Dengue Fever Puts A Refreshing New Spin On The Music Of Cambodia

By KENNETH PARTRIDGE |Special to the Courant

July 3, 2008

Dengue Fever (HANDOUT / June 30, 2008)

The strange and colorful Cambodian pop music of the 1960s was born of and killed by military conflict.

Its haunting mix of American surf, garage, and psychedelic rock, as well as traditional Khmer lyrics and vocals, was the result of Cambodian musicians listening to U.S. Armed Forces Radio broadcasts from neighboring Vietnam.

The sound thrived until 1975, when the dictator Pol Pot seized power and began massacring much of the population.

Thirty years later, the Los Angeles sextet Dengue Fever is reviving the forgotten genre. Over the course of three albums, the band has gone from rerecording lost classics to writing its own songs, honoring the era's hybrid spirit by crossing its music with a variety of global influences.

"We're really about changing and shifting and not being any one way," bassist Senon Williams says by telephone, before beginning a tour that stops Saturday in Northampton, Mass.

Williams discovered Cambodian pop in 1995, when he traveled to the country and was floored by the updated version he heard while riding in a taxicab.

"It was a medley between Madonna and the Rolling Stones, and then it would be Sonny and Cher, and then it would be the Cars, and it would be mixed in with Cambodian vocals," he says.

He began buying stacks of '60s records, an obsession he shared with friends Ethan and Zac Holtzman, who developed the idea of starting a band.

The three enlisted a drummer and saxophone player and headed to Long Beach, a Los Angeles neighborhood with a sizable Cambodian community.

They found Chhom Nimol, a Cambodian native who was already famous back home. She reluctantly accepted the job.

"Her big concern was, and it still is, 'Why would these American people like a Cambodian singer when they can't understand the lyrics or what the music is about?'" Williams says.

Any doubts about the band's appeal soon dissipated: At its first show, Dengue Fever managed to move a roomful of notoriously dance-averse Los Angeles hipsters.

"The music is organ, bass, fuzz and wah guitar, saxophone, and drums, so it's kind of this Western core," Williams says. "Then we have Nimol, who bends notes between our 12-note scale. She sings all these invisible notes. Then she breaks into this voice called 'the ghost voice,' which is almost like yodeling."

"This voice soars really high and hits this soprano register, not in an operatic way, but in a more chilling way. It's kind of dreamy."

DENGUE FEVER performs Tuesday 7 p.m. with Chica Libre at the Iron Horse Music Theater, 20 Center St., Northampton, Mass. Tickets are $12 in advance, $14 at the door. Information: 413-584-0610 or www.iheg.com.