Womad festival goers can add an American band playing 1960s-style Cambodian psychedelic rock to their experiences this year. Guitarist Zac Holtzman speaks to Alastair Bull of NZPA about their music and the documentary they are also bringing to Taranaki.
Auckland, March 4 NZPA - Imagine coming in as a foreigner to play reggae to Jamaicans, didgeridoo music to indigenous Australians, or kapa haka to Maori.
It's something like what American band Dengue Fever had when they brought their version of 1960s Cambodian psychedelic rock to Cambodia for the first time.
Dengue Fever, one of the feature artists at the Womad festival of world music in Taranaki this month, had by 2005 started to develop a following in the West but they had yet to try their music out on the locals.
As it turned out, the locals hadn't heard it much for some time either.
"We were the first band to ever go back there and play 60s Cambodian rock'n'roll since the Khmer Rouge were there and they got rid of all those artists," guitarist Zac Holtzman said.
"When we were there there was lots of karaoke going on, which is like pretty heavily American hip hop and Chinese and Thai pop, we saw some huge variety acts and then there were some bands like a blues or rock or heavy metal band, but we didn't see anything that was tied in to the old Cambodian psychedelic movement."
Holtzman admits he was concerned about how their band of five Americans and one Cambodian singer would be perceived. But it didn't take long for them to realise how welcome they were.
"The first show that we did was on Cambodian Television Network, which is the biggest TV station in Cambodia. It was a two hour show and they played it three or four times a day, they broadcast it every day that we were there," he said.
"Almost everybody has a TV, so a lot of people saw the show, and even those who heard us on radio knew who we were.
"There was this one point where we were in the middle of nowhere and we climbed 200 stairs to the top of these old ruins that were built during the same period as Angkor Wat, and at the top of the stairs this little monk comes out from like this rock structure and points a finger at us and says `Dengue Fever'."
The band took documentary filmmaker John Pirozzi with them, and his film of their journey, which has just been completed, will be among the offerings to Womad spectators this year.
Dengue Fever started when Holtzman and his brother Ethan independently discovered Cambodian psychedelia.
"A friend of mine was working in a record store in San Francisco called Aquarius Records, and he turned me on to it.
"I was just kind of listening to that on my own and then my brother went to Cambodia in the 90s and he collected a good chunk of tapes and CDs and he brought them home and when I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles and I was playing the CD that I had and he said `how did you get this music?"
The Holtzmans got three other musicians to join them, but decided at some stage that a Cambodian female vocalist would finish the band off.
They searched clubs at the Cambodian quarter of Long Beach, Los Angeles, and after a few weeks discovered Chhom Nimol.
"We ended up in this one club called the Dragon House and there was an ex-Cambodian band playing with six female vocalists and as soon as Chhom Nimol started singing I turned to my brother and said `hey, we've got to ask her".
"She said yes when we asked her if she wanted to join the band but she didn't really speak any English at the time, she didn't really know what she was saying yes to.
"We gave her a CD and she came to the audition and she started coming to practices and we got pretty lucky."
The band members also quickly discovered Nimol, who was at the time trying to pay off legal fees after being detained 22 days for a lapsed green card, was from Cambodian musical royalty.
"They're sort of like the Jacksons of Cambodia. Nimol has performed for the King and Queen of Cambodia, so has her sister, and both her brothers and parents were great musicians," Holtzman said.
The band played nothing but covers of Cambodian psychedelia songs on their first album, partly because Nimol's English was practically non-existent, but listeners can now expect a wider-ranging sound.
"It was hard to communicate to tell her that we're not used to being a cover band, we come from other bands where we all wrote our own stuff," Holtzman said.
"Luckily we quickly got to jump into that bringing ourselves into it. Our second album was 10 originals and maybe two covers, and our last album, Venus On Earth, was all originals, and the album we're working on is all original."
"We're just one crazy family, touring around the world and having a great time making music together."
* Dengue Fever feature at the Womad Festival in New Plymouth from March 13 to 15.
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