By APA Staff

In the midst of touring and showcasing their new documentary, Dengue Fever invites APA to lounge in their shed-turned-studio, as the band experiments with beats and explains how Cambodianization breeds musical haikus.

Click here for video.

Interview with Dengue Fever
September 26, 2007
Interview and article by Angilee Shah
Video Edit by Oliver Chien

Something psychedelic emanates from a small shed-turned-studio behind a welcoming home east of Hollywood. The late September full moon marks the last day of a Cambodian festival to pay tribute to ancestors and family members who have passed away.

Between plucks at the bass guitar, the occasional, pleasantly synthetic sounds of a Nord keyboard (the Farfisa organ was in the shop that day) and the clinking of deep brown bottles of Red Strip beer, Dengue Fever lead singer Chhom Nimol says Cambodian people think about the past, and look to their faith for direction. Chhom, the youngest of a famous Cambodian family of singers, says her decision to sing the psychedelic rock of the pre-Khmer Rouge 1960s with a band of Americans was an act of faith.

"Me, I don't have a plan. Right?" she says to four other band members, who are fiddling with their instruments as they nod and continue the conversation with their own stories of Dengue Fever's unlikely, but organic, beginnings.

Senon Williams, the group's bass guitarist and owner of the home-grown studio where much of Dengue Fever's third album Venus on Earth, was recorded, says that Dengue Fever’s initial raison d'être was to put some Cambodian pop songs together for a show that later ended up cancelled.

Zac Holtzman, keeping a straight face under his iconic long beard, adds this tall tale to the mix: "We were there [in Cambodia] and we stayed a little too long and they closed the temple. And we wandered around all night, the only ones there. And then, that's when it came to Ethan. I think it was a full moon. It was a full moon rave, and we were lost at Angkor Wat."

In truth, it was just Ethan Holtzman who was in Cambodia with a friend. Zac Holtzman was back in San Francisco listening to Cambodian pop on cassette tapes. In 1998, Ethan Holtzman was leaving Angkor Wat on a truck, and he remembers hearing the Western-influenced Khmer sounds of Cambodian pop playing on the radio. At the time, his traveling companion was beginning to show the symptoms of a very painful tropical disease.

It is a sad but unavoidable pun to say that the music infected the brothers.

They found a drummer in their friend, Paul Dreux Smith. "They were telling me they were going to find a singer," he says, still incredulous. "I was like, good luck finding a Cambodian singer in L.A."

Chhom was working at Dragon House, a dim-sum-restaurant-bar-karaoke-nightclub in downtown Long Beach, the Southern California home to a sizeable population of Cambodians, many of whom came to the United States in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge. Chhom, who is from Battambang in the northeast of Cambodia, had originally come to the United States for a six-month tour singing ballads with her brother in 2000.  The Holtzman brothers had found their Cambodian singer. Their first album, a collection of cover songs released in 2003, was self-titled.

While the band's history began somewhere between Cambodia and Los Angeles in 2000, its ancestry goes back much further and wider. Williams cites as inspiration American bassist Charles Mingus, who defied musical classifications. Ethan Holtzman talks about "Afro-scifi-surf" and the oft-mentioned Ethiopique cover they did on the first album. Then there's the Khmer remake of the dramatic Joni Mitchell song, "Both Sides Now," which Dengue Fever recorded for the soundtrack to the 2002 film City of Ghosts. And, of course, Chhom references 1960s Cambodian pop star headliners like Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea, both widely believed to be among the many musicians who fell victim to the Khmer Rouge's purge of music and art.

The band (minus David Ralicke, the brass man behind the driving riffs that give Dengue Fever its strong big band sound) rehearses in the cramped studio, where a few standing lamps dimly light one side of the room and a large computer monitor lights the other. Chhom and Zac Holtzman share a sofa that sags a bit close to the ground, an arm's reach from Williams, who is several heads taller than everyone else and has the easiest access to the six-pack sitting on a speaker behind him.

The rehearsal seems much like their song writing process: put many different elements in close together and see what comes out. For their original indie rock tunes, Zac Holtzman writes lyrics in English and then works with Chhom and a Khmer-fluent friend to translate them.

"A lot of the time when we translate it, something that is maybe six or seven syllables in English turns into 25, 30 Cambodian syllables," he explains. "So you go, ok, let's get rid of this, this and that. So it turns some of the songs into haikus."

Language barriers don't seem so tall when they are paired with danceable beats and powerful vocals, though. Dengue Fever's second album Escape from Dragon House, released in 2005, is replete with original tunes in both English and Khmer. (Smith explains that the band's goal was for Chhom to not need to work at the Dragon House restaurant: "We had to compete with them for the weekends.") It has just one cover, "Tip My Canoe," a duet originally sung by Sisamouth and Sereysothea.

Zac Holtzman is improving in his Khmer, and Chhom is singing in English more often – the cultural and linguistic leaps energize the group. Last year, they toured in Cambodia, playing small venues and a high-profile show on the Cambodian Television Network, and sparking a flurry of excitement among expat bloggers in Phnom Penh. Filmmaker John Pirozzi made a documentary about the tour called Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, also the name of the haunting middle track from Escape from Dragon House.

Chhom says people were surprised that she did not return to Cambodia singing in English with her American band.

"Basically instead of us converting her to be Americanized, she Cambodianized us," Williams says.

This year, they release their third album and have shows all along the west coast, as well as in Spain and New York City. Venus On Earth, set for a Jan. 22 United States release, has 11 original songs, including duets all in English.

For music and tour dates, click here.

Published: Friday, October 19, 2007