Interviews
Straight Outta Cambodia: Dengue Fever
Straight Outta Cambodia
By Drew Tewksbury
LA Alternative Press, August 28th, 2005
It was on this day nearly 35 years ago that Dengue Fever was born into a thousand Cambodian homes. In one home, a seemingly normal Cambodian kid sits poised, guitar in hand, eyes locked on small AM radio emitting the strange sounds of “House of the Rising Sun.” In another house, a kid stands on his toes to look out the window, watching American GIs gathered on a corner mouthing the guitar into from “Foxy Lady.” In yet another house, a girl picks up her first pair of drumsticks, raising them above her head and for the first time in English shouts, “one, two, three, four!” In each of these houses, an ordinary Cambodian kid becomes attuned to the global influence emerging from their periphery and the first gentle mutations of a globalized world.
It is from these fragments that Dengue Fever began to rebuild.
For Dengue Fever, the eponymous California-cum-Cambodia rockers, the fruits of these intrepid Asian musicians became the reason to bring the words slapback, Silvertone, and Farfisa back into the American lexicon.
Having traveled through Cambodia in the late ‘90s, Zac and Ethan Holtzman soaked up the musical culture espoused from plazas and marketplaces speckling the country. Acquiring Cambodian rock comps from the ‘60s and ‘70s, the seed of inspiration gestated in their imaginations. In 2001, Zac left San Francisco and his band Dieselhed for Silver Lake, where he and his Farfisa organ playing brother put their incipient ideas into action. In the same spirit of ingenuity that birthed Cambodian rock, the brothers Holtzman decide to tackle the daunting task of reverse engineering the music that they’d grown to love.
Actually…“We kinda just learned the chords,” Zac tells Worldlyremains.com.
Well, even though the process of dissecting the music wasn’t that hard, finding a vocalist to front their Cambodian dream proved to be a bit more challenging. “I don’t know how the hell we’d find a singer like that, ” Ethan’s friend and drummer Paul Smith remembers thinking after the Holtzmans unveiled their vision.
Fortunately, through a tip from a friend, the boys of Dengue headed to the unlikely bastion of all things Cambodia: Long Beach. The concrete jungle of Long Beach is the home of nearly 50,000 Cambodians, many displaced by the socio-political upheaval wrought by despots, foreign invaders, and false international promises that plagued recent history in the Southeast Asian Country.
Others came for the Karaoke.
The three scoured the slightly seedy nightclubs of Little Phenom Penh, presenting their project to every singer that they could, with limited success. Many only spoke Khmer – the language of Cambodia – but they convinced a few to show up and audition to front Dengue Fever. Enlisting their friend Senon Williams to temporarily fill-in on bass, the auditions were graced by a surprise visit.
“We had a rehersal space in Long Beach and we told the other singers that Ch’hom Nimol was coming and they said ‘no she isn’t, there’s no way she’s going to sing with you guys.’ But sure enough, like ten minutes later, she walked through the door and some of the other singers left! I guess they didn’t want to have to out-sing her.”
The fears of these unfortunate singers were not unwarranted. In Cambodia, Nimol carried the legacy of a pop-princess and heiress to a musical family worthy of entertaining royalty. In Long Beach, she and her sister performed mainly for the insular audience of Little Phnom Penh at Cambodian weddings and at the Dragon House nightclub, but for this audition she had to reach much further into her musical repertoire: She was going to rock.
Without missing a beat, Nimol instantly recognized the Cambodian covers from her parent’s era and with her swooping vocals, shimmering vibrato, and delicate arpeggios, the band knew without a doubt that she was the one.
However, Nimol wasn’t so sure about them.
“She was highly skeptical of the whole thing’ Smith remembers. “White people playing Cambodian music was just something that wasn’t on her radar.”
Unsure of their modus operandi, (and probably perplexed with the length of Zac’s gargantuan beard) the cautious Nimol traveled with what could only be described as an entourage. She was leery of leaving Long Beach and, for the first year and a half, communicated only through a translator.
Despite the communication breakdown, the band was unified with their musical aspirations and it was from here that Dengue Fever evolved into its present form.
Over the last few years, Nimol’s English has improved and she now shares the songwriting duties with Zac, who previously wrote the songs in English and had them translated. Not that he can’t sing them himself, as he has proven on several songs where he, to the delight of many Cambodian audiences, in sings in passable Khmer.
Although their first album consisted mostly of covers in Khmer, Dengue Fever has created a chemistry (or maybe alchemy) that allows them to experiment and pull the band in new directions. For their newest album, Smith explains that the first rule for Dengue Fever is that there are no rules. The band creates a space to “allow for osmosis and feed off each other’s influences, and learn to constantly change, let things happen the way they happen. Do it if it feels right.”
And it does feel right.
It is this responsivity to feeling that drives the band, where music becomes a universal language bypassing the intellect and speaking directly to something hidden within us. Something ancient and real.
Never is this more true than on Escape from the Dragon House, Dengue’s second album and first original effort where emotional landscapes are created in the ache inscribed in the Nimol’s voice, the wash of spaced-out reverb, and the hypnotic tones of the Khmer language woven with the bombastic surf rhythms.
“It’s such a cliché that music can be the international language, but it really can. It is almost like reading a book instead of watching a movie where your imagination gets to fill in the gaps.” Smith reveals, “I often lip synchs behind her playing and it feels so good and I don’t know what she’s saying. It doesn’t matter. The emotion’s there, it’s really obvious where things are going.”
Undeniably, this music takes you places.
It takes you down alleyways of memory, into dilapidated discos bathed in neon light, past lines of Cambodian teenagers sitting on curbs outside, and onto the darkened streets of Phenom Penh, where we experience the uncanny recognizance of memories unremembered. We feel the déjà vu. We feel the reality of the unreal, and we take the ticket into places and emotions we never knew existed inside us. All hidden in our own Dragon Houses.
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