The wall behind the old parliament building is lined with makeshift al fresco eateries peddling deep fried meat on a stick and other goodness. Across the street, a burgeoning mid-market klatch is following suit. The Framed Art Cafe, an art and framing shop with half a dozen tables and a growing reputation for inexpensive fried meat and dollar draft, is the newest among them. The cafe’s walls are covered with ubiquitous watercolor landscapes and happy paintings, but also schwag-a-delic Cambodian Space Project posters and other pop-culture hangables. The menu is long and includes pastas and pages of local dishes. The deep fried seafood ($4.50) is everything you could ever want from a street-side cheap-eats place, and the fresh mango passion fruit freeze ($2) is yummy enough to be dessert. Framed Art Cafe, #14 Street 246.
Space trippin’
THU 12 | Ever wondered what crazy adventures the Cambodian Space Project crew must have experienced during their past five years touring Cambodia and the globe? Check out their trip in full kaleidoscopic, psychedelic glory at Space Four Zero Pop Art Gallery with the launch of The Cambodian Space Project: A Five-Year Retrospective Photographic Exhibition. There will be tasty things to sip and snack on while cuts will be played from the CSP forthcoming album Electric Blue Boogaloo.
WHO: The Cambodian Space Project
WHAT: Photographic exhibition
WHERE: Space Four Zero pop art gallery, #40 St. 118
WHEN: 5pm, March 12
WHY: You’ve heard their songs, now view their story
Hey Mikkie!
THU 12 | Berlin-based singer-songwriter Mikkie B. can hardly be described as conventional. An unlikely marriage of pop, acoustic folk and classical music translates into a warm, yet melancholic sound. Tune into her honest, relatable lyrics and classically-trained piano and you’ll find yourself transported to a world that’s far from your smoky surroundings. Oh yeah, and she’s only 21, so what the hell are you doing with your life?
WHO: Mikkie B
WHAT: Classical pop
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 8pm, March 12
WHY: A chilled way to (almost) welcome in the weekend
A touch of France
FRI 13 | Good France Cambodia is celebrating all things French this coming week and the crew at The Creem have the cocktail side of things covered. It’s round number two for team Creem at Bouchon Wine Bar, and this time they’ll be sprinkling it with all things French. DJ Jack Malipan will man the decks, spinning classic French electronica from Daft Punk and Justice among others, and, of course, with a bar as well-stocked as this one, you can expect a creative explosion of French-inspired cocktails: think champagne, French martinis and Rose Pamplemousse Piscine (the harder they are to say, the tastier they are to drink).
WHO: Francophiles and cocktail-drinkers
WHAT: French Touch Party
WHERE: Bouchon Wine Bar, #3 St. 246
WHEN: 8pm, March 13
WHY: It’s French Week. Sante!
The house that Jacques built
FRI 13 | Love house, but sick of gigs so deep they risk penetrating earth’s core itself? Look no further than 24-year-old analogue prodigy Jacques Greene, who spent his teen years navigating synthesisers and drum pads while the rest of us were out dancing to shitty billboard charts. The result is an eclectic mix of ambient house, indie-electronica and R&B favourites. This sound was evidently unique enough to perk up the ears of Radiohead, who hand-picked Greene to remix their tracks for album production. Alongside this, Greene has collaborated with likes of Tinashe and The xx and co-produced the Vase record label. This Friday, he’ll be bringing his finely honed silky, supernatural IDM to Phnom Penh for a gig you’re not likely to forget in a hurry.
WHO: Jacques Greene
WHAT: Dreamy IDM
WHERE: Pontoon Pulse, #80 St. 172
WHEN: 10pm, March 13
WHY: It’s deep, but not too deep
Art, music & a whole lot of paint
SAT 14 | Celebrating art and music, the folks at Simone Art present a festival with a line-up that will in itself be music to your ears. Having just released their new album, Dub Addiction will join Wat A Gwaan, providing smooth reggae beats, while the KlapYaHandz team will get you up and bouncing with skillful hip hop. If electronic music is your bag, DJ Moudy, DJ Mercy and DJ Sequence will spin their tunes long into the night. Oh, and it’s obviously so cool it’s reached South America – Columbian street artists Stinkfish will be painting the walls with their trippy murals throughout the evening.
WHO: Dub Addiction, Wat A Gwaan, KlapYaHandz & more
WHAT: Art festival
WHERE: Simone Art, St. 93 Boeung Kak Lake
WHEN: 2pm, March 14
WHY: Music, art, dance, drinks. What more could you want?
Prodigal son
SAT 14 | Known best as “that guy from The Prodigy,” Leeroy Thornhill has, in fact, developed a unique style of his own, having spent many years as a solo producer, as well as producing for artists such as David Gray, Moby and Dr. Doom. He’s also had his own music remixed by numerous artists in the field, including Maxim and Adamski. Thornhill will infuse his Miami Bass with electro-breaks, hip hop and old school samples that are bound to get you popping like it’s 1996.
WHO: Leeroy Thornhill (The Prodigy)
WHAT: Miami Bass/Hip hop
WHERE: D-Club, #3 St. 278
WHEN: 9pm, March 14
WHY: Awesome in The Prodigy. Even better on his own.
Inside out
WED 18 | Heng Ravuth presents his latest work in Innermost II. Continuing to explore self-portraiture and the human form as a medium for expressing the human condition, Ravuth displays a range of dynamic works that evoke mystery and curiosity about the bodies in which we all travel. Sound intense? That’s cuz it kind of is. Leave yourself a good amount of time to peruse a room full of portraits which are likely to leave you feeling positively meta.
WHO: Heng Ravuth
WHAT: Art exhibition
WHERE: Java Café & Gallery, #58 Sihanouk Blvd.
WHEN: 6:30pm, March 18
WHY: It’s a visual philosophy lesson
Guilty Pleasures
Last night there were only two things worth watching on TV. One was Channing Tatum and Bear Grylls stripping off their zippy trousers and lumberjackets atop a mossy precipice and jumping into a waterfall together, whooping like gibbons as they went. I loathe heights and, so engrossed was I in their manly jackanapes, I forgot this was just TV and waited breathless for a bloody bloom to appear in that roiling, rocky basin below. Just in time, those alpha boisterers shot out from the chill depths in super slow-mo with their ab packs glistening and shaking the drops off their hair like sexy TV seals. And laughing and laughing. Oh, how they laughed. After sundry muddy rollicks they made a little house in a batty cave, scouting for broody she-cats first. As they lounged shirtless and musky, consummate woodsman Bear showed greenhorn Tatum how to light a fire with a single human hair. Or fashion a saucepan out of his belt buckle then cook some grubs in it. Something like that. Anyway it was just delightful to see two red-blooded outdoorsy gents from oh-so-different entertainment genres bromancin’ over ant scroggin and scouring each other’s pelts for juicy ticks.
Over on the other channel it was the same odd-couple madcappery, but with adorable animal babies, untimely wrench’d from nature’s furry teat. Clint, a destitute rhino tot with abandonment issues, was paired with an experienced sheep called Harry. Harry was shit scared – and who wouldn’t be? Young Clint was one thousand pugnacious kilos of seething rhino resentment. But as the almost unintelligible Seth Efriken voiceover man said, this year’s star ungulate is genetically predisposed to flock up, and ain’t too fussy who with. Soon enough our woolly helpmeet was cleaved to Clint like lamby Velcro, fluffing and jinking round those thumping great clodhoppers and weaponised snout like Maddie Ziegler in a shaggy jacket. It was so heartwarming I soon realised I was squealing with delight at the TV. Later, we saw a widowed Orangutan and her colour-coordinated cat, a badger and foxlet couple and, most darling, the toddler baboon mothering a clingy, glassy-eyed bush baby all over the shop. My tearstrings were yanked right out of their sockets. Honestly, TV doesn’t get much better than that.
Like when Bear met Chan and Clint met Harry, CharmingVille’s chockers with all manner of incongruous togetherness – animal, vegetable, mineral and metaphysical – that cook my cockles all the way through. Like, who in their right mind pairs a green tartan Easter bonnet with tailored woollen jacket over black satin pants, artisanal spats, and make it work? Impish Mr. Fang, the cyclo gaffer at Psar Kandal, that’s who. He’s a fucking sartorial genius, like a nuttier Alexander McQueen pre-incarnate. And who doesn’t love sunflower pyjamas at the movies at four o’clock in the afternoon? A policeman with a Pleasant Goat helmet? Socks ‘n’ thongs?
Call me chkuit but word mashups tickle me fancy almost as much as old Bear ‘n’ Tates comparing third nipples. Today on my way to lunch I saw a blackboard outside an all nations eatery on Pop Street – I could have Crimboll Eggs with my choice of penkeks and/or bacon. I had to say Crimboll in my head and then out loud, in a decreasingly Khmenglish accent, before I got scrambled. I gave myself a mental back slap: what an inadvertently marvelous new word, and how clever of me to work it out. But wait. As I stepped out of my tuk tuk, I accidentally left my eyewear on the seat. My driver handed them back. “Take care your sunclash!” Of course that’s what they are.
Pulling up to the pumps just as your motoduhp lights up another Disco, you scope a centenarian codger and his srey saart strolling with his ‘n’ hers bubble teas. You may see two constabularians holding hands in the shade of the Wat Botum banyans.
There could be a street kitten snoring like a trumpet in the arms of a God on 178. And don’t look now, but there’s a man sitting cross-legged by a temple lion at Chbar Ampoev, singing to his blissfully comatose fighting cock. My favourite ensemble is usually parked outside the Ministry of Cults and Religions on Sisowath – a Golden Retriever sitting opposite the stout fortune teller in her tuk tuk having his cards read.
Oh, of course there are the other strange bedfellows in our pandemonious hamlet that’ll raise the ire of some and eyebrows of many. I may have a PHD in Hedonic Psychophysics, a three-legged rabbit and a husband, but I’ve still got no fucking clue about love. So who am I to judge?
Green machine
While most of us were sneaking furtively into clubs and making out on sticky dance floors blasting the Top 40, Jacques Greene instead spent his adolescence carefully tuning his ear to the intricacies of techno composition, feeling his way around synthesisers and drum machines. This early fascination has since resulted in collaborations with iconic sound artists including Radiohead and The xx, as well as the release of his co-owned label, Vase records.
Despite an impressive track record, Greene has somehow managed to dodge the mainstream media spotlight for the most part – a circumstance that he says is far from accidental. “I try to keep a tiny bit of distance from full blown transparency, maybe call me old-fashioned,” Greene says. ”I don’t want to go full anonymous because that betrays the purpose by drawing more attention to your identity. But yeah, I think I’ve kept a healthy distance.”
This relatively old school approach interlaces Greene’s work on a multitude of levels beyond media exposure. His regular implementation of analogue equipment within the recording process and live sets is one particular characteristic of Greene’s which sets him apart from an increasingly competitive crowd.
“Every single record at least has a few analogue elements,” explains Greene. “It started with just being something I idolised as a kid; the image of someone figuring out a synthesiser or a drum machine appealed so much more to me than sitting at a computer, clicking away. From there, it became a thing of comfort. I enjoy the physical nature of using those instruments. I think we just have an incredible luxury in this time to be able to choose what approach we want. In the late ‘80s, if you wanted to make a house record there were not that many ways to go about it. You needed the machines and the knowledge to program them.”
Such words could just as easily emanate from the lips of a wisened digital media veteran. At only 25 years old, however, Greene speaks with a calm confidence that belies his youth, thanks to a 10-year pedigree already neatly tucked beneath his belt. “Twenty-five almost feels old at this point, actually, simply because I started using drum machines, synthesisers and production software around the age of 15.” Greene says.
On March 13, Greene will be arriving in Cambodia for the first time to perform a characteristically dreamy house and techno set. According to Greene, Punters will be treated to some of his new material, which partly draws upon his recent eclectic, alternative influences.
“I’ve been in the studio writing a lot, and when I do I like to remove myself a bit from the immediate context of my peers. So I’ve been listening to artists like Gila Monsta, Shlohmo, and all those new Aphex Twin SoundCloud uploads. I’ve been working on a lot of new music, so hopefully I get to try out a few. I try to surprise myself as much as I can, so hopefully something that keeps everyone, myself included, excited.”
Jaqcues Greene will perform at 10pm on Friday March 13 at Pontoon Pulse, #80 St. 172. Tickets are $8 (incl. one drink). Presale available at Pontoon, Duplex and Samai Distillery.