Tiger Phone Card is my new favorite song of the moment by Los Angeles band Dengue Fever, whose primary inspiration is 60’s era psychedelic Cambodian surf rock complete with lyrics in cambodian and english. Their music is wicked and their vibe is totally left field. There’s a new film about their pilgrimage to Cambodia Sleepwalking Through The Mekong and the trailer goes into their influences and how they’ve arrived at such an original sound.
The odyssey is a homecoming for singer Chhom Nimol and a transformation for the rest of the band as they perform with master musicians and record new songs along the way.
More than a rockumentary, the film serves up a portrait of modern Cambodia as the band tours through Phnom Penh and beyond, crossing a great cultural chasm with the same spirit of Cambodia’s original rock pioneers.
Cambodia is often synonymous with the brutal Khmer Rouge regime that left millions dead and scattered refugees around the globe. This tragedy overshadows the story of Cambodia’s music scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Cambodian musicians reinvented Western rock n’ roll with a distinctly Khmer flavor to crete a sound that is at once familiar and completely original.
- Dengue Fever (wikipedia)
- Dengue Fever (myspace)
- Dengue Fever on NPR (recent interview)
- Tiger Phone Card
- Sleepwalking trailer
- More Dengue on YouTube
- More on Cambodian rock music
- My photos from Cambodia
