok Thlok to come,” Adrian says. “And we will jam.”

In the face of the imminent destruction of the Preah Suramarit National Theatre in 2008, the performers living there needed a new place to call home. Kok Thlok, founded in 2006, was largely a reaction to the theatre’s demise, and the group continues to play an important role at the centre of modern performing arts.

“Kok Thlok used to play lots of concerts with electric and traditional instruments, old Khmer rock ‘n’ roll songs,” Adrian explains. “They can play all those old songs, and they play them with the roneat and the tro. And it’s really interesting, because when you do a party and the roneat and the tro can answer, question and answer, it’s really crazy, very beautiful.”

Anonymous beginnings are something of a forte for The Alley Cat Cafe, an intimate, diner-style Mexicana joint located on the Street 19 alley. In 2006, a Tasmanian guitarist named Julian Poulson had recently befriended an intoxicating young female vocalist by the name of Kak Chanthy. The two had chemistry, and friends at the restaurant offered up a slice of the dining room floor to try out their new sound on a live audience.

Maronneaud, invited by Poulson, was at The Alley Cat that night, too. Then, as now, the band had no name, and few involved would dare speculate about what, if any, promise the future held. From that initial jam session, Poulson went on to build The Cambodian Space Project, a band of which Maronneaud is still a “huge” part.

For family and work reasons – he is a husband, father and teacher – Maronneaud prefers to play close to home, and these days, CSP is often on the road and outside the country. His latest project is in some ways an attempt to form a band that will not require such travel commitments. It is also, in deeper ways, a means to connect with his heritage. “I prefer to play with Khmer musicians,” he says. “I am half Khmer.”

Working alongside Kanika Pheang and Phat Sothlideth, the three form an easy relationship, their musical synergies evident in the music they make. It is the foundation on which some greater musical endeavor could surely can be built, and their Cinco de Mayo show holds as much promise as that first anonymous Alley Cat show, even if no one dares to say it.

WHO: Kok Thlok & associates
WHAT: Khmer rock fusion
WHEN: 8:30pm May 5
WHERE: The Alley Cat Cafe, St. 19 Alley
WHY: They could well go into the annals of Phnom Penh musical lore

Ghetto blasters

Mention Philips, the Dutch appliance maker, and it’s hard to image a more unexciting corporate conglomerate. The company makes electric leg shavers, low-wattage LED light bulbs and a whole glossy catalogue of workaday consumer goods.

Few would place it among the world’s greatest contributors to global hip-hop culture. But there it most certainly stands.

The story begins at the 1963 Berlin Audio Show, when Philips introduced what at the time appeared to be a shockingly innocuous new medium of audio storage – the compact cassette.

By 1966, with technology on the march, the company released the Norelco Carry-Corder 150, a portable audio device that could not only play compact cassettes but also record them. In 1969, Philips married its recorder to the radio and released the ‘radiorecorder’, a dull grey and matte black plastic audio box with an extendable chrome antenna for the radio and chunky mechanical buttons to record, play, stop, fast-forward and rewind.

The boombox was born.

Sound quality improved throughout the 1970s. Dual cassette decks were added, which made copying cassette tapes push-button easy. And by the 1980s, just as hip-hop legend DJ Kool Herc was redefining the term ‘house party’, the humble radio recorder was ready to become epic.

“I remember getting my first ghetto blaster as a kid, and using the dual cassette decks to try to make my own mix tapes,” says the Bangkok-based American rapper known as Hydro Phonics, a card-carrying medical marijuana smoker from North Carolina, in a soft southern drawl.

The portable boombox moved the party from the living room to the street corner, where rappers and b-boys traded dance moves and beats. It provided the artillery for a generation of freestyle street battles. “Nothing can ever replace that box sitting in the middle of the party and everyone dancing.”

These days, Hydro Phonics works out of Bangkok pushing hip-hop throughout the Asia region. He performs a two-man show under the rubric Ghetto Blasters with regional DJ powerhouse Tech 12. The Ghetto Blasters perform with Akil the MC, previously of Jurassic 5, under the name Four Dub.

Originally from Bristol, in the UK, Tech 12 claims residencies at two legendary Bangkok night clubs: the Bed Supper Club and Q-Bar. He’s also the resident Wednesday night DJ at Seduction Phuket, and he’s worked alongside such musical heavy weights as The Black Eyed Peas, Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash, Cash Money, Massive Attack, Portishead and others.

Akil was a founding member of the Los Angeles-based alternative rap act Jurassic 5, which came of age during the late 1990s heyday of West coast rap. Powered by the prodigal turntablism of DJ Cut Chemist, the group’s eponymous 1997 album was hailed by many critics as a legitimate contender for hip-hop album of the decade.

Cut Chemist left the group in 2006, and the rest of the members parted ways soon after. Akil, a Los Angeles native, headed east. He met Hydro in Bangkok through mutual friends, and the two bonded over big fatties and old school beats. Musical collaboration came naturally. And for a DJ, Tech 12 was the only real choice. “He’s the best,” Hydro says.

Working together, the trio has in recent years established themselves as among the region’s leading hip-hop acts. “In three years, we turned it from a one-show gig to a 20-city tour,” Tech 12 says.

The three leave for China this weekend, where they will do the first of 20-dates on the Revenge of the Boombox tour, an old-school hip-hop tribute to the movement’s earliest battery-powered boxes. The tour includes stops in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. “Not bad for a couple of white boys,” Hydro muses.

They still do the original gig, too: Gin and Juice, aka Sucka Free Sundays, at the legendary Q-Bar in Bangkok, and their regular dates now include more than a dozen cities in the region. “We got like a billion points on Bangkok Airways,” Hydro laughs.

In addition to the music, the group is working on a television show called The Real Houselives of Potheads, with Akil and Hydro as the stars. There are also plans afoot for a movie, called Hemp Hop, and tentative ideas for a musical.

A year ago, the trio collaborated with people from MTV Exit to write a song for one of the show’s anti-human-trafficking campaigns. For Hydro, the subject is more than just the hot-topic du jour.

“My girlfriend was part of a human-trafficking attempt,” he says. “She was led to a place that was supposed to be a modelling dinner, and they tried to kidnap her.” Her story became part of the MTV Exit documentary Enslaved. The music was a natural contribution.

“We did a song called Not For Sale and a remix of the same song called Enough, and we’re basically promoting the song before we release it on tour. The song is basically anti-human trafficking. We’re just trying to bring some sort of awareness to that,” Hydro says.

No strangers to Phnom Penh, the group made its first local appearance in 2007. Local b-boy crew Tiny Toons danced while Akil sang. When the power went out – as it did, and often still does – people in the crowd used mobile phones to light up the dance floor, and the Tiny Toons kids kept breaking.

It was an introduction to Cambodia that Akil remembers most fondly. “Definitely one of my best memories as an artist,” he says. “Period.”

WHO: Akil the MC, Hydro Phonics, DJ Tech 12
WHAT: Revenge of the Boom Box Tour
WHEN: 8pm 5 May
WHERE: Pontoon
WHY: Old-school hip-hop resurrected