GROOVE CLUB VOL. 4 : SINN SISAMOUTH
Record review
Sometimes rock and roll is just pop music. On a few occasions, it’s life and death.
I’m not talking about the Rolling Stones at Altamont. A Pearl Jam, or Who tragedy where the crowd surged and trampled part of the audience. Or even The Eagles of Death Metal massacre at the Bataclan in Paris.
I am talking about the Rolling Stones playing Havana for the first time, or behind the Iron Curtain. I’m talking about the last president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, naming his Velvet Revolution after the Velvet Underground. Music to outlive the regime.
Most of all, today, I’m talking about Cambodia.
At the height of the West’s pop music boom in the 1960s and 70s, at the nadir of America’s war in Vietnam, halfway around the world, in a musical Golden Age, a “parallel universe, complete with its own Elvises, Patsys and Jimis” (as author Joel Selvin describes it, in the liner notes to this album), some of the most mesmerizing sounds of the last century were etched into hot wax, spun cooly… then nearly ground to dust under the heel of a brutal Marxist regime in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Midcentury Khmer (Cambodian) music was nonpareil on this earth, by turns sophisticated and earthy, traditional and modern, joyous and chilling, always modishly cool, and it was nearly erased from existence. Its triumph over death is so compelling, and unbelievably true, that at times the myth threatens to overshadow the music. But the myth persists only because the sounds live up the legend. This is music sung by spirits, songs to cheat death.
The country’s first pop flowering ended tragically, like the life of its most revered crooner, Sinn Sisamouth, in a Maoist fever dream that took most of modern Cambodia with it, beginning in 1975. Because the original recordings, and their revival more than twenty years later, bookend a genocide, Cambodia’s musical history echoes that oldest of human myths: the one about going down and coming back up. About death and resurrection—or if you prefer, reincarnation. Orpheus charming his way out of Hades, or Leadbelly out of prison, with a song.
Don’t look back.
That any of these recordings survive at all is a testament to hope in humanity. They were preserved on vinyl at the cost of life, after the music, along with all art, intellectual activity—and people who wore glasses—were declared samizdat by the Khmer Rouge, and snuffed out, along with most of the music’s original creators and collectors.
That is the dark romance, the backstory to Cambodia’s pop music efflorescence, when it nearly died in full flower.
One of the unspoken truths about the West’s fascination with Cambodian pop, I suspect, is that it’s haunted by ghosts. The three great voices of 1960s Phnom Penh on this record—Sinn Sisamouth, along with songstresses Ros Serey Sothea and Pen Ran—were all executed by Pol Pot’s regime. A truth acknowledged, of course, by anyone who cares to look—but its morbid mystique, its Apocalypse-Now hold on the Western imagination, remains a tacit unmentionable, for good reason. It’s horrid; the fate of Cambodian musicians in the 1970s reveals the depths of human depravity. The flip side of that depravity speaks to the very best in human nature: people risking their lives to preserve a few records, and what they meant, staring totalitarianism down on the killing fields.
This is music to make you human, songs to bleed your heart. The vibe of moonlight after eclipse. Eerie sounds, sung by shades. Wax voices from the other side.
No one relates the story of this music with more insight than the people who bring you this record, an assortment of material composed by Cambodia’s musical patriarch, Sinn Sisamouth, organized and analyzed by its key promoters and documentarians in the twenty-first century.
To tell this story, Pearl of Asia Records and Lion Productions present a thirteen-track compilation that includes eight pages of full-color liner notes, approved by the family of Sinn Sisamouth, penned by producer Anthony Lefferts, author and journalist Joel Selvin, and filmmaker John Perozzi.
Straight out of the Mekong: Pearl of Asia records, small indie label in the heart of Phnom Penh, in conjunction with Lion Productions (“We champion the obscure!!”), presents: Groove Club: Vol. 4: Sinn Sisamouth.
This is the most recent addition to a millennial revival of 1960s and 70s Cambodian music—a formerly obscure rock-and-roll mystery cult, steadily gaining recognition ever since a group of American musicians teamed up with a woman living among the United States’ largest population of Cambodian immigrants (the band Dengue Fever, fronted by vocalist Chhom Nimol, from Long Beach, CA).
The revival of Cambodian sounds gained further traction after the release of John Perozzi’s 2015 film, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll…
As journalist Joel Selvin points out, the systematic execution of the first wave of Cambodian pop musicians, and the eradication of their records by a fanatical communist regime, betrays that regime’s implicit acknowledgement of the music’s power—to move hearts, make minds, and create communities through song. So long as the songs excelled, brainwashed totalitarianism could not. Victims took their lives in hand, along with the songs on this record, to secret away the original recordings from which modern-day compilations like this one are curated—burying LPs under their houses, wrapping records in trash bags to stash them at the bottom of outhouses—or die trying. The tracks preserved on Sinn Sisamouth are the surviving pieces of that historical record. And lest we forget, the cord in re-cord means, the “heart.” Listen, love and remember, with some of the best that remains of Cambodia’s most celebrated artist, a man with range enough to embody the mantle of Cambodia’s “Elvis” and “Sinatra” at once, Emperor Sinn.
Along with his two proteges, Pen Ran and Ros Serey Sothea.
Like French composer Olivier Messiaen, who was inspired by the sounds of birds to write Quartet for the End of Time in a German POW camp, Sinn Sisamouth was inspired by the sounds of his own country, as well as France, Latin America and Motown, to compose popular love songs up to the moment he was abducted for political “reeducation.” You can only dance to one of these politically-imprisoned Francophones, the Cambodian one—but the common impetus in their compositions is soul, transcending time and place.
If you’re new to this remarkable contribution to world music, see the John Perozzi documentary above, in re: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll—required viewing for anyone probing the 60s, the good and evil of cultural revolution, or the candle of the human spirit in darkness.
If you’re already a Khmer-ophile, Sinn Sisamouth pulls out all the stops—fresh material, written and performed by the “King of Khmer,” sung by queen Ros and Pen Ran, with quality post-production. Vinyl fans receive eight pages of critical commentary, biographies, historic photos, and musings from the aforementioned cognoscenti (director, author, producer).
Khmer is a culture that lives and breathes music, and that is something rare and worth experiencing, especially artifacts like this, from Cambodia’s golden age.
Once, listening to songs like these meant plundering the mixtapes of amateur musicologists from the 1990s, a loose assortment of untitled and uncredited tracks that made their way from S.E. Asia’s backpacker circuit onto a compilation album that came to be known as Cambodian Rocks (1996).
The work of these rucksack ethnologists, plus the success of L.A.’s Dengue Fever, brought Cambodian psych and soul into the limelight—with classic song covers, reinventions, a Dengue Fever documentary (Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, 2007), soon to be followed by new compilations (Electric Cambodia, 2009).
In the years since Dengue Fever brought its version of Cambodian-American rock & roll to the world, another East-West ensemble out of Phnom Penh, also fronted by female Cambodian vocalists, emerged to become the new remembrancers of Cambodia’s musical past—the Cambodian Space Project. As American groups like Foxygen and Ty Segall reimagine classic West Coast psychedelia for the twenty-first century, Cambodian Space Project stokes the flame of 60s Cambodia in the new millennium. The group’s sound guru, who died tragically in 2019, Sin Sethakol, was the late grandson of Sinn Sisamouth.
The same people promoting Cambodian Space Project—Sin Sethakol, producer Tony Lefferts, Groove Club, et al—are still championing classic Cambodian rock and soul from the 60s and 70s, at Pearl of Asia Records. Have a look, have a listen, with this latest installment, on Groove Club Vol. 4: Sinn Sisamouth.
Fuck yeah, good stuff!