American filmmaker John Pirozzi made local music history Saturday night when more than 600 people packed into Chaktomuk Theatre to watch the world premiere of Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock ‘n’ Roll. Pirozzi’s documentary traces the evolution of the country’s foreign-inspired music from the 1960s and 1970s. In attendance were pop starlet Chhom Nimol, lead singer of Dengue Fever, and Sinn Chanchhaya, son of Sinn Sisamout, as well as original members from The Bayon Band, Apsara, Baksei Chamkrong and Drakkar, all superstar groups before the war. After the screening, they gathered on a stage behind the theatre and rocked it.
Category: Music
Free of expectations
Dengue Fever effectively gave two fingers to the commercial music industry last year when the band announced it was forming its own music label, Tuk Tuk Records. Corporate outfits nearly always wanted full-length albums, which required lots of material and tons of time. The move to independence would allow the LA-based sextet to make and sell music faster and in ‘smaller chunks’.
That was the promise.
The first offering came 12 months later. Girl From The North, a modest three-song EP, arrived on December 3 in conjunction with a one-off Christmas freebie, Little Drummer Boy. The EP represents the band’s first original offerings since its 2011 album, Cannibal Courtship.
The four new cuts seem likely to mark a turning point in the band’s evolution. Since Escape From the Dragon House, their second album in 2005, the group has mostly plied the waters between eclectic world/indie and Golden-era Khmer rock. But these new cuts, Little Drummer Boy included, transcend the band’s diverse musical influences to arrive at a sound that is discretely grander than any of its contributing parts.
No longer is Dengue Fever an American indie band playing Khmer rock. Or an LA band with an exotic Cambodian singer. With Girl From The North, Dengue Fever delivers a sound that, while certainly familiar, is far richer than anything you’ve heard from them in the past.
Witness Little Drummer Boy, the band’s soulful remake of Katherine Kennicott Davis’ 1941 Christmas classic: the song opens with a drum fill and plunges straight into a slow-struttin’ rhythm built on bluesy guitar licks and punctuated by low-end horn blasts. The music provides a tapestry of funk across which singer Chhom Nimol weaves a ribbon of sensuous Khmer vocals. While there are hints at such mastery in the Dengue Fever catalogue, nothing previously has ever come together so righteously.
The three cuts off Girl From The North take a similar tack. The EP’s first track, Taxi Dancer, is reminiscent of music from the band’s second and third albums, but this time around there is less the sense that Chhom Nimol is just singing a Khmer song on top of American rock ‘n’ roll beats. The two styles now mesh seamlessly to create something altogether new and unique.
Taxi Dancer begins with familiar sounds: brooding woodwinds, melodic guitar arpeggios and Ethan Holtzman on the Farfisa organ. When Chhom Nimol comes in, it’s with vocals at a pitch lower than usual and sung more in the Western style. An Echoplex on the guitars adds to the overall trippy feel and by the time the refrain comes around, Chhom Nimol’s vocals have jumped back up an octave and the whole thing sounds like it belongs in a David Lynch film.
On Deepest Lake on the Planet, the band dives into an underwater world of noir-ish dream-pop with haunting, repetitive vocals, spooky rhythms and more tripped-out Holtzman-esque guitars. A showcase for Chhom Nimol’s vocal range, the verses allow the Cambodian singer to move effortlessly along the low end then soar high through the refrains.
The EP’s final cut, the eponymous Girl From The North, has its roots in a Battambang jam session with the musicians from Phare Ponleu Selpak. Dengue Fever played an early version of Girl at their FCC gig in May. The song represents the perfect culmination of influences: the electric guitar licks are Khmer in their essence; the rhythm a bluesy, heavy-in-the-low-end beat as weatherworn as the Mekong River. Dreamy guitar licks and a horn solo fill the break and anchor the song firmly in the rock ‘n’ roll tradition.
In all, Girl From The North is probably the kind of offering that most major labels wouldn’t even consider: too short, too exotic. Yet it’s arguably Dengue Fever’s finest work. Commercial labels might balk at the brevity, but that Girl From The North counts only three songs hardly matters. After all, it’s not quantity they were shooting for.
Girl From The North is available now on CD and as a digital download from denguefevermusic.com.
WHO: Dengue Fever
WHAT: Girl From The North EP
WHERE: denguefevermusic.com
WHEN: Now
WHY: Dengue Fever at their very best
Exploring inner space
When artist Khiang Hei performed Space Within at the Bophana Centre on December 19, almost 50 people found themselves tied up in his experimental, mostly improvised installation. Greg Bem reports on the ensuing twists and turns.
It’s the end of the performance. Borey, a friend, collects metres and metres of the pink, yellow, orange, purple, blue and green ribbon and slowly approaches me, wielding it en masse. He wears a grin like a scythe ready to cut me open. The main performers have already taken their bows and are filtering into the audience for necessary post-event socialising. And so the cameras refocus on Borey and me, waiting to see what will happen. Everything is dragging, slow motion, etiquette and style and purpose, and then Borey acts: with great effort, he wraps me in a cocoon of filthy ribbon fouled by water and dirt. In an act of retaliation, I reposition half of the chromatic snare around Borey’s torso, thus ensuring we’ll both look like fools or geniuses in unison. The chaos of ribbon, soaked by water, is slick and disgusting, rubbing liquid against our skin, ruining our clothes. I look off in the distance and notice Khiang Hei’s nod of approval.
I’ve known Khiang Hei for a couple of months, having first been introduced on a late-night rooftop above Street 63’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Khiang used to live in Manhattan and I remember his loud NYC expressions driving my original attraction to him. Across the room I listened to his conversations on Washington Heights and an American urban landscape I’ve come to love and hate and know over the past five years: racial divides, geographical decay, gritty artist struggles. This realm of chatter was quite the typical exchange for a party of cheap booze, homely Singaporean cooking and constant blood extractions from ankle-frenzied mosquitos. White meat.
A few coffee meetings and an established friendship later, I wound up at Bophana Centre. Aside from a handful of photograph prints and a variety of explicit sculptures in his apartment, I hadn’t encountered Khiang’s art before and certainly didn’t know much about what he planned for Space Within. While we did toss ideas for this event around at a restaurant on Pasteur a few times, I was still in the dark. New updates were made to the Facebook event nearly every day. A video from October 2012 surfaced and I watched Cambodian dancers (and Khiang himself) spontaneously throwing objects and each other around the central space on the ground floor at Bophana. I was reminded of Merce Cunningham.
And now it’s 2013. The audience, made up of around 50 expats and Cambodians, sits in chairs pointing toward the central space of Bophana’s ground floor. Khiang is circling the room, passing out wafer-like cookies and what he calls “worms”, a Chinese New Year treat made of flour and coconut milk. They look like worms and they are delicious, almost melting inside your mouth. After his first circuit he makes a second round, distributing unused coils of pink, yellow, orange, purple, blue and green ribbon to each person in the space.
The performance, if it hasn’t already begun, is definitely in full swing now that the audience has been equipped. There is beautiful, hesitant Ouk Channita half-dancing across the room: there is exploration, grace and intelligence. There is Ali Ben with some manner of hand drum easily bringing up a beat and then discarding it at a moment’s notice. Trumpeter Steffen slowly blasts out notes and garbles of sound, just loud enough to keep the audience alert without damaging or distracting.
I’m fumbling with my camera and then look up to see Khiang standing right in front of me. “Start it off,” he says, and then motions for me to use my ribbon. I do, as Borey, sitting next to me, would do, and as everyone in the audience will soon do as well: I tie my blue ribbon to Khiang’s and slowly unwind the coil as he proceeds to move away, onward.
The rainbow of ribbon, a madness of string, goes from strands to waves cascading behind an enraged Khiang. There is purer and purer motion, energy, force, breakage. The audience stares sitting, gaping, googly-eyed as he moves around the room, lines get crossed and tangled and the installed material becomes one beautiful, impeding mess. Previously open and passable, the space becomes more and more impassable with each step Khiang takes. The musicians struggle to stand in security along the periphery of the centrum. Khiang’s bound appendages and torso create a constraint on the movement in and out of the room’s centre. What is the Space Within? What is apparent the moment the audience realises their contribution to the performance isn’t just a beautiful form of ribbon, but a locking down of a sentient being?
Khiang is so overwhelmed by ribbon he is unable to move. He becomes the puppet, with the entire audience a puppeteer collective. Ribbon is to be pulled by everyone. I yank on my ribbon and watch Khiang try to yank back, yank back on mine, but grab hold of bundles of ribbon belonging to groups of ten other hands from within the crowd. There is ribbon in the corners. There is ribbon under feet. There is a large basin of water in the centre of the room and ribbon dangles into it, slides through it, causing the room to become slippery. Khiang tries to control his movement, but gets caught by the currents of power from many wrists. The people of the room, from the audience to the other performers and even including some of the photographers, want to pull Khiang toward them.
In an ejaculatory fury, Khiang manages to rip free from his bonds and exhaust himself in the ‘space without’. Members of the audience laugh. Or look disturbed. Or confused. Or all of the above. The focus of the audience gently transitions to other performers, who engage subtly with the now deadened material lingering like litter throughout the space. The energy dims. Several women are invited into the crowd to dance. I am motioned by one of the performers to join in the dance, a conga line sans torso clutch, and everything is slightly more absurd, the giant water container in the room’s centre, dead ribbon scattered everywhere. Prematurely, the performance is called to an end. It feels too soon, but then I notice Borey. He’s walking toward me and the mass of ribbon he has collected is firmly between his hands…
Catharsis through torrent
Laura Mam’s debut solo EP, Meet Me In The Rain, is catchy and uncontrived
Laura Mam. You’ve probably seen one of her clever videos or heard her band, The Like Mes. Her Youtube channel has verged on virality and she maintains a homely appeal by merging intimate live recordings with higher-budget productions. Through her inviting music and inspirational outlook, Mam has found the eye of the masses and yet also cultivated a community among Cambodians, Cambodian-Americans and expats.
Her excellent and relieving first solo EP, Meet Me In The Rain, is now poised for release at the perfect moment in her career. The five tracks meet the power of polished production with innovation in language and local Cambodian culture. Mam’s music successfully pulls off what many have been waiting to see: new Khmer music that’s fresh and progressive, retaining its integrity by capturing part of the spirit making up modern Cambodia.
Mam is on her way to producing tracks that fuse old and new, Cambodian and international. The five songs, including the title track, feel distinctly American in their structure, but the lyrics are Khmer and the music features traditional Cambodian instrumentation, including gongs and the roneat (similar to the xylophone). Being a diaspora artist, it makes sense that Mam’s light-hearted love songs resemble a space away from Cambodia – and yet they are distinctly Cambodian.
The EP opens like a scene from a movie. Part hopeful-sexy, part longing-reflection intro track Soben Sni (‘Little Black Polka Dot’) moves us through lyrical repetition, layered ripples and the urge of layered vocal tracks. Mun Tuk Pleang (‘Meet Me In The Rain’) melts Mam’s vocals into the soft tweaks of fanciful electric guitar, a crying that will wrench your heart as Mam calls out: “Kiss me in the rain, kiss me in the rain. Love me in the rain, love me in the rain.” Light and fluffy these songs are not, but they are also not overblown. Their pain, transformation, love and redemption are tolerable. Perhaps because you’ve never heard love songs quite like these.
After an upbeat Sin Chngai (‘The Distance Is No Fair’) and a soothing Kou Preang Veasna (‘Four Of Hearts’), we reach Chenchean Boncham Chat (‘Take This Leap’). A Khmer-lyric profession running parallel to many songs played during your favourite college open mic, but it’s unlike the countless stream of Western singer-songwriters churning out the same songs: Mam’s song is catchy and uncontrived.
Each of the tracks on Meet Me In The Rain present degrees of complacency, contemplation and longing. Love has never felt better through post-rainy-season listening sessions. As mellow as it is enthralling, hardly imposing or pretentious, Mam’s music feels right at home here in Phnom Penh.
But the EP is an EP and, thus, feels short. Five songs leaves you wanting more, wanting epic instrumentals and lengthy lyric confessionals, pronounced collaborations and experimental flirtations. Fortunately, Mam starts work on her next album in the New Year – a release worth waiting for, and for now we wait in the rain.
Meet Me In The Rain, by Laura Mam, is available now on iTunes and Amazon.
A night at the opera
‘Opera is the most misunderstood of art forms. Many people enjoy excerpts they might have heard in movies and television programmes (and adverts) but continue to feel that a night at the opera is not for them. Wrong. When it works, opera is quite simply the most dazzling, emotional, visceral experience you will have in a theatre.’ – The Bluffer’s Guide To Your First Night At The Opera
Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t have to be a toff to enjoy the opera. Listening to people singing in foreign languages won’t make your ears bleed. And you don’t need an IQ approaching that of genius to appreciate this ‘most misunderstood of art forms’, which is more often than not centred on just three or four themes: man loves woman, woman loves man, people die (often by their own hand).
Yes, dear reader: opera is for YOU! Think any compelling series you’ve ever watched on Fox Crime, but with more elaborate costumes and a killer live soundtrack. Opera is about sex. And violence. And – somewhat shockingly, to the uninitiated – humour. There’s even a synopsis you can read before it begins (a bit like Wikipedia, but without the plot spoilers). To borrow from American humourist Robert Benchley: “Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of dying, he sings.”
It may be some time before Phnom Penh is in a position to host an opera in its entirety, which would involve a cast of hundreds, but good news: Gabi Faja, he of The Piano Shop and, separately, GTS Jazz, is hosting an aural appetiser of sorts along with very modern mezzo-soprano Ai Iwasaki, a professional opera singer since 2004. Having completed a postgraduate degree in Opera Musicology at her native Tokyo’s Shouwa University of Music in 2010, Ai moved to Italy and the Conservatorio A Boito in Parma under the tutelage of Master Lucetta Bicci.
Now living in Phnom Penh, Ai cautions that opera isn’t for the faint of heart. “As a teenager in Japan I had always liked to sing, but then I went to an opera performance and was staggered by the power and intensity of this amazing thing,” she says. “Opera isn’t just singing. It’s history, it’s psychology, it’s love. One of my favourite composers is [Claudio] Monteverdi. Monteverdi belongs to an Italian school from three to four hundred years ago, when opera was barely developed. The music is so simple because it was early days, so the singing becomes the most important. Also they had gods who were all having sex with each other and killing each other. It was really full of drama – even more so then because of the shock value at the time.”
And what of this aural appetiser? Says Gabi: “Because we can’t do a fully fledged opera, we take some of the most famous and the most beautiful arias and we do a melange, a collage of arias from different operas. It can be anything from Mozart to Puccini and beyond, so you get the best of the best in a nutshell. Opera can be done in a modern, popular way. You can do it in the streets; you can do Stomp and Puccini, there’s no stopping you!” [Bursts into a jazz rendition of Un Bel Di from Madame Butterfly]
WHO: Ai Iwasaki (mezzo-soprano), Gabi Faja (piano) and Bong Somnang (clarinet)
WHAT: An introductory night at the opera
WHERE: Doors, Street 84 & 47
WHEN: 8:45pm December 26
WHY: Opera is the most misunderstood of art forms
Giving Death a damn good kicking
A small girl with a disproportionate grin worthy of Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat pokes out her tongue, pointing at it frantically. One hand clamped firmly in mine, her flowery dress fluttering in the tropical breeze, she turns her extended index finger towards my face – a sign I’m expected to bare tongue, too. Out it pokes, steel tongue stud glistening in the sunlight. My young charge, along with a horde of bug-eyed teenage onlookers, squeals with delight and then dances haphazardly off into the dust, proudly wearing my (relatively) giant flip-flops.
This scenario is repeated at least 20 times, each with a different child and always to a chorus of shocked gasps and ecstatic squeals, during the course of my four-hour visit. We’re at Wat Opot, about 30km south of Phnom Penh on National Highway 2. This five-acre site, once a place of death and despair, is today one of the most alive, energetic and profoundly invigorating places to be in Cambodia – and plays host this weekend to an outdoor music festival starring Laura Mam.
It was not always so. When the United Nations Transitional Authority on Cambodia arrived in Phnom Penh in 1991, the 22,000 soldiers, police officers and administrators who made up this sprawling peacekeeping force brought with them not peace, but death and decay. Such was this force’s sexual appetite that within two years the number of prostitutes in the capital had swelled from 6,000 to more than 20,000, many of them underage. The HIV virus had officially arrived – and its stay would not be a pleasant one.
On Valentine’s Day 1998, just as the virus was beginning to make its presence felt in spiralling death statistics – and several years before antiretroviral (ARV) drugs would arrive in Cambodia to treat it – another, rather more welcome, visitor made land. Wayne Dale Matthysse, a US-born medic and veteran of the Vietnam War, had returned to Southeast Asia to make reparation for the horrors he witnessed during the conflict. Here in Cambodia, he instead found fresh horrors: having set up a clinic at Wat Opot with a former Buddhist monk, he discovered that 90% of the men, women and children who visited them were infected with HIV. For years, the clinic – intended to nurture health – served instead as a place people went to die. That was until the belated arrival of ARVs halted Death in its tracks.
Today, this former hospice is home to 46 children who are HIV positive, have lost their parents to Aids or both. No, you can’t tell who’s who – and the community, rather than being a place of sadness, reverberates round the clock with all the shrieks, giggles, yelps and hollers you’d expect of any group of children this size. As Wat Opot prepares to host its first ever outdoor music festival, intended as a rousing celebration of life and all its promise, The Advisor meets founder Wayne and his business partner Melinda to talk swearing nuns, a godless world & giving Death a damn good kicking.
Take us back to the beginning.
Wayne: In 1998 we visited a home with one child who was kept in a box. His parents had both died and he was about four years old. He was quite sick and they fed him with a spoon, but they wouldn’t touch him because at that time nobody knew how you caught Aids and so nobody wanted to touch him. We could see people dying underneath the house, but they didn’t want to bring them into the house. We knew that people deserved something better than this: we needed to build a hospice. Our intention was to take care of people. We never thought that those dying people would include children.
I signed on to stay maybe six months or a year, to get the hospice going. Taking care of dying people, you can burn out any time and leave and go somewhere else. I never intended to stay as long as I have and never dreamed of it getting as big as it has. Between 1994 and 1997, we were losing people every week – sometimes two a day. Six months after the medicine started, the dying started to stop. It was evident that people were getting better. It was that hope, too. Before then, there was no hope so people just died. With the medicine, word spread and people began to have hope again.
By 2007 we had one patient who was almost blind, manic depressive and suicidal, with real angry temper tantrums – sometimes uncontrollable. He would wake up at 2am sometimes and he was very paranoid. Because he couldn’t see anything, he would start hitting the beds next to him with the metal pole he used to walk with. Nobody would sleep in the room with him, so I used to sleep under his bed. For six months we took care of him and he would have good days and bad days. Finally I took him to Takeo hospital and told them I couldn’t handle him any more; I was burned out. Three days later they dropped him off at our front gate. They had done nothing with him. He was filthy; he hadn’t had a bath or anything. They threw him at our door and said: ‘He’s yours, not ours.’ He had seven days of ARV medicines left with him. ‘Don’t give them to him if you don’t want to.’ I can’t make that kind of decision! But I think he understood what was going on and he realised that even I had given up on him at this time. On the seventh day I gave him his last dose of medicine and then he died. I almost think he knew there was no point sticking around, so he died before I had to make the decision about whether to continue medicating him. The day he died, he was laying on the bed and the hospital called me and said: ‘We have a lady who’s manic depressive and paralysed from the neck down. She cusses and swears all the time. She wants people to kill her. Will you take her?’ We had never turned anybody down, but I said: ‘Let me think about it overnight. I can’t give you an answer now.’ That night I went to bed and thought: I can’t do this any more. It’s too much.’ The hospital never called me back the next morning, so I called them and said: ‘We aren’t taking any more patients.’
We had three people in beds here. I told them: ’If you want to be sick, there’s a hospital in Takeo. If you don’t want to be sick, get out of bed.’ They’re still here! They help out in the kitchen, stuff like that. So that was the end of the hospice. We had the choice of getting rid of all the children, shipping them out to orphanages, but some of them had been here for six or seven years. We could have closed, but I thought: ‘What else am I going to do?’ I figured out I’d stay on and see what else we could do, which is when we created the children’s community. It has completely changed and become a happy place.
Melinda: At first, even the 16-year-old boys were scared of ‘ghosts’ at night, but now we don’t hear that any more. They’re accepting of this place. We tell them that they’re ‘happy ghosts’: ‘If there are ghosts here, they’re your parents and they’re watching this DVD with you!’ We try to dispel the notion that ghosts are scary, because Khmer culture is very scared of ghosts. But my dad is here – and he died years ago, so now whenever a door bangs the kids will say: ‘Oh, that’s just Melinda’s papa.’
The first time I visited, I left feeling energised. It’s a place where fun rules the roost, or that’s how it feels.
Wayne: [Laughs] Usually. It’s definitely feminine, in that it has its periods.
Have local perceptions of HIV and Aids changed since you arrived?
Wayne: Once in a while the kids will mention that someone in the community said something to them because they’re HIV, but in general this community has grown a lot since we came to this place. I had found a lovely place, which was about nine miles off the road, but it was up in the mountains and had a nice breeze and was surrounded by trees. When we talked to the surrounding people they said: ‘Oh, but all your sewage is going to come into our rice fields. We don’t want you here.’ They were, of course, talking about Aids. When we got to this wat, which was the most rundown at the time, I didn’t like it at all. It was my last choice. The community had one Aids station, right outside the front door here, and one Aids station out back. They already had Aids here, so they said: ‘Come on in! Help us!’ They opened their arms to us and accepted us right away.
Of course, part of the community – and I was a Christian at the time – said: ‘We don’t want this Christian living in our wat,’ because they didn’t know how it would affect things. At the beginning, they would bring their sickest people to us and they would die, sometimes within hours, sometimes within days. The word going around town was that we were killing people! But because we had hired local staff, they would go home at night and say: ‘That’s stupid! Wayne’s taking care of them; he’s doing his best.’
Almost every family around here has been affected by Aids and so knows how it came about. The people we would get here were generally good women: wives and mothers whose husbands had given it to them. This community has become more accepting of it. Our people go to weddings all the time; when we first came, no one would even think of inviting someone with Aids to a wedding because no one would eat at the table with them. ‘You serve people with Aids? We’re not eating this food.’
Similar attitudes exist in the West.
Wayne: Actually, yes! We have Western people who come here and say: ‘Cambodia is far ahead of the United States.’ There’s one coming here on Christmas Day who’s gay and has been out since he was 14 years old. He’s now 30-something, a successful businessman who’s HIV positive. It’s his tenth anniversary of having been diagnosed with HIV so he wants to spend it here with the kids. Since he got HIV, he says: ‘My mothers, my sisters, my friends, my co-workers, they all say: ‘We still love you; nothing has changed.’ He came here and wanted to help somebody so he picked one of the kids who’s now in high school, wanting to tell him that if you have HIV it’s OK, you can still have a successful life. He was going to give this little pep talk: ‘I want you to know I’m HIV positive, just like you are.’ The kid rushed over to him and gave him this big hug and said: ‘Well then we can be really good friends.’ Rob walked back to me, scratching his head, and said: You know, for many years everybody has said: ‘That’s OK, we still love you.’ I don’t know about that now. When this kid hugged me, it was a hug of love. All of a sudden I have to really think about how people really feel about me. That was a hug of love, not a hug of pity. In the States you get pity, you don’t get love.’
What of the kids in your care today?
Wayne: Now we have three kids who have graduated from university: one with a BA in nursing who’s now working on his Masters; two who have graduated in law. This year, we have one who will graduate with his BA in civil engineering; three kids doing different forms of art; one girl in midwifery school; one boy in an international English school – he’s passing all his tests and he rides his bicycle to school, with all these kids who drive Lexuses. We have another one who just joined the circus arts school in Battambang.
They do seem an energetic bunch…
Wayne: We’re very happy with the new direction. They’re good kids. We run the place as a commune, so everybody works together and everybody carries their own weight. It’s not like we’re taking care of them; we take care of each other. The emphasis is certainly on education: they have to go to school. We have a volunteer here for a year and she teaches English classes as well. We have music and arts. They have activities but they can’t participate in them until they can show that they’ve done their homework. Education is our main goal.
Most people are shocked when they come here. We had one lady come here who was 60 years old, had never married or had children but wanted to do something with her life. She found our website and saw a picture of someone holding a baby, so she came here with the idea she would be taking care of little starving babies in cribs. Where she got that idea from, we have no idea!
Melinda: She was with a seniors group that was travelling all over Asia, doing the touristy thing, and then she broke away to do something else. ‘Oh, good. I’ll end my vacation holding sick babies.’
Wayne: [Laughs] But then she got here and there were no sick babies!
But what you do have is a lot of rambunctious children who WILL jump up and down on you until you’re exhausted.
Wayne: She wasn’t prepared for that – and she admitted it. She was very uncomfortable for the first few days. She’d never been around children. She’d never really had a relationship with anybody, is basically what she said.
Melinda: She had a hard time understanding why this child was consistently asking for this or that when you’ve already said no. Well, that’s because he’s a kid! She had a lot of questions, trying to figure out children for the first time.
Wayne: And the kids don’t mind if you’re not that accepting of them; they’ll still jump on you.
Melinda: More! It’s like they sense your fear factor, like an animal: ‘OK, I got this one…’
Wayne: So they treated her just like everybody else! When it was almost her last night and she was feeling like she hadn’t done anything here, one of the little boys was crying and she said: ‘Here’s my opportunity. I can help him.’ She walked over to him and said: ‘Would you like me to help you?’ And he said: ‘No! I can take care of myself.’ She said: ‘All of a sudden it hit me. I’m looking for needy people, but these people don’t need me. They just love me.’ It just clicked in her mind. The kids have experience with all kinds of people, from Western to Asian. It’s almost like group therapy here… [Laughs]
Wayne, you came here as a man of faith, but have since abandoned religion. What happened?
Wayne: I came here as a Christian missionary with the idea of changing Buddhists to Christians; that’s what I had been doing. In Salt Lake City we changed Mormons to Christians; in New Mexico we changed Indians to Christians; in Honduras we changed Catholics to Christians. Now I had come here and was going to change Buddhists to Christians. That was what my life was: making people see things the way I saw them, which was the way I had been taught. Then I got here and met Beth Goodwin, a Buddhist nun. We were talking and she asked what I was going to do here. ‘I came to bring the love of Jesus to the people of Cambodia.’ She said: “Bullshit!” ‘You can’t say that!’ “Why not?” ‘God will strike you down with lightning!’ “I’m a Jew.” [Laughs] Beth is an outstanding woman who has worked in Palestine and still works in Cambodia with her Aids programme. That got me thinking. She said: “What are you doing here?” I said: ‘I’m a nurse and I want to help people.’ She said: “Well, that sounds a lot more like it.” So we got to know each other and she asked me to redefine what I was saying: “I don’t understand this Christian crap you’re talking about.” Basically, when you’re with Christians, you throw out a Bible verse then someone else throws out another Bible verse and you see if you can trump them with another Bible verse, but you never say ‘Bullshit!’ to anybody, you just throw out another Bible verse. She was the first person to come out and say ‘Bullshit!’ to me and I had to think about that. Maybe it is! And I had to ask, if I take away the Christianity, who am I? I started thinking about that and doing some reading and realised that maybe I had got it wrong. I’m still working on it – I don’t have all the answers – but I pretty much left all religions; I don’t see the value in any religion. I believe that ‘God’ is the problem with the whole world. We are responsible for this world. ‘God’ isn’t going to save us; there’s no Jesus who’s going to come back and rescue us; he’s not going to throw our friends in Hell. It’s our world and if we destroy it, we destroy it. Life will go on in some other form, maybe, but if we can’t take care of this world someone or something else will do it for us. And if we want to change it, we have the power to change it. We are the creator!
WHO: Laura Mam and a lot of very rambunctious children
WHAT: Wat Opot Music Festival, featuring Laura Mam (no booze, though – it’s a kids’ community)
WHERE: Wat Opot, near Chambok town on National Road 2 (47km/30m south of Phnom Penh)
WHEN: 11am – 6pm December 22
WHY: It’s a fun, happy place
Going Underground
For too many of us there’s a kind of inevitability about Saturday nights in Phnom Penh. Tanked up on Street 51, come the wee small hours someone calls ‘Pontoon!’ or ‘Heart!’ or ‘Nova!’ Off you toddle for a bit of drunken grinding before lurching out an hour later. Then you grab some dim sum and get mugged for the pitiful few dollars left in your wallet.
With a fairly restricted choice on the club circuit it’s easy fall into that kind of trap. But there’s change in the air. An altogether better class of DJ is emerging and soon enough, they hope, Phnom Penh will rival anywhere else in the world for its electronic beats.
So says DJ Sequence, who along with other pseudonymmed collaborators (plus The Advisor’s Best DJ of 2013, Simon C Vent, pictured) has set up an online space for Cambodia’s classier DJs and producers to publicise their offerings. On December 20 the Phnom Penh Underground dons physical form, with a launch at Meta House.
Having gone live just weeks ago, the Phnom Penh Underground website is already garnering 5,000 hits a month, proving there are indeed a lot of people out there who are more into the quality of the vibe than the quantity of the beer. The Facebook page just earned its 1,000th like, too.
“The site is something of a public service,” says Sequence, whose other aim is – well-intentioned cliché warning – to “bring people together with the universal language of music”. Harking back wistfully to the glory days of the early ’90s, Sequence remembers how acid house and rave united clubbers from all social strata. The longer-term aim is to recreate that here in the Charming City.
The price of mainstream events (plus drinks) may be one reason for the exclusion, something the electro scene seeks to counter. “Too often,” says Sequence, “the only Khmer people you see at some of these venues are behind the bar and that ought to change.”
Be that as it may, Phnom Penh’s lack of heavy-handed regulation means the dance music explosion of the Madchester years could well ignite here too. “It’s so simple to get a club night together at short notice,” explains Sequence. “A crowd of 250 is big for this town; you can book venues quickly and simply. We once set up a boat party in 24 hours. You couldn’t do that anywhere else.”
Merely ‘the Reggae Bar’ no longer, the Dusk ‘Til Dawn rooftop is taking off as one of the city’s hottest spots with stupendous views making up for the vertiginous setting. The Mecca of Phnom Penh house, techno and dance remains Meta House, of course: joining DJ Sequence at the decks at Saturday’s launch will be danbeck (from Kimchi Collective) and Tonle Dub & Mercy (Tech-Penh).
Phnom Penh Underground continues to grow its base of collaborators, and future ideas include a talent contest and a big night for New Year’s Eve. “I’m sure there’s some kid in Tonle Bassac somewhere listening to dubstep in their bedroom,” DJ Sequence concludes, “and we’d like to connect that kid with something bigger.”
WHO: Clubbers, ravers, technoheads and partaay people
WHAT: Phnom Penh Underground launch party
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Boulevard
WHEN: 10pm December 20
WHY: Make some shapes to an eclectic range of the phattest beats in Phnom Penh (bottle of mineral water obligatory)
The band factory
The New York scene had CBGB and the Ramones; in London, the Sex Pistols and their guru Malcolm McLaren operated from the trendy King’s Road. Phnom Penh doesn’t boast the same kudos just yet, but if it did, the epicentre might be here at the achingly T&C coffee shop opposite the X2 club.
That’s right. I’m meeting the architects of the Cambodian rock revolution for iced lattes on a Saturday afternoon, served by a waitress with fake reindeer antlers. Self-mutilation, spontaneous swearing and mainlining skank do not ensue. But the polite and respectful – if oddly dressed – lads who shoot the breeze here of a weekend are pioneering an alternative path in Cambodia’s pop scene.
The Cambo Headbangers are a loose collective of rock aficionados, their musical genres spanning from pop rock to punk, metal and deathcore. Since the gang’s formation by the Sliten6ix and Anti-Fate outfits in 2011, they’ve gathered pretty much the entire Cambodian metalhead population under their wings.
There are now 14 bands involved: almost double the community’s following last year. And this weekend hails the Headbangers’ third anniversary event at the Longbeach Plaza Hotel, promising an ear-splitting odyssey through emerging Khmer rock.
The purpose of the CHB is simple, says one of the founders, Propey: “It’s about gathering all the rockers, starting up bands and making music.” Like anywhere else in the world, bands break up, bands reform and bands meld together. Through CHB they inspire, encourage and build each other up throughout the process.
In a country where the screech of the electric guitar is still alien, CHB picks up interest through social media. It’s a safe space for anyone brave enough to cast off the shackles of pop convention to connect with their audiences, though Khmer rock is now even beginning to make tentative appearances on television. As another founder member, Veasna, points out, CHB means the nightmare days of trying to introduce metal to happy-clapping teens at the school disco are over.
Without the big bucks commercialism, CHB’s rapid growth remains down to everyone mucking in, acting as crews and groupies for other bands while the scene takes off because, unlike K-pop, the Headbangers are not “about the beauty, the lip-syncing, the appearance, the way we act… we focus on the music and that way we last longer as bands.”
The majority of Cambodia’s youth may still be beholden to K-Pop and KTV classics, but there are those among the CHB collective who think a bygone age may be returning. “Look back to the ’60s,” Propey continues. “Rock ‘n’ roll was big, but in Cambodia these days it’s kind of lost. We want to bring back the ’60s, bring back Cambodia’s musical pride and encourage people to make their own music.”
Challenges remain, of course. The Cambo Headbangers and their spectators remain quite male-oriented, though there are women coming through such as Khmer Reborn’s vocalist Akhia. It’s also hard to find recording venues offering the appropriate facilities for upcoming bands (“It’s a crisis,” laments Veasna). Some groups’ technical ability allows room for improvement, too. Few Khmer rockers are formally trained, many having learned to play from YouTube tutorials. That just adds, however, to the homespun quality of the music.
Though there’s a tendency for newer groups to start off with cover versions, the more experienced and adventurous headbangers are now starting to compose their own material. “Bands keep their new music under cover until they’re ready to reveal it,” Propey explains, “but expect surprises on the day.”
The organisers also foresee “the craziest audience in Phnom Penh, a mosh pit and naked guitarists”, or at least a 50-50 chance of some gratuitous full frontal. Bring your bathing suit, too, because the stage will be treacherously close to the pool (“At the very least, you’ll learn how to swim,” quips Propey).
Several newcomers are slated for Saturday, from alt-rockers Asylum to The Pieces and Volcano. Looking forward to 2014, the Headbangers would like to try an open-air venue for the showpiece December gig. “We want to keep influencing the music scene,” concludes Veasna. “There’s going to be more and more people carrying around guitars and playing in tea stores. Cambo Headbangers is a band factory and we’re going to keep challenging Khmer people to know and understand this kind of music.”
WHO: Headbangers, who else? 6ixStrings, Animation, Anti-Fate, The Asylum, Count Us In, Khmer Reborn, No Forever, The Pieces, Sliten6ix, Tepsyut (‘Shooting Star’), Varaman, Volcano, The Underdogs
WHAT: Cambo Headbangers three-year anniversary pool party (tickets are $8 to see all 14 CHB groups play – that’s just over 2000 riel per band. Bargain)
WHERE: Longbeach Plaza, Street 291 (Corner of Street 528), Tuol Kork
WHEN: 4 – 11pm December 14
WHY: Encounter pretty much the whole spectrum of unconventional Khmer bands, from pop-rock to the hardest guitars in the Kingdom
Paraprosdokians, a wandering falsetto & the best God joke ever
Lanky Yankee Emo Philips – described by Jay Leno as “the best joke-writer in America”, by British comedian Gary Delaney as “the best joke-writer in the world” and by Weird Al Yankovic as one of the funniest people on the planet – is bringing the ‘idiot savant’ style of stand-up comedy that made him famous right here to the Comedy Club Cambodia.
For a taste of the comedic routine to come, look no further than Emo’s Facebook page, on which this veteran of more than 6,000 stand-up shows declares: “Welcome to my one & only Facebook page. How can you know it’s authentic? Because it’s linked to from my website, www.emophilips.com, which is linked to from here, which is linked to my from my website, which is linked to from here, which is…” (and so on and so forth).
Master of ‘the wisdom of children’ humour, Emo – who made his debut in Chicago in 1976 aged 20, at a time when there were but six comedy clubs in the entire US – is, to borrow from the Boston Globe, ‘admittedly a bit cuckoo, but he’s the king of that stand-up staple, the one-liner’. “I’m not sure exactly when or where I first heard one of Emo’s routines, but once I did I instantly became a fan,” Weird Al Yankovic once told Chicago Magazine. “Emo had the iconic look of somebody who could have been a major star in the era of silent films. His body language was indescribably weird and his material was flat-out brilliant.” And if you were asked at gunpoint to say who’s the funniest guy in the world, Mr Yankovic? “Without question I would have to say Emo Philips, especially if Emo happened to be the one holding the gun.”
Why so funny, you ask? Here’s another shining example: in 1990, approached by Time Out magazine in London for an interview, Emo, rather than leave anything to the gods of journalistic chance, agreed to be interviewed on its hallowed pages… by himself (coincidentally enabling him to pocket the writer’s fee). The results were nothing short of priceless, as this Emo-to-Emo exchange from the article entitled Me, Myself And I demonstrates:
Emo: How old are you?
Emo: 34.
I could see right away his joust of wit would not be for the faint-hearted.
Emo: How tall are you?
Emo: Six feet two.
Emo: How much do you weigh?
Emo: 145 pounds, naked. That is, if that scale outside the drugstore is anything to go by.
This last answer caught me totally off-guard. Laughter – a sweet, helpless laughter – welled up inside me, uncertain at first, and then increasing logarithmically, like the passion within the breasts of a tender young virgin chained to a post in the Coliseum as the baboon trainer approaches her with his lascivious charges.
So, Emo, is this to be that sort of interview? A silly, nonsensical, no-holds-barred affair, comic-take-all? Oh, you monster! You delightfully naughty monster! Well then, so be it! Make me your little whipping boy and toss caution to the breeze!
Emo: Emo, you are very talented.
Emo: Well, that’s not for me to say.
Emo: Darn you, Emo, modesty will get you nowhere! You must learn to blow your own horn in this world! Very well, if you refuse to praise yourself, then I will. I’ll shout it out from the highest mountaintop: Emo is talented! Emo is…
Emo: Please stop. You’re embarrassing me!
Emo: But you just have to learn how good you are!
Emo: I beg you, change the subject.
Emo: You are so wonderful. Very well, I shall soldier on. Now Emo, you are getting to be quite the frequent visitor to our shores, old chap.
Emo: Oh, yes. In fact, they’re getting to know me so well at Heathrow Immigration that this time I was able to completely bypass the six-month rabies quarantine…
In 2005, a joke penned by Emo some 20 years previously was declared by ship-of-fools.com, ‘the magazine of Christian unrest’, to be the world’s greatest religious joke of all time. In case you missed it – and we’re sure Emo wouldn’t mind us sharing it with you on our hallowed pages – here it is again:
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said: ‘Don’t do it!’ He said: “Nobody loves me.” I said: ‘God loves you. Do you believe in God?’ He said: “Yes.” I said: ‘Are you a Christian or a Jew?’ He said: “A Christian.” I said: ‘Me too! Protestant or Catholic?’ He said: “Protestant.” I said: ‘Me too! What franchise?’ He said: “Baptist.” I said: ‘Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?’ He said: “Northern Baptist.” I said: ‘Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?’ He said: “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said: ‘Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?’ He said: “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said: ‘Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?’ He said: “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said: ‘Die, heretic!’
Now a resident of Los Angeles, Emo – via Comedy Club Cambodia’s very own Dan Riley – told The Advisor: “It’s beautifully situated for living (you can swim in the ocean in the morning and ski in the mountains in the afternoon, I’m told) but, because of its non-central location, it is not at all well-situated for a touring American comedian. This Asian tour is the first time since I played Australia in ’95 that living on the west coast has come in handy (last year I played Jakarta, but the promoter sent me the long way, through Istanbul). I am on the road… well, I guess for you, approximately 75 metric weeks a year.”
After decades of stand-up comedy, what else is left? “I’ve been branching out into the classical music field. Last year I narrated Peter & The Wolf for the Glendale Philharmonic; this January, for the same orchestra, I will be narrating Carnival Of The Animals. Please know, though, that I have not at all changed the nature of my stand-up act; please don’t stay away from my show on the false assumption that it is now ‘good for you’.”
Emo’s appearance at Pontoon on December 10 marks his first time on Cambodian soil – and he has solemnly sworn to perform at least one of his jokes in Khmer (his shortest one, he insists). “Last year at this time I performed three nights in Jakarta and fell so much in love with Indonesia that I stayed an extra three weeks. I would love to spend three weeks in Cambodia as well, but sadly can only spend three days. All I know is that I have never written the number three so many times in a single paragraph in all my life and that, yes, this is actually sentence number three… which means, of course, that I should stop now.” And has he done much by way of preparing for his arrival in Phnom Penh? “To me, a country is like a movie: I try to learn as little about it beforehand as possible, in order to maximise the surprise. All I know is that, from all my friends who have visited, Cambodia has gotten the most glowing reviews.”
Emo will not be alone. Sharing the stage is British-born comedic comet Gina Yashere, who made her name state-side on NBC’s Last Comic Standing and in the guise of Madame Yashere, The Surly Psychic, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. ‘One of the best comics in the world,’ gushes The Guardian of this bombastic personality behind sell-out stand-up shows Skinny Bitch and Laughing To America (you may also have spotted her on Mock The Week). MCing for the evening will be Roddy Fraser, Scottish musician-cum-comedian now resident in Phnom Penh.
Says Dan Riley of the show, for which tickets are $10: “I’ve been an Emo Philiac (fan of Emo) for many years now. I even printed out some of his sublime one-liners and stuck them on the wall of my guesthouse in Kampot for guests to enjoy. I’ve never been more eager or excited to see an act than I am about Emo and I’m sure many have been impressed that we’ve managed to get him without having to charge an arm and a leg for tickets. That he’s supported by the amazing Gina Yashere is just incredible.”
WHO: Emo Philips (US) and Gina Yashere (UK)
WHAT: Comedy Club Cambodia
WHERE: Pontoon, #80 Street 172
WHEN: 8:30pm December 10
WHY: The word ‘Emo’ is about more than pale-faced, self-obsessed Goths
When disaster strikes
When Typhoon Haiyan tore through the Philippines, battering the archipelago with wind speeds nearing 200 miles per hour, the devastating storm surge left an apocalyptic wasteland in its wake. At least 3,974 people were killed and a further 1,186 remain missing, with about 500,000 now homeless, according to the latest official figures. On November 28, in a citywide show of solidarity, one of the capital’s most loved Filipino musicians – touched personally by the tragedy – will host a benefit concert to raise much-needed funds for survivors.
Jerby Santo, lead singer with Jaworski 7, says Filipinos based here in Phnom Penh have been quick to react to the disaster and there are a large number of similar initiatives underway. “We were all worried and deeply wounded,” he says. Efforts are being coordinated under the JUAN HELP banner and all activities with this logo are being supported by the Philippines Embassy. “It helps when you have lots of NGO experts and ad agency people,” Jerby notes.
There are around 3,000 Filipino expats in Phnom Penh at present. Like other expats, they’re here working as teachers, engineers, with corporates and NGOs and in business. But like all Australians are surfers, and all Americans are lawyers, is it true that all Filipinos are musicians?
“I am not sure about that, but yeah, the arts are very much ingrained in the daily lives of people,” says Jerby. “Doctors, engineers, politicians, teachers: almost everyone has a performance group affiliation, a choir, a band, a hip hop dance crew, a folk dance group, a community theatre, a festival street dancing group. I guess this is the result when you stay 300 years in a Spanish convent and suddenly party for 40 years in American Hollywood and are then compelled to follow the rigid Japanese bushido for four years.”
The typhoon has had a particularly personal impact on Jerby. “The most devastated city, Tacloban, was where I went to college and established my career just before coming here to Phnom Penh. I left a really interesting city and was looking forward to seeing it again then the storm hit it. I spent sleepless nights thinking about my family and friends because I could not contact them and the images on the news networks and social media compounded my situation. Thankfully they survived the storm, but some of my friends did not make it. Two musicians from our scene both got engulfed in the storm surge, promising young musicians… snapped out in a flick, just like that.”
The full extent of the damage is still to be calculated. “There are close to 5,000 people dead, others are still missing. Thousands do not have shelter, and livelihoods are gone. It will be a long and arduous journey for the province and Tacloban to get back to where it was, but I am sure that the city will get back to its feet sooner than expected. I will go home soon; I need to rebuild our house, as well as my community.”
Entry for the concert will be $5, says Jerby, “but we encourage people to give more because $5 won’t buy a single corrugated iron sheet. The goal is to be able to buy corrugated sheets and other building materials for my town, Dulag, where 98% of homes were destroyed. December till February will be rainy and people don’t have homes right now.”
And what do you get for your donation? A good sampling of the many expat bands that feature Filipino musicians, including Vibratone, Moi Tiet, Adobo Conspiracy, and Jerby’s original music project, Dancing with the Indios.
WHO: The expat music community
WHAT: Typhoon Haiyan benefit concert
WHERE: Equinox, #3a Street 278
WHEN: 9pm November 28
WHY: Show some love for our Filipino friends and help rebuild a shattered nation