Fever pitch

Dengue Fever’s Venus On Earth was one of the more extraordinary records of last year, a wanton blendering of garage psychedelia and Cambodian 60s pop with elements of surf, raga and space-rock. This six-piece ensemble was founded in 2001 by Californian-born brothers Zac and Ethan Holtzman, who had independently and synchronicitously stumbled upon a shared love of the sounds of the Mekong delta.

The Holtzman boys decided it was crucial that they enlist the services of a Cambodian singer: enter the extraordinary Chhom Nimol (already something of a celebrity, having performed regularly for the King and Queen of Cambodia), whose supple, shapeshifting vocal style is the band’s secret weapon.
“My brother and I started driving down to Long Beach where there’s a population of about 50,000 Cambodians,” Zac explains, “and we started going to the nightclubs there and watching the different singers, and then we went into the Dragon House, which was the biggest nightclub, and we saw about six singers up on stage, and Nimol was one of them. As soon as she took the mic, I instantly knew that would be the greatest thing we could pull off, if she would agree to sing with us.”
Their first meeting was, Zac admits, inauspicious.
“We approached her, but her English was… all she was able to say was a few words. So we gave her a CD and hummed a few bars of the songs we wanted to start with, and she was very polite and said yes, but her sister was there too, and she was shaking her head and said, ‘No way, don’t trust these guys – look at that beard!’ But she talked to some more friends after we left and gave us a call back. When we told people at the audition that she might show up, they were like, ‘No way – that’s like saying Janet Jackson’s gonna come sing in your band!’ So when she showed up, everybody else left. We’ve been together ever since.”
Dengue Fever’s self-titled debut featured covers of Cambodian classics performed in tribute to the singers and songwriters who were killed by the Khmer Rouge. In the band’s press release, drummer Paul Smith states: “The music of the 60s we’re drawing on still brings up a lot of pain for Cambodians. These songs are from a time and place that doesn’t exist anymore, but music can be therapeutic. We’re hoping we can continue to build bridges between America and Cambodia, between the present and the past.”
When asked to elaborate, Zac says, “The only music that survived was the vinyl that was exported out of the country to Paris or to Long Beach. And Phnom Penh was like the jewel of South East Asia at the time, and then we come in there and make it totally unstable, the government falls and Pol Pot takes over, so that was the music that was going on right at that time, the darkest period of Cambodia. Almost anybody you talk to lost relatives during that time. Being a musician was reason enough to be killed.”
As well as recording two more albums, Escape From Dragon House and Venus On Earth, both of which co-opt everything from Ethiopian jazz, G-funk and Bollywood grooves to Morricone soundtrack atmospherics and Iraqi pop, the band made a pilgrimage to Cambodia in 2005, a sojourn that was captured for posterity in John Pirozzi’s documentary film Sleepwalking Through The Mekong.
“It was such a trip to see the reaction of everybody as we were playing their music,” Zac says. “As far as being perceived as appropriating somebody else’s culture, this is what we are into and are influenced by, and it’s what Nimol grew up on, so if somebody’s going to make rules that we can’t be influenced by anything but stuff that’s two blocks away, that seems pretty narrow-minded. It’s a give and take game that art and languages always play, borrowing from each other. That’s the whole beauty of it." they were influenced by the stuff they were hearing during the Vietnam war over the radio waves, and it totally shaped their music, and we hear that and it shapes our music. And after we went back there and played, maybe we’ll shape some future generation of Cambodian bands.”

Venus On Earth is out now on Real World.