Cambodian Rock And Roll

Out Of The Darkness: The Cambodian Space Project

In 2009, Tasmanian musician Julien Poulson walked into a karaoke bar in Phnom Penh and heard a lone female voice singing Peggy Lee's 'Johnny Guitar'. This struck him as odd. Ordinarily the bars in Cambodia's capital only allow singers to perform in groups of around a dozen, and youth and vacant stares seem to be favoured over musical talent. "They kinda look like the zombies in Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'," he says. As he listened to her he realised why she sang alone. A voice as naturally gifted as this is a rare find.

Poulson invited the singer, Srey Thy, to start a band with him and together they formed the nucleus of what has become The Cambodian Space Project, a remarkable group who not only cover and preserve songs from the 'golden age' of 60s Cambodian pop but also write their own dazzlingly original Khmer psychedelic rock. They've now toured all over the world, from Texas to the End of the Road, but the shows they talk of with most pride are the ones they play in remote villages across Cambodia.

To understand the importance of these shows, and their context, we have to go back to April 17th 1975: the day Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia. As Poulson says, they "ripped out the heart and soul of Cambodian culture. Their very ill-conceived manifesto was a kind of fucked-up Maoist thing, to return society to agrarian utopia, which meant destroying and dismantling culture. The Khmer Rouge very successfully destroyed everything, along with almost two million Cambodian lives."

The Khmer Rouge specifically targeted anybody that they regarded as professionals or intellectuals. This included the majority of Cambodian writers, artists and musicians, many of whom were taken to the Killing Fields. Cambodia today is littered with haunting reminders of the horrors of the regime. At Choeung Ek, about 17 km south of Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, there stands a stupa, a Buddhist monument, with glass sides. Inside there are more than 5,000 human skulls piled on top of one another. Many are cracked or smashed in. It was built as a memorial to the 17,000 people killed there between 1975 and 1979, and stands as an awful testament of man's inhumanity to man.

Dengue Fever in Cambodia Town, Then Fingerprints Records, Last ...

​The press event was organized by Long Beach’s Bike-Friendly Business District program, which purchases bicycles for use by employees and patrons in the city’s four designated districts. Though Cambodia Town is the last of the four to get its wheels–which include several commuter bikes and a people-holding cargo bike–it is probably the only one to have a band claim the neighborhood as the reason for its existence.

Cambodia Town’s large community of émigrés is what attracted singer Chhom Nimol to move there from Cambodia more than a decade ago. And its reputation as a haven for Cambodian musicians and singers is what drew brothers Zac and Ethan Holtzman into Dragon House from Los Angeles the night they discovered Nimol’s elevating vocals 10 years ago. After the short group bike ride and a traditional Cambodian lunch at the Grand Paradise Restaurant (where Nimol has been known to still perform), the band members left to get ready for their next appearance on the list: an in-store performance at Fingerprints.

Scheduled to begin at 7p.m., the crowd was left standing outside of Fingerprints’ East Village storefront until nearly 7:30 before being ushered into the dimly lit back room. Bass player Senon Williams and guitarist Zac Holtzman emerged in the same casual garb they’d been wearing on the bike ride earlier, but Nimol had undergone a glamorous update for the show. Dressed like a top-tier Cambodian pop star, her prismatic black cocktail dress with matching heels and sparkling diamond bangles stood in contrast to the band-dude dress of the others.

Her voice–silky and wraithlike–channeled through an exotic karaoke mic echo also set her apart from the aggressive noises that materialized out of the instruments on stage, which in the first few songs alone ranged from freestyle psych-organs to escalating proto-surf guitar riffs.

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