Sounding off

The urgent chirruping of Hungarian birds, a thunderstorm rumbling in the distance. A quaint English accent giving a lesson in making polite conversation at the tobacconist’s. Honk! Honk! The clown-like call of hyla gratiosa, better known as the barking tree frog. These are just a few of the more than 3.5 million sounds that have been captured, sorted and stored during the past 100 years or so by the staff of the British Library.

The mechanical, electrical and now digital inscription and recreation of sound waves has kept sound engineers occupied since the Banu­ Mus­a brothers invented the world’s first mechanical musical instrument in the 9th century. By 1857, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had invented the phonautograph, the first device that could record sound waves as they passed through the air (it couldn’t, however, play them back).

Today, sound artists such as British musician Simon Whetham lasso these air-borne pressure oscillations – from Icelandic sagas to the drone of urban shopping malls – and corral them into intricate, ethereal soundscapes destined for record labels with names like Dragon’s Eye, Entr’acte, and Mystery Sea.

It was a trip to Iceland with artist friends in 2005 that set Simon – then a disillusioned rock guitarist and vocalist – on his sonic course. Scouring the countryside in search of the Northern Lights and armed only with a minidisc recorder, he captured waterfalls, cracking ice and other sounds specific to his journey. “These sounds were going to inspire music back in the studio, but while travelling I realised the recordings themselves would be the perfect accompaniment to a future exhibition by the other artists.”

Back in Reykjavik, at a record store called 12 Tonar, Whetham found music that was more abstract than anything he’d ever heard, along with albums by artists such as Chris Watson and Lawrence English, both using field recordings. “Everything kind of fell into place: I discovered my love of sound hunting, and the mental state it puts you in, and also discovered a small but global community of artists and musicians working in the same way.

“For me, the act of listening rather than just hearing (there’s a big difference) is an important one, and one I like to share. Working in various ways, I expose sounds that are not noticed, or go unheard, and combine them in a way that leads you on a journey in what I feel is quite cinematic.”

At a recent show in Hanoi, members of Whetham’s audience said they found themselves remembering certain places they’d been or times in their lives they’d previously forgotten. “This is the power of the sound material I work with, and one I enjoy experimenting with.” Whetham will be conducting his sound experiments alongside neo-beat poet Antonio Pineda and a Cambodian drummer at Meta House this week. Lend him your ears.

WHO: Sound artist Simon Whetham and neo-beat poet Antonio Pineda
WHAT: The art of sound
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 9pm June 29
WHY: Feed your ears

 

 

Skin Deep

The lobby of the mid-west American hotel, normally crowded, had all but emptied in a few minutes flat – requests for the ear-splitting “noise” blaring from the portable cassette player to be turned down, repeatedly ignored. Only when the manager threatened to call the police did the offending guest return to his room. Two minutes later, he re-emerged – followed almost immediately by a devastating dynamite explosion coming from the bathroom. Keith Moon turned to the horrified innkeeper and calmly explained: “That, my friend, is noise.” He turned on the cassette player again. “This, on the other hand, is The Who.”

The antics of ‘Moon the loon’, The Who’s legendary drummer and resident crazy, have for decades been considered the benchmark for rock ‘n’ roll eccentricity. Of his penchant for toilet pyrotechnics, rock’s premier hellraiser once told biographer Tony Fletcher: “All that porcelain flying through the air was quite unforgettable. I never realised dynamite was so powerful.” Long after his death in 1978 at the age of 32, Moon – permanently enshrined on Holiday Inn’s Ten Most Wanted list – was described by Allmusic.com thus: “Moon, with his manic, lunatic side, and his life of excessive drinking, partying, and other indulgences, probably represented the youthful, zany side of rock & roll, as well as its self-destructive side, better than anyone else on the planet.”

Almost as famous as Moon’s off-stage excesses were his on-stage machine-gun-like drum outbursts. Flying bass pedals; wild cymbal crashes; savage licks tearing drum skins from their supports – all were hallmarks of his exuberant kit-smashing style. Some 40 years later, more than 8,300 miles from where Moon drew his last breath in the same London flat Cass Elliot had died in four years earlier, a dilapidated practice kit creaks and groans under an equally ferocious attack. Perched atop the wobbly stool in The Shark Cage, the rehearsal space at Sharky Bar on Street 130, is the two-tone-haired drummer with Cambodia’s ‘original’ all-Khmer rock band. Above the thunder, preternatural screams.

Cartoon Emo, currently working on their second alternative/heavy metal/rock album, signed with Svang Dara Entertainment in 2010. The band’s commitment to writing original material is a rare thing in the local music market, and their debut album, Shadow, sold in the region of 1,000 copies – “but we don’t need the money,” says manager Vuth, 22. “We just want to promote our music on the internet so that everybody understands us.”

Music graduates from the Royal University of Fine Arts, this band of 20-somethings – Boy (vocals), Tom (lead guitar), Din (bass guitar), Dan (guitar), and La (drums) – cite Iowan heavy metal icons Slipknot, and Massachusetts-based metalcore group Killswitch Engage as among their influences. But they’re not altogether unaware of their English forefathers. Mention The Who, The Sex Pistols or The Rolling Stones, and five heavily stylised heads – all crowned with spiky technicolour hair – nod in approval. Mention K-Pop, and they explode in derisory snorts.

As Svang Dara’s executive director Meng Sok Vireak noted at the album launch for Shadow, “Rock music is not popular in Cambodia nowadays, so our company is introducing this original Khmer-style rock music to the people of the country.” Chiu Seila, director of Sabay, chimed: “The formation of the band shows that our arts scene is developing, even if a little slowly.”

Today, Cartoon Emo are regular staples on Khmer TV and make their living exclusively by playing in the country’s nightclubs – although they save their own music for the rowdier foreign-owned bars. “With rock music, it’s usually high-class rich people who listen to it,” says Vuth (during the interview, he intercepts every question – occasionally rewording the band’s Khmer-language answers in favour of his own). “We’re not poor and we’re not rich, we just have enough of everything – time and money, our own studio. We want to be famous rock stars in Cambodia and help people to understand rock music.”

During more than an hour spent backstage, the band barely drains one pitcher of beer – hardly the stuff of rock ‘n’ roll hellraisers. In the West, screeching guitars and deafening drum rolls have long been synonymous with sex and drugs, but what of Cartoon Emo’s self-penned lyrics? “When we do something bad or wrong to our parents, like a shadow that follows us, we try to think about how bad the experience feels,” volunteers Vuth. “So we try to do something good, to make a balance. We also sing about lovers, about women, about drugs, but everything is a lesson; education. We try to teach people to be good. Many people in Cambodia are gangsters, or playboys. You see how we are dressed: we may look like them, but we are not gangsters or playboys in our hearts.”

Quite how true this is may be a matter of debate (when Boy appeared with his manicured blue Mohawk and stretched ear lobes in the mosh pit at Equinox during last month’s Anti-Fate/Sliten6ix gig, rumour had it he’d given his manager the slip for a rare unchaperoned night out), but on stage Cartoon Emo are one of the rowdiest ass-kicking bands in the country – something Roger Daltrey’s band of degenerates would surely have appreciated. And though Cartoon Emo may not share Moon’s terminal lust for the wild life, they’re a damn sight more likely to survive their thirties.

WHO: Cartoon Emo
WHAT: Cambodia’s original rock band
WHERE: Sharky Bar, St. 130
WHEN: 9pm June 29
WHY: They’re going to be HUGE

 

Going, going……. gone?

It isn’t just Ty and his football team who are concerned about the mooted development of Phnom Penh’s Olympic Stadium. A cathedral to Khmer creativity, the sports complex is a place of pilgrimage for photographers, students, architects and enthusiasts, as well as the myriad joggers, wrestlers and petanquers who make use of its facilities. A perfect marriage of form and function, the structure and its future are as much a matter for sportsmen as they are for urban planners.

Commissioned by Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the salad days of Cambodian independence, the complex was a concrete metaphor for the kingdom’s post-colonial rebirth. At the 1964 opening ceremony, Prince Sihanouk assured his subjects: “We have certainly shown the world that we are not a bastard nation deprived of intelligence, courage and energy, as the enemies of our people and our country have often pretended. Despite the criticism and slander of some of our neighbours and their imperialist masters we have proven our capacity to transform our ancient kingdom into a modern nation.” Stadium architect Vann Molyvann, interviewed by The Wall Street Journal in 2010, remembered that night as “one of the greatest moments of my life”.

Out of this newfound hope and confidence rose New Khmer architecture, a uniquely Cambodian interpretation of architectural modernism, combining slick Le Corbusian esotericism with Khmer guts. Typified by natural lighting and ventilation systems, Angkorian irrigation features, and streamlined vernacular motifs, the style works in harmony with the meteorological extremes of its birthplace. From social housing in Bassac to the (now demolished) Council of Ministers, Sihanouk and Molyvann, the urbane prince and the Sorbonne-educated architect, used New Khmer architecture to transform the city from a sleepy riparian outpost into the modern capital of a country on the ascendant.

But the halcyon days were short. From 1975 to 1979 the outlying sports fields were turned into cabbage patches and Khmer Rouge cadres marched through the arena. The complex fell further into desuetude during the decades of civil strife and occupation; it was only in 2000 that the site was returned to something resembling its former state by a Taiwanese firm, who revivified the stadium on the condition of their entitlement to develop pockets of the periphery for commercial use.

Recently, rumours surfaced claiming that the regeneration was poised to leap from ‘development’ to demolition. While these unconfirmed reports have been energetically refuted by the city Municipality, there’s no denying that the complex is about to undergo a radical make-over, with a cluster of skyscrapers – one 55 storeys high – set to rise up over the low-slung skyline. And despite intentions to protect the stadium, the encroaching development is rumoured to have sorely compromised water run-off, leading to the flooding of surrounding roads and the weakening of the structure’s foundations.

For Dr Dougald O’Reilly, founder of non-profit Heritage Watch International, the rapid reimagining of Phnom Penh’s cityscape has wide-ranging ramifications for inhabitants. “Filling in blank spaces with skyscrapers is ill-advised. The architectural landscape of Cambodia is a testament to the dramatic history of the country stretching over thousands of years. It would be unthinkable to tear down Tuol Sleng and the same should be said of more recently built jewels of Khmer ingenuity. There is a need to develop Phnom Penh, but a crucial part of that development should be an attempt to keep the city liveable and attractive.”

These jewels of Khmer ingenuity are some of the city’s best kept secrets, overwritten by the new face of new Phnom Penh. The architecturally curious are catered for by Khmer

Architecture Tours, who run fortnightly excursions to post-independence buildings such as

Vann Molyvann’s sleek Royal University complex and the stately 1960s villas of Tuol Kork, as well as regular guided walks of Olympic Stadium. The tours provide an opportunity to see the crumbling structures before they sink below the glass and chrome shards of

architectural progress.

As Ty and his teammates kick up and down the Olympic scale football pitch, the echoes of construction bounce off the bleachers. The stadium may have been reprieved for now, but development forges onwards and defiantly upwards on every side.

WHO: Khmer Architecture Tours (ka-tours.org)
WHAT: Guided walks of Olympic Stadium and other architectural gems
WHERE: Around Phnom Penh
WHEN: Fortnightly
WHY: You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone

 

Party like a pagan

It all started with the pagan ritual marking summer solstice. In 1976, Joel Cohen, an American musician and expert in French and English renaissance music, hit on the idea of staging an all-night musical celebration to mark the moment the Sun reached its zenith in the sky.

He pitched his idea to his employers, French radio station France Musique – and six years later, in Paris, the first Fête de la Musique finally took place. Today, more than three decades on, it has spread so far and wide it’s now known as World Music Day.

On June 21, for as long as local laws will allow, amateur and professional musicians alike will take to the streets to perform, with free concerts held across the globe. From Algeria to Venezuela, anyone who can play music is invited to do so, wherever they most feel the need. Here in Phnom Penh, several nightspots will be hosting their own festivals, most notably Sofitel, Memphis, and the Institut Francais du Cambodge.

Pianist Gabi Faja, of GTS Jazz, has been drafted in to oversee the night at Sofitel. “It’s a mini music festival featuring some of Phnom Penh’s most popular bands, doing everything from bossanova and bluegrass to jazz and old school Swing,” he says. “We have The Phnom Penh Hippies, Grass Snake Union, GTS Jazz Quintet, Sise’ Swing, and The BossaNovas.

“The French connection here is pretty strong historically, and everyone at Sofitel is French, so they gave me carte blanche to do whatever I wanted. It’s not just a celebration of music; it’s a celebration of musicians as well. One guy, Sam, has just arrived in town and he’s an awesome mandolin player. He plays gypsy and jazz, which is really unusual. He’s very talented.

“There’s the Phnom Penh Hippie Orchestra, which is a wonderful conglomeration of Khmer singers; Khmers doing jazz; then you’ve got a German doing gypsy. Grass Snake Union are also playing, and they do some great hardcore bluegrass stuff. There’s going to be a great atmosphere; it’s a happy day for musicians. The best thing is that some of them will stay on stage to play with other bands. There are about 70 musicians coming in and out. It’s going to be a big party.”

The party across town at Memphis Pub promises to be big, too. Cartoon Emo, the first original Khmer rock band, will be strutting their technicolour spiky haired stuff alongside Kheltica. Once upon a time, people playing Celtic music were hairy guys in cable-knit jumpers with fiddles, but Kheltica offer an “entente chordial of musical traditions from France and the British Isles”, says flautist Jean-Claude Dhuez, and there’s nary a cable-knit jumper in sight. Kheltica and Cartoon Emo share the Memphis stage with Maia, Thy Nata, Skip, and Rock X-Press, while the Institut Francais hosts its own open mic.

WHO: Musicians of all hues
WHAT: Fête de la Musique
WHERE: Sofitel, Sothearos Blvd; Memphis Pub, St. 118; Institut Francais, St. 184
WHEN: Check venue
WHY: The party will rage worldwide

 

The meaning of life

Freedom. This one little word has kept the greatest brains in world history whirring for over 2,000 years. From Ancient Greece to modern day France, Western philosophers have chewed over the paradoxical nature of freedom. The concept implies individual free will, the ability to exercise voluntary action or inaction. But with this freedom comes the burden of responsibility: the freer man is to choose his actions, the more responsibility he bears for their consequences. As Sartre pithily grumbled, “man is condemned to be free”.

Canonical wordsmiths have scarcely been more enthusiastic about liberty. Wordsworth worried that freedom could prove ‘tiring,’ and Kafka warned that it was sometimes easier to be in chains. Freedom, in Eurocentric thought, is something of a poisoned chalice.

Next month, Phnom Penh’s Meta House will be putting an altogether more attractive spin on being free. “Freedom is the meaning of life,” Meta House’s Nico Mesterharm assures the sceptics. “We want to find out how important freedom is for Cambodians. We want to encourage Cambodian artists to express their ideas freely and share them with our audience.”

It’s this desire that led Meta House to inaugurate the Free Your Minds Festival, a month-long event incorporating varying creative formats – videos, paintings, installations and performance – from artists from nine countries around the globe. Mesterharm hopes that this cultural melee will “trigger a creative dialogue on how to overcome constraints and further develop the country”.

In the spirit of confounding constraints, Free Your Minds has an assertively free-wheeling format. Based at Meta House and sponsored by the Friedrich Neumann Foundation, Free Your Minds exhibits will also spring up at Top Gallery, Old Meta House and Botanic Café. New films by international and Khmer media-makers will be shown alongside painting and photography exhibitions; community arts projects will run throughout the festival, as well as speaker events and performances. As Mesterharm explains when asked about the plethora of genres being showcased, “a festival about ‘freedom’ has to grant all artists full artistic freedom. So no guidelines at all, just a loose framework…”.

Contributing to that loose framework is Global Hybrid, a dialogue and exhibition between film makers, performance artists, visual artists, photographers and writers from around the world. Having shown at Meta House for the past four years, Global Hybrid 2012 explores the notion of identity in a globalised world through the works of nine Khmer and international artists. Sokuntevy Oeur, vanguard of the Kingdom’s up-and-coming generation of female artists, exhibits paintings which consider freedom in love; her works are juxtaposed with those of Vietnamese painter UuDam Nguyen, whose Love Buttons installation examines the same theme from a male perspective. Thus a dialogue is produced between two artists of different genders from different countries who have never met.

North American sculptor Denise A. Scott, who has been the curatorial mastermind behind Global Hybrid since 2008, believes that building these connections between South-East artists and their international counterparts constitutes a “step towards establishing a global artistic dialogue, creating a future for Khmer and International Artists that transcends cultures and disciplines”.

According to Mesterharm, this sense of transcendence epitomises Free Your Minds 2012. “The event means artists learn to free their minds of traditions and prejudices; they learn that artists all over the world struggle for freedom under different conditions, but that this struggle makes them stronger and leads to stronger artworks. They find a common language, although they come from different parts of the world. After all, art can break all boundaries.”

WHO: Artists from Cambodia and beyond
WHAT: Free Your Minds Festival 2012
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd, and sister locations around Phnom Penh
WHEN: July 2012
WHY: Freedom is the meaning of life

 

The artful use of scandal

The ‘crime’, were it committed today, would barely warrant a wolf whistle. Making her way off stage at a sixth-floor theatre on New York’s Houston Street, burlesque dancer Mae Dix absentmindedly began peeling off her costume before she’d reached the wings.

The year was 1917 and the spectre of Victorian England – where ‘proper’ women went to extraordinary lengths to hide their natural contours beneath bustles, hoops and frills – still loomed large. Young ladies stripping on stage? Unthinkable! Outrageous!

Not so to this downtown audience of impoverished immigrants, who whooped and cheered at the sight of such brazenly bared flesh. To wild applause, Dix strode back to centre stage and continued her spontaneous striptease. Thrilled, the owners ordered the ‘accident’ to be repeated every night.

The move triggered an endless power struggle: to keep their license, the Minsky brothers had to keep their shows clean, but to keep their customers – including Condé Montrose Nast, legendary publisher of Vogue – they had to dabble in the risqué. Whenever they overstepped the mark, Minsky’s Burlesque was raided by the authorities (by 1937, reform-minded New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had outlawed use of the words ‘Minsky’ and ‘burlesque’ in public advertising).

Roll. Twang. Whoosh! Millie DeLeon was by far the biggest burlesque star of the early 20th century. As responsible as the Minsky brothers for giving the form its raunchy reputation, this beautiful, buxom brunette famously tossed her garters into the audience during shows and occasionally neglected to wear tights – shenanigans that got her arrested on more than one occasion.

Such artful use of scandal is the very essence of burlesque, a term derived from the Latin word burrae, which translates as ‘nonsense’. Long before it became a synonym for ‘striptease’, it referred to the pantomime-style lampooning of serious literary, dramatic and musical works so beloved by the upper classes. These extravagant pastiches deployed comedy, music and dance to challenge the established values of the day, with enormous success.

By the end of the 19th century, just as the genre’s popularity was dwindling in England in favour of rather more staid Edwardian musical comedies, it found new fame in New York. It had been introduced to the city by visiting troupe Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes.  Switching the focus from comedy to female near-nudity, American burlesque began to flourish. It boomed further during Prohibition, bootleg liquor fanning the intoxicating air of inhibition.

As Robert G. Allen writes in Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture, published in 1991: “Without question… burlesque’s principal legacy as a cultural form was its establishment of patterns of gender representation that forever changed the role of the woman on the American stage and later influenced her role on the screen… The very sight of a female body not covered by the accepted costume of bourgeois respectability forcefully if playfully called attention to the entire question of the ‘place’ of woman in American society.”

The point was not to offend, but to spoof and – to a limited degree – titillate; the emphasis firmly on the tease, rather than the strip. It is this golden age of burlesque that Elyxir hopes to breathe life into during Cambodia’s first ever show this week. The event is a nod to neo-burlesque stars such as Dita Von Teese, who in her own words “puts the tease back into striptease” (this 5’5” corset-clad pin-up, dubbed ‘a Burlesque Superheroine’ by Vanity Fair magazine, once appeared at a fundraiser for the New York Academy of Art wearing nothing but $5 million worth of diamonds).

Elyxir’s owners believe there’s a need for the bold challenge that burlesque poses to the social, cultural and sexual status quo – just as a new generation is recognising the spirit of spoofery that made it such potent entertainment back in the mid-19th century (the 2010 film Burlesque, starring Christina Aguilara and Cher, wiggles its derrière in the old-school direction).

“When I saw the Glamazon hair show at Pontoon, I knew the country was ready for burlesque – just going that one step further,” says Nathalie Ferrero. “We want, for one night, to animate this place, make it a fantasy land. I want to offer Khmer people something they’ve never seen.

“In Europe, burlesque is a way of doing things without being vulgar. It’s all about the tease. That’s the goal: to change the mentality without shocking. We want to do something funny, unusual, and totally crazy. With burlesque, that’s easy, because everything is stupid and crazy. It’s over the top; it’s not reality – like Dita von Teese.”

The sprawling mansion on Street 466, once the site of Lebanese restaurant Le Liban, will play giddy host to roughly 20 performers on the night, from belly dancers to Miss Joy and the Femmes Fatales – a fan-dancing offshoot of Dance Workshop Cambodia. Expect bronzed Aphrodites in the pool; high-kicking hits from the musical Chicago, and a whole host of Sugar Babies channelling the very best of neo-burlesque. Bring your own pasties.

WHO: Dita Von Teese devotees
WHAT: A night of neo-burlesque
WHERE: Elyxir Urban Wine Spot, #3 St. 466
WHEN: 8pm June 22
WHY: Burlesque is alive and giggling

 

Curious and suspicious is how I’d describe them

In 1940s New York, a group of Abstract Expressionists – including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning – met in studios, galleries and bars to discuss their work, their philosophy, and, occasionally, to throw punches at one another. The group took on the moniker The Club, after the name of a favourite venue. Across the globe and throughout art history, artists, curators and writers have discovered stimulating ideas, challenging personal philosophies and inspiration in each other. The value of discussion – not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself – cannot be doubted. It has made itself known in the very work artists have produced.

The organisers of arts+society, a new discussion group formed in Phnom Penh, have given their group a less ambiguous name and certainly are not expecting any violence, but they are hoping for just as stimulating conversation. Charlotte Craw, Khiang Hei and Roger Nelson established arts+society for a community of artists, curators, art writers and arts enthusiasts whose ties to Cambodia are as strong as their ties to art. The idea is to remedy a clear bias in Cambodian education towards business, economics and technology; to assert the importance of intellectual debate and to establish that discussion can be productive in itself.

“There is a trend in Cambodia of experts telling non-experts information, which the non-experts have to imbibe. Arts+society challenges the assumption that experts know more than non-experts,” says Nelson. “We don’t think that we have the answers. We want different ideas from different perspectives.” The binary of expert/non-expert is under attack: the organisers are endeavouring to establish a community where people learn on equal terms.

The Bophana Centre gave arts+society a space to hold the inaugural meeting and volunteer translators were on standby. Their role was vital: for a smooth-running, dynamic discussion to be possible, complex theories had to be translated between Khmer and English without losing their original sense. Roger also noted the importance of using a space not associated with a gallery in Phnom Penh. “We wanted a neutral space so that everybody – experts, non-experts, professionals and students alike – would feel comfortable sharing their ideas.”

There were 27 bodies at the May 24 meeting, mostly those of Khmer arts students. “One of the reasons we held the event on Sunday morning was to ensure it wasn’t dominated by Westerners,” says Nelson. Before they began the debate, Khiang and Charlotte both voiced their concern that Khmer speakers might feel as though they have to borrow Western terms to discuss their art. “Arts+society is about finding ways to talk about Cambodian art in the Khmer language,” Charlotte told the group. Their concerns were valid: one Khmer speaker had to resort to using the English word ‘gallery’, much to the group’s amusement.

The title for the first meeting was ‘arts+craft’. Members of the group were invited to consider the difference between art and craft; why we might consider craft to be more feminine than art, and whether art can be ‘useful’. The conversation began with some confusion, with one member apparently thinking it a suitable forum for pitching sales ideas. Dany Chan – the artist currently exhibiting at Sa Sa Bassac – then opened the discussion proper by saying that the difference between art and craft lay in the intent of sale. His to-the-point and open-ended assertion was not, unfortunately, the model for the remainder of the discussion.

It became clear that Roger’s plan – for each person to say at least one thing about each question – was going to go unrealised. Certain voices dominated what at times seemed more like an art history lecture than a participatory, dynamic discussion. “I was immensely disappointed at the dominance of a Western voice,” says Roger. The conversation veered towards a Western tradition of art, which alienated many of those present. Only a few were able to comment on some of the ideas raised and many remained silent throughout.

The driving impetus behind arts+society is to affect a shift from a Western-dominated debate to a debate not only applicable to, but specific to, Cambodian art and philosophy. “We need ideas that we can all share,” says Roger. One participant brought up the concept of the ‘aura’ – a notion discussed in Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. “At first I wondered whether Benjamin had a place in this discussion, but the idea of the aura was brought up in such a way as to make it applicable to Cambodian art and comprehensible to everyone present.” Arts+society is not about avoiding complex ideas in favour of a basic appreciation of art: some concepts cross cultures readily. The members of arts+society just have to find these concepts.

“Hopefully we’ll see arts+society develop over time,” says Roger. “We want to continue to see more Khmer participants, to hear more Khmer voices.” He also voiced a desire to have professional artists give presentations at the meetings. Asked what he thought of the predominantly male presence, Roger answered that it reflected a condition common to Cambodia: more males attend university than females. “It’s a sad reality. Hopefully it won’t always be like that.”

The flexibility of the forum is its most attractive attribute. The organisers are not dictators: they want people to participate as speakers and facilitators. They’re currently soliciting suggestions for the next meeting. Speak up.

WHO: Anyone who loves art
WHAT: arts+society debate
WHERE: Future venues TBC
WHEN: June 24 (monthly)
WHY: To discuss Cambodian art on Cambodian terms

 

Ensemble of emperors

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor from 1519 to 1556, was something of an over-achiever. The heir of Europe’s most powerful and long-lasting dynasties, his empire spanned almost four million square kilometres at its zenith. And despite being perpetually at war, Charles somehow found the time to become an accomplished musician.

“The Emperor understood music, felt and tasted its charms: the friars often discovered him behind the door, as he sat in his own apartment, near the high altar, beating time, and singing in part with the performers,” 16th century Spanish biographer Prudencio de Sandoval wrote. “A composer from Seville, whose name was Guerrero, presented him with a book of Motets and Masses; and when one of these Masses had been sung as a specimen, the Emperor called his confessor and said, ‘See what a thief, what a plagiarist, is this son of a —–! Why here,’ says he, ‘this passage is taken from one composer, and this from another,’ naming them as he went on. All this while the singers stood astonished, as none of them had discovered these thefts, till they were pointed out by the Emperor.”

By the time Charles inherited the Habsburg dynasty from his father, the splendidly named Philip the Handsome, the imperial family’s obsession with music was already the stuff of legend. From the 13th century to the beginning of the 20th, successive rulers lured some of the most eminent singers, musicians and composers – including Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven – into the service of the Habsburg courts, shaping the music of Europe’s most influential cultural centres.

The corpus of music written for court functions includes vast numbers of sacred works, operas, oratorios and chamber works, several of which are to be resurrected live by the Ensemble TRIOthlon this month. Three soloists – Markus Gundermann on violin; Steven Retallick on violoncello, and Anton Isselhardt on flute – will channel a chamber ensemble to present stirring works by Haydn, Bach, Beethoven and Mysliweček.

Beethoven, whose Serenade in D Major is a core part of the concert, was just 13 years old when he petitioned for – and was duly granted – an official salary and position at the electoral court of Cologne. He was so gifted a teacher in piano, theory and composition that, within a few years, three nobles pooled their resources to grant the young composer a pension for life. This despite his dictatorial tendencies: Beethoven once bragged to a friend that he had rapped Archduke Rudolf of Austria over the knuckles for keeping him waiting in an ante-room.

WHO: Ensemble TRIOthlon
WHAT: Music from the Habsburgian Courts
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd
WHEN: 8pm June 12
WHY: If it’s good enough for an emperor…

 

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

 

Life after Castro’s Cuba: a tale of Latin fusion

When the Soviet Union imploded during the 1990s, Fidel Castro’s socialist Cuba was plunged into a deep depression. The country had previously ranked among the leading developing nations in terms of high literacy rates and low infant mortality, thanks to the $6 billion it received each year in Soviet subsidies, but those achievements had come at great cost: namely, human rights and democracy.

It was at about this time that a small band of teenagers raised in the rural countryside upped sticks and moved wholesale to the capital city, Havana. These seemingly disparate students of economics, law, language, and cybernetics at the Central University of Las Villas in Santa Clara shared but one thing: a destiny to claw their way out of poverty and become one of Cuba’s most celebrated bands.

“We were born in the Fidel Castro era, we didn’t know any other, and it did influence us, especially our social lives,” says Alex Gonzalez, one of the founding members of Warapo, which in 1998 was voted Best Amateur Band at the 14th Festival of College Artists of Cuba against a backdrop of extreme hardship and, on more than one occasion, homelessness.

“Every political system influences the life of its people: musicians, doctors, lawyers, everybody. For us, it was more difficult than it would have been in another country: the lack of resources; the lack of communication with the outside world. We were students from the countryside and we went to the capital, Havana, with no money, no home, no work, nothing. At the beginning it was difficult, very difficult indeed, but after sacrifices we got our dreams.”

Among those dreams was the 2004 release of Warapo’s first album, Mala Vida (‘Bad Life’), with the help of acclaimed Cuban producer Emilio Vega – a rousing blend of cha-cha-cha, pop, guaracha, son, and rock ‘to which the rhythmic wealth of the Caribbean adds itself’. Four years later, their second album, Tengo Nada (‘I Have Nothing’) was nominated for Cubadisco, the most notable awards in the Cuban music industry.

“We were all in the same school, and with different tastes in music we were able to produce what we call a good fusion. For us, culture and music go together. At that time we were influenced by bachata, cumbia, merengue, Cuban son, salsa, pop, rock, swing. The band now is quite different, but the essence is the same.

“Moving to Vietnam has been very interesting. It was a very difficult decision, because we were going to live in a place where we could not speak the language, didn’t really understand the culture, and everything was a risk.

“We are very happy with the band we have right now and what we have been able to create here. We have many followers and, in a way, we can say that we were the pioneers of Latin music in Vietnam.”

By the time Warapo decided to move to Vietnam in 2008, they had fame firmly by the scruff of the neck. “We were one of the most popular young bands in Cuba,” says Alex, who plays the keyboard and keytar and is responsible for musical arrangements. “If you go to Cuba and ask about Warapo, people know about us.

“At our last concerts, having people sing your songs and recognise you on the streets, that’s what we miss the most. We want to do in Vietnam and Asia what we did in Cuba: get to be popular, perform at big places and when people hear Warapo, they know who we are.”

WHO: Warapo
WHAT: Cuban fusion
WHERE: Latin Quarter, cnr St. 19 & 178
WHEN: 9pm June 9
WHY: There’s more to Cuba than just damn fine cigars