FROM L.A. TO PHNOM PENH, BY WAY OF VENUS: Dengue Fever From left: Ethan Holtzman, Senon Williams, Zac Holtzman, Paul Smith, David Ralicke and Chhom Nimolby RUPERT BOTTENBERG
“You know how perfume covers things up to make things seem prettier? It’s the big cover-up of trying to put a better face on a really sad situation.”
Over the phone from California, Zac Holtzman, the founder, primary songwriter, guitarist and singer of Los Angeles sextet Dengue Fever, is explaining the subtext of “Monsoon of Perfume,” a gorgeous ballad on the band’s recent album Venus on Earth, their third and most successful batch of retro psych-rock in a Cambodian vernacular.
“It’s actually the most Cambodian song on the album, and in a modern sense too. It’s what you actually hear when you go there—it’s about karaoke, about a karaoke bar and the people who get up and perform there.
“There’s a custom that their friends and fans do, which is take these pinkish, perfumed tissues that are on all the tables, twist them up into a rose shape and go up and give it to the person who’s performing, almost like delivering a bouquet of flowers.”
Holtzman and his brother Ethan, who handles organ duties, started Dengue Fever in 2001, striving to revive the distinctive rock ’n’ roll of Cambodian artists like Sin Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea, tunes they discovered on dusty cassettes while travelling there. They inducted bassist Senon Williams, drummer Paul Smith and saxophonist David Ralicke (whose horn arrangements bring a note of Afro funk to the table, alongside Holtzman’s spaghetti Western twang), and then found their ace in the hole. Chhom Nimol, a young singer with an established rep back home, was working the Cambodian community circuit in California when the brothers discovered her and, with some cajoling, convinced her to front the band.
The “sad situation” Holtzman alludes to, one that permeates the music of Dengue Fever, is no mere romantic cock-up or comparable material for melodrama. It’s nothing less than the war, and then the extended campaign of auto-extermination, that wiped out a quarter of the Southeast Asian nation’s population in the mid-’70s, including the country’s celebrated rock ’n’ rollers.
Shattered by American carpet bombing—a spill-over from the Vietnam War, like the rock ’n’ soul on U.S. military radio that inspired the artists on whose work Dengue Fever draws—Cambodia was swarmed by “Brother Number 1” Pol Pot and his rural Communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge, who systematically murdered academics, technocrats, artists and anyone with the faintest whiff of the West to them.
Wearing glasses, owning a radio, a passing grasp of the English language—all capital offences until early 1979, when Vietnamese troops drove the Khmer Rouge from power.
Rocky road to travel
“It’s a very charged situation,” says filmmaker John Pirozzi of Cambodia today. The dwindling yet nasty Khmer Rouge guerrilla war gasped its last only at the end of the ’90s, and the trials of the surviving leaders for crimes against humanity drag on into the new millennium.
“I think there’s an element within Cambodian society that wants to make sure that what happened is taught in the schools properly, and that people understand their history, and there’s another element that wants to move past it. I think it’s a tricky balancing act.”
Since 2001, when he served as camera operator and second-unit DOP on Matt Dillon’s film City of Ghosts (which featured a newly minted Dengue Fever covering Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”), Pirozzi has visited the country several times. But while the ghosts of that time of horror a generation ago still linger, it’s what came before—and, in Dengue Fever, so many years after—that led Pirozzi to work on not one but two documentary films.
Pirozzi’s original project was a doc called Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll, an exploration of the originators of the sound which is still in the works. Finished first, though, was Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, which Pirozzi presents this weekend at the Saidye Bronfman Centre’s swank new CinemaSpace room, the night after Dengue Fever return for a show.
The film follows another return, of sorts, for the band. In 2005, Dengue Fever made a two-week pilgrimage to Cambodia, performing a number of concerts, jamming with traditional musicians and making a memorable appearance on national television. The band’s dynamics were inverted, with Chhom, on her home turf, taking the lead.
“They were on her territory, and I wanted the film to reflect that,” says Pirozzi. “In the opening scene, when they’re introducing themselves on that TV show, you can really see that they’re nervous. They’re trying to speak a little Khmer, they’re obviously not in their element, and I purposefully didn’t subtitle the TV hostess who’s introducing them, so that the audience would feel what the band was feeling. It was good that they were open to the experience and really put themselves out there. They had no idea how people were going to respond. They just went for it, and by the end of the trip, they felt it was really successful.”
Oldies and aliens
Pirozzi’s film succeeds not only in telling the tale of Dengue Fever’s journey to the source but in capturing the demure beauty of the Buddhist nation. He points out how helpful the Cambodians were across the board.
“They want to see projects that portray Cambodia in a positive light. So many films focus on the recent history, and it’s hard for films to come in and do stuff that’s more positive. It just doesn’t happen that often. So I think they realized that this would be one of those kinds of projects.
“One thing I learned, being there with the band, this music really is Cambodia’s golden oldies. It really is the older people who respond to it, because to them, it symbolizes a time when things were much better for them, before the war. When you go to see Dengue Fever in clubs in America, it’s all kids, younger people dancing, it’s pretty hip music. But it has such deep roots there, it reaches back to the older people.”
On these shores, Dengue Fever’s tunes have reached all kinds of folks, dominating and in fact breaking out beyond the specialized world-music market. Likewise, they’ve gone past the straightforward cover versions of their self-titled debut, crafting several original songs for their sophomore release of 2005, Escape From Dragon House (named after the L.A. restaurant where they found Chhom). Their latest, Venus on Earth, is entirely original material, reflecting their unique musical formula and quirky interests.
Take, for instance, “Integratron,” a slow-burning exotic rocker named after, as Holtzman explains, “a building that was built out in Joshua Tree, California in the ’40s by this guy who supposedly received instructions from beings from Venus. They told him to build it without any metal, and in this crazy parabolic shape. There’s this thing around the outside that spins, and would heal you and actually turn back the years.”
Language barriers
The extraterrestrial trip continues on “Oceans of Venus,” an opulent instrumental. “The direction it went was sort of psychedelic surf, and by the time we were 75 per cent into it being what it was, it felt just fine without any vocals on it. And the saxophone and my brother’s keyboards on it are kind of haunting, outer space voices at the end of it. They feel like voices, so it felt fine without having Nimol on that one.”
Chhom’s soaring vocals are essential, though, to the duet “Tiger Phone Card,” which hinges on the fact that, while improving rapidly, Chhom’s English is hardly perfect. “The slightly broken English makes it even better and more sincere,” says Holtzman, “because in a long-distance relationship, that’s kinda how things are—little mispronunciations and misunderstandings.”
By the same token, Holtzman’s facility with the Cambodian language Khmer—he often sings in it—is coming along in fits and starts. “I totally embraced it when we were in Cambodia, carrying a little notebook to write my own things in, and learning as much as I could absorb. I’ve gotten kinda lazy, though, when I’m not surrounded by Khmer-speaking people.”
Perhaps Holtzman will have that opportunity again, if the band returns to Cambodia. “We’re not going crazy over the plans, but there’s been talk, and there are a few places we played over there that really want to have us back, and talk of a beer company getting behind us to sponsor the whole trip, and we’ve got a friend we met there who writes for the BBC… but right now, we’ve got two U.S. tours and two European tours coming up, so there’s a lot on our plate.”
Dengue Fever play with Jerusalem In My Heart and Le Soleil Sortant De Sa Bouche at la Sala Rossa on Friday, March 7, 9 p.m., $12. Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, presented by John Pirozzi, screens at the Segal Centre’s CinemaSpace on Saturday, March 8, 9:30 p.m., $8 ($6/students and seniors)
“You know how perfume covers things up to make things seem prettier? It’s the big cover-up of trying to put a better face on a really sad situation.”
Over the phone from California, Zac Holtzman, the founder, primary songwriter, guitarist and singer of Los Angeles sextet Dengue Fever, is explaining the subtext of “Monsoon of Perfume,” a gorgeous ballad on the band’s recent album Venus on Earth, their third and most successful batch of retro psych-rock in a Cambodian vernacular.
“It’s actually the most Cambodian song on the album, and in a modern sense too. It’s what you actually hear when you go there—it’s about karaoke, about a karaoke bar and the people who get up and perform there.
“There’s a custom that their friends and fans do, which is take these pinkish, perfumed tissues that are on all the tables, twist them up into a rose shape and go up and give it to the person who’s performing, almost like delivering a bouquet of flowers.”
Holtzman and his brother Ethan, who handles organ duties, started Dengue Fever in 2001, striving to revive the distinctive rock ’n’ roll of Cambodian artists like Sin Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea, tunes they discovered on dusty cassettes while travelling there. They inducted bassist Senon Williams, drummer Paul Smith and saxophonist David Ralicke (whose horn arrangements bring a note of Afro funk to the table, alongside Holtzman’s spaghetti Western twang), and then found their ace in the hole. Chhom Nimol, a young singer with an established rep back home, was working the Cambodian community circuit in California when the brothers discovered her and, with some cajoling, convinced her to front the band.
The “sad situation” Holtzman alludes to, one that permeates the music of Dengue Fever, is no mere romantic cock-up or comparable material for melodrama. It’s nothing less than the war, and then the extended campaign of auto-extermination, that wiped out a quarter of the Southeast Asian nation’s population in the mid-’70s, including the country’s celebrated rock ’n’ rollers.
Shattered by American carpet bombing—a spill-over from the Vietnam War, like the rock ’n’ soul on U.S. military radio that inspired the artists on whose work Dengue Fever draws—Cambodia was swarmed by “Brother Number 1” Pol Pot and his rural Communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge, who systematically murdered academics, technocrats, artists and anyone with the faintest whiff of the West to them.
Wearing glasses, owning a radio, a passing grasp of the English language—all capital offences until early 1979, when Vietnamese troops drove the Khmer Rouge from power.
Rocky road to travel
“It’s a very charged situation,” says filmmaker John Pirozzi of Cambodia today. The dwindling yet nasty Khmer Rouge guerrilla war gasped its last only at the end of the ’90s, and the trials of the surviving leaders for crimes against humanity drag on into the new millennium.
“I think there’s an element within Cambodian society that wants to make sure that what happened is taught in the schools properly, and that people understand their history, and there’s another element that wants to move past it. I think it’s a tricky balancing act.”
Since 2001, when he served as camera operator and second-unit DOP on Matt Dillon’s film City of Ghosts (which featured a newly minted Dengue Fever covering Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”), Pirozzi has visited the country several times. But while the ghosts of that time of horror a generation ago still linger, it’s what came before—and, in Dengue Fever, so many years after—that led Pirozzi to work on not one but two documentary films.
Pirozzi’s original project was a doc called Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll, an exploration of the originators of the sound which is still in the works. Finished first, though, was Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, which Pirozzi presents this weekend at the Saidye Bronfman Centre’s swank new CinemaSpace room, the night after Dengue Fever return for a show.
The film follows another return, of sorts, for the band. In 2005, Dengue Fever made a two-week pilgrimage to Cambodia, performing a number of concerts, jamming with traditional musicians and making a memorable appearance on national television. The band’s dynamics were inverted, with Chhom, on her home turf, taking the lead.
“They were on her territory, and I wanted the film to reflect that,” says Pirozzi. “In the opening scene, when they’re introducing themselves on that TV show, you can really see that they’re nervous. They’re trying to speak a little Khmer, they’re obviously not in their element, and I purposefully didn’t subtitle the TV hostess who’s introducing them, so that the audience would feel what the band was feeling. It was good that they were open to the experience and really put themselves out there. They had no idea how people were going to respond. They just went for it, and by the end of the trip, they felt it was really successful.”
Oldies and aliens
Pirozzi’s film succeeds not only in telling the tale of Dengue Fever’s journey to the source but in capturing the demure beauty of the Buddhist nation. He points out how helpful the Cambodians were across the board.
“They want to see projects that portray Cambodia in a positive light. So many films focus on the recent history, and it’s hard for films to come in and do stuff that’s more positive. It just doesn’t happen that often. So I think they realized that this would be one of those kinds of projects.
“One thing I learned, being there with the band, this music really is Cambodia’s golden oldies. It really is the older people who respond to it, because to them, it symbolizes a time when things were much better for them, before the war. When you go to see Dengue Fever in clubs in America, it’s all kids, younger people dancing, it’s pretty hip music. But it has such deep roots there, it reaches back to the older people.”
On these shores, Dengue Fever’s tunes have reached all kinds of folks, dominating and in fact breaking out beyond the specialized world-music market. Likewise, they’ve gone past the straightforward cover versions of their self-titled debut, crafting several original songs for their sophomore release of 2005, Escape From Dragon House (named after the L.A. restaurant where they found Chhom). Their latest, Venus on Earth, is entirely original material, reflecting their unique musical formula and quirky interests.
Take, for instance, “Integratron,” a slow-burning exotic rocker named after, as Holtzman explains, “a building that was built out in Joshua Tree, California in the ’40s by this guy who supposedly received instructions from beings from Venus. They told him to build it without any metal, and in this crazy parabolic shape. There’s this thing around the outside that spins, and would heal you and actually turn back the years.”
Language barriers
The extraterrestrial trip continues on “Oceans of Venus,” an opulent instrumental. “The direction it went was sort of psychedelic surf, and by the time we were 75 per cent into it being what it was, it felt just fine without any vocals on it. And the saxophone and my brother’s keyboards on it are kind of haunting, outer space voices at the end of it. They feel like voices, so it felt fine without having Nimol on that one.”
Chhom’s soaring vocals are essential, though, to the duet “Tiger Phone Card,” which hinges on the fact that, while improving rapidly, Chhom’s English is hardly perfect. “The slightly broken English makes it even better and more sincere,” says Holtzman, “because in a long-distance relationship, that’s kinda how things are—little mispronunciations and misunderstandings.”
By the same token, Holtzman’s facility with the Cambodian language Khmer—he often sings in it—is coming along in fits and starts. “I totally embraced it when we were in Cambodia, carrying a little notebook to write my own things in, and learning as much as I could absorb. I’ve gotten kinda lazy, though, when I’m not surrounded by Khmer-speaking people.”
Perhaps Holtzman will have that opportunity again, if the band returns to Cambodia. “We’re not going crazy over the plans, but there’s been talk, and there are a few places we played over there that really want to have us back, and talk of a beer company getting behind us to sponsor the whole trip, and we’ve got a friend we met there who writes for the BBC… but right now, we’ve got two U.S. tours and two European tours coming up, so there’s a lot on our plate.”
Dengue Fever play with Jerusalem In My Heart and Le Soleil Sortant De Sa Bouche at la Sala Rossa on Friday, March 7, 9 p.m., $12. Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, presented by John Pirozzi, screens at the Segal Centre’s CinemaSpace on Saturday, March 8, 9:30 p.m., $8 ($6/students and seniors)
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