AsiaLIFE

In an already scorching Phnom Penh, LA band Dengue Fever raised the temperature even further last month. AsiaLIFE’s Nora Lindstrom caught up with the band’s bassist Senon Williams during a brief poolside respite.

AL: You’re back in Cambodia five years after your first tour here. What’s it been like?
SW: It’s been great, but it’s been so busy. We’re just coming off a lot of days on tour so this is kind of like our moment of repose, and it’s nice to have it here in Phnom Penh. It’s also nice to work with Cambodia Living Arts, and this morning we spent the whole morning with Wildlife Alliance in Phnom Tamao and practically made love to the elephants out there. It was nice to see how Wildlife Alliance is helping the country and its people by preserving its habitat.

AL: You played a great show last night at Parkway Mall.
SW: Yeah, hanging out with Cambodia Living Arts has been incredible and playing with those kids is great.

AL: What’s your relationship with them?
SW: It first started when we came in 2005 to make the film [Sleepwalking Through the Mekong]. All of us were trying to organise everything from LA, so it was pretty hectic. People said just come and everything will be fine, but we had like tens of thousands of dollars from investors saying that we should be doing something and we still had nothing! Zac came out a couple of weeks early with the film director just to do it on the ground, and they met [CLA Board Vice President] Dickon Verey who said why don’t you work with these dancers and these kids, so we first met them in 2005. Since then they have grown and the dancers have just gotten better and better. The ones that performed with us last night were just fabulous. Amazing.

AL: So why the benefit gig?
SW: When we were setting up these concerts we knew that we wanted to do a beneficiary for them and collaborate with them for the show, so that’s why we did it together. It was a big risk, there wasn’t that much funding. We could have fronted the money but we wanted to organise a concert so that we could raise as much as possible. So they really scraped together all the resources to make it happen. You know there’s a risk going into anything because if nobody comes, it’s not going to be fun. But the exact opposite happened. It was sold out, we made tons of money – it made me feel really good.

AL: Cambodian chaipei master Kong Nai also played with you.
SW: Yeah, it was great. We jammed with him five years ago and we wanted to do it again. It was funny because we had this song that we thought would be perfect for him to play on, and so we started rehearsing that. But you know Kong Nai is a master, so basically we jammed this song that sounded great in sound check, but later we came on stage and he said, “I play, you follow”. And we’re like “Okay”, and that was that! So he hit the stage and played and we followed. Master says, “I play – you follow”, so what do you do? You follow.

AL: What does Cambodia mean to you as a band?
SW: Well, of course it means most to Nimol because she’s from here. The original intent of the band was to have a good time and to do something different from what was happening in the neighbourhood. It wasn’t about shedding light on this body of music, but it’s become that, and it’s become just as important as the band that the original artists get recognised. We haven’t played the cover songs for a long time. We still play them, but we’re pushing forward with new music. Yet at the same time, we also want to give respect to the music that was a catalyst for us and inspired us to think of a crazy enough idea to go find a Khmer singer.

AL: How did that come about?
SW: I still think it’s a crazy idea. We were so culturally different – Nimol grew up here until she was 20 and then moved to the States, and immediately met us. She didn’t speak a word of English so it was literally her looking at these five crazy guys and us looking at her and thinking this is probably either the best or the worst idea. So the original inspiration was just to do something strange and different. There’s a huge Cambodian community just outside LA, so it was just like here’s the music, here are the people, and here’s tons of nightclubs, so let’s just try it and see what happens.

AL: You’re currently working on your fourth album. What is it going to be like?
SW: It’s going to be more like fifty-fifty Khmer and English. We’re spending a lot more time making this album, whereas in the past we pretty much just did a song, recorded it in Khmer and called it a day. So once the song was done the song was done. But now, we’ve given ourselves time, we haven’t rushed it. Some songs we’re trying in English, and if they don’t work we’ll do them in Khmer, and vice versa. We’re just kind of experimenting with songs. Nimol’s English is getting a lot better now so it’s easier for her to sing in English. Still, when she sings in Khmer, she just needs to think of hitting the right notes, but when she sings in English she has to think of pronunciation, phrasing, meaning, emotion, etc.. I think it’s going to be fifty-fifty, but there’s also one song with some French.

AL: You were invited here by the American Embassy, were you planning on coming here anyway?
SW: They got in touch with us to come here for a celebration a couple of months from now. But we already had some shows booked in Vietnam for this time, and there wasn’t enough money to fly us out here from LA just for that show, so we talked and said couldn’t we do the [60th] anniversary celebration of relations between the U.S. and Cambodia a couple of months earlier, and they said “Of course”. It was that simple! So that’s how this show came up. It’s great that they were so flexible.

AL: There seems to have been a revival of Cambodian 60s pop culture lately. What role do you think you have played in that?
SW: I don’t know if we started the revival, but we started our own personal revival about eight or nine years ago. It’s simply an amazing body of work, and it doesn’t matter when the revival happens, it’s bound to happen, because there is something special about the Cambodian way of making art. It’s very fluid and smooth, the dancing, the singing, the visual arts, the pagodas and the temples, are all very fluid and beautiful. There’s something magical about Cambodian culture, and the way the Cambodians did their 60s psych-rock that was completely Cambodian. I’m so stoked to part of the revival.

AL: What’s next for Dengue Fever?
SW: Next is making the new album. We have the album written, but we’re going to start recording. We’re just going to focus on the record for three or four months. We’re hoping to have it done sometime in the Fall, and it’ll probably come out at the beginning of next year.

AL: Will you then return to Cambodia to promote it?
SW: There’s actually a chance that we might be back. Ticket sales won’t cover it, but if we get some sponsorship from one of the beer companies or someone then we might be able to come back and play in more provinces.