Today marks my final installment Cambodia, for now. Some closing remarks on how this music came to be, and why its story is so compelling.
Many of these observations are supported by Dee Peyok’s interviews with golden-age musicians, conducted everywhere from Phnom Penh to Paris and New York, in Away From Beloved Lover (2023). Combined with more general insights from the work of musicologists like Ted Gioia, and my own experiences with the region and its music since 2017.
Accuse me of harping-on about Khmer music… I’m in good company.
Herbie Hancock, the American jazz-fusion maestro and former piano player for the Miles Davis Quintet, has been involved with Cambodian music since 2011. A UNESCO goodwill visit brought him to Phnom Penh, where he befriended a former Royal Palace musician, now a local music instructor, Svay Sor.
“Funk Brother” Dennis Coffey (a Motown guitar legend), and Mick Harvey (of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), have each collaborated with The Cambodian Space Project (the multinational ensemble out of Phnom Penh who, along with Dengue Fever, have become the most vigorous proponents of Cambodia’s musical revival in the 21st century).
Jim Diamond, who’s recorded Jack White, the Sonics, and a slew of other Detroit talent, produced the Cambodian Space Project’s Electric Blue Boogaloo. He mixed the album at his own Ghetto Studios—where he recorded the first two White Stripes albums, in Motor City.
In 2016, Diamond attended a “From Motown to the Mekong” panel, sponsored in part by the U.S. embassy, organized by Cambodian Space Project founder Julien Poulson. Coordinated through the:
“burgeoning SpaceFourZero gallery/shop-cum-agency/empire that the expat Tasmanian Poulson oversees out of Phnom Penh with his American partner Tony Lefferts,”
… in the words of another “Motown to Mekong” panelist, Australian music writer Clinton Walker.
I had the good fortune of meeting Poulson’s “American partner,” Anthony Lefferts, an ex-pat from Houston, when I stumbled into the SpaceFourZero gallery in Phnom Penh.
(Shop SpaceFourZero’s collection here, including original ink prints, a rare Ralph Steadman, and signed music memorabilia from around the world).
Michael ‘Big Mike’ Hsu, another American expat, also set up shop in Phnom Penh. The former music manager for CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City in New York—two clubs at the epicenter of the city’s underground music scene in the 1970s—opened a similarly dubious establishment abroad—“Indochina’s longest running rock and roll bar,” Sharky’s, which he ran until his death in 2016.
(‘Big Mike’ is also the man flashing double peace signs in the picture below.)
Aside from these millennial boosters of Khmer music, in the years before Cambodia’s golden age (right around the time ‘Big Mike’ was enjoying Woodstock in the photo above), a host of musicians from all over the world came to play in the clubs and restaurants of the “Pearl of Asia,” Phnom Penh.
“We had Ben Goodman, a trumpet player from the Philippines,” recalls Herbie Hancock’s friend, Svay Sor—as well as the Benny Goodman, “a clarinetist from the USA.”
Cambodia has scores of other proselytizers: Dengue Fever; NPR; actor Matt Dillon; the producer of Mad Men. Countless backpackers and travelers, like the unassuming English teacher who bought a handful of bootleg tapes at a market in Siem Reap, lugged them back to America, then aggregated the first compilation of Cambodian rock & roll in the 1990s, Cambodian Rocks.
Locally, of course, Khmer musicians are venerated. A trinity of them—Sinn Sisamouth, Pen Ran, and Ros Serey Sothea—are considered semi-divine. There are preservation societies, like Cambodian Living Arts, and the Cambodian Vintage Music Archive, dedicated to digitizing their work. Because, for centuries, Khmer culture was transmitted orally (musical notation wasn’t introduced to Cambodia until the 20th century, from France and the Philippines), some of these art forms were nearly extinguished—after the 1970s, only two musicians retained the knowledge of the traditional instrument of the Khmer bards, the chapei.
Even the modern works recorded on vinyl and cassette, as I’ve said elsewhere, barely survived the Cambodian genocide.
What makes this milieu, surrounded by tragedy, so compelling? And why did it happen here like nowhere else?
For starters, the sounds are singular. The few tracks I’ve shared with readers so far (Groove Club vol. 4: Sinn Sisamouth) don’t begin to scratch the surface. It’s estimated that Sinn Sisamouth alone, the ‘Elvis’ and ‘Sinatra’ of Cambodia, composed as many as 4,000 songs, before he was murdered by the Khmer Rouge in his mid-forties. Compare that output with some of America’s most prolific songwriters: Bob Dylan (over 600), Steve Allen (about 1,000), or Irving Berlin (roughly 1,500)—all of whom lived to see their 80th birthdays (none of whom wrote during a civil war).
The sound quality of surviving works from the 1960s-1970s is often shoddy, for a variety of reasons—remember, this music’s been to hell and back. Perhaps it’s part of its appeal, for a certain type of lo-fidelity, primitivist audiophile. Along with its punk-ish, bric-a-brac ethos—as evidenced by the preservation of the tracks on Cambodian Rocks, ‘restored’ by a Cambodian immigrant in Long Beach, using DIY overdubs, an electronic keyboard, and drum machine. A fan-cum-preservationist-turned-artist, inserting himself into the tradition.
In Cambodia, 45 rpm records, the singles-workhorse of midcentury pop music across the globe, were susceptible to warping in the tropical heat (one reason, along with economics, that the local music industry in Phnom Penh became an early adopter of compact cassette tapes - the kind we now associate with the 1980s in the West - long before bulky eight-tracks became popular in the United States in the 1970s).
The recordings that escaped the ravages of time, heat, war and exile, weren’t always in mint condition by the time they were dubbed or digitized for the new millennium.
Even at the moment of production, these recordings, while featuring royally-trained, professional musicians, were created using what is often described as “primitive technology.” The RNK (Khmer National Radio) station in the capital, the apex of that technology, initially recorded musicians live on-air, crowded around a single microphone in its Soviet-style studio. (Later, a smattering of privately-owned studios popped up around Phnom Penh, along with the country’s first vinyl pressing plant.)
In the arena of what might be called ‘primitivism’—primitive technology; “rockers [who] cite cultural influences as far back as 500 AD” (in the words of Dee Peyok), including animism and shamanic ritual; as well as the cultural phenomenon Edward Said dubbed “Orientalism” (Westerners exoticizing the East, just as urban Cambodians became fascinated with the West)—some interesting musical innovations took place.
The most striking psychological effect of that innovation, to Western ears, is best described as Uncanny: the alien, but eerily familiar.
Dee Peyok doesn’t dwell on this, but it inspired the title of her book. The preface recounts her ascent of a mountain in southern Cambodia, to tour an abandoned casino known as the Bokor Palace Hotel at the summit. Penetrating the stripped interior of the building, she’s greeted by a song she’s never heard, being blasted from a boombox in a foreign language, with a melody she inexplicably recognizes. Away From Beloved Lover, the title of Peyok’s book, is the name of that song, adapted from a well-known sixties tune by Sinn Sisamouth; the singer, like so many Cambodian musicians, changed the name and lyrics of a Western composition and made it his own. After a few measures, the author recognizes the melody: it’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” by Procul Harum.
It is uncanny, hearing George Gershwin’s “Summertime” aria sung in Khmer, or the 1913 Appalachian folk song “Man of Constant Sorrow” played on a tro instead of a banjo. Like “Hey Jude,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “Proud Mary,” and countless other Cambodian interpretations of Western songs, these alien alterations strike occidental ears with a sense of mysterious recognition: you’ve heard this before, but never quite like this. Viktor Shklovsky called it defamiliarization—appreciating something banal from a fresh angle. Émile Boirac called it déjà vu, a glitch in the brain wires, the “already seen.” Freud called it doppelgänger, “the double,” unheimlich, “un-homely”—the Uncanny. It’s how Dee Peyok must’ve felt in that empty palatial casino in the mountains of Cambodia, hearing that old familiar melody anew: estranged, not quite at home.
Marketing strategists have long theorized that the safest formula for success is to offer new-ish products that are the ‘same but different,’ shiny but familiar—this goes beyond that, to dialectic. Ancient traditions reacted with Western inspirations to synthesize something unheard of—"traditions were upheld but music was also open to progressive moulding and reshaping with influences from across the globe,” as Peyok puts it.
Classical Cambodian instruments like the tro—a kind of spike fiddle—and the chapei—a cross between a sitar and a lute—infused with electric Vox guitars and Hammond organs in the most effortless way. Western and Eastern instruments converged to impersonate each other—an electric guitar mimicking a Cambodian floor zither […] or brass chimes replacing a high hat …
The desire to imitate Western instruments using Eastern ones may have been born of necessity as much as a reverence for tradition, a need inspired by so-called ‘primitive technology.’ In the “melting pot of sounds and ideas that fused western popular music with local sensitivities,” the Khmer Times reported, covering the “From Motown to the Mekong” panel in 2016, “technology played a part.” As panelist Clinton Walker suggested:
“The question of where their equipment came from is important. I suspect that artists had to improvise with what they could find or afford. This caused the music to change even further.”
Whether out of pure enjoyment or improvisational necessity, Cambodian artists evinced a talent for imitation both vocal and instrumental. And imitation, combined with repetition, is the language of magic and ritual, as well as propaganda. The political regimes in Cambodia - there were three between 1970 and 1975 - were well aware of this.
In his study on how imitation functions in cultural negotiations, Mimesis and Alterity (1993), anthropologist Michael Taussig suggested that from a media standpoint, the Nazi project—and by extension, the aim of totalitarianism in general—boiled down to the absolute regulation of mimesis. Total control over what sounds, images, and ideas could be copied, reproduced, and manipulated. All three political regimes in Cambodia (a royal monarchy; succeeded by a U.S.-backed military “Republic;” followed by the totalitarian Khmer Rouge) regulated what artists could say and play in public. However, it was the most liberal of these governments, the monarchy, that drafted a specific ban on musical mimesis:
mimicking English and American accents […] was allowed under the [U.S.-backed] Lon Nol regime but had been seen as a form of youth defiance under the previous Sangkum government [the monarchy] and banned from the radio.
—Away From Beloved Lover
(Today, Cambodia has an inverted predicament, when it comes to musical copying: the country has almost no copyright laws, which were only nominally instituted in 2003. The families of musicians who weren’t allowed to copy English accents in the 1960s now have no recourse to protect their relatives’ intellectual property from being copied—to stop the unlimited reproduction of golden-age songs, mostly for use in karaoke bars across Asia.)
While the monarchy—otherwise the most permissible and arts-nurturing government Cambodia has known in the last hundred years—prohibited the imitation of English accents, the corrupt Lon Nol “Republic,” covertly supported by the CIA, allowed the imitation of U.S. speech patterns (go figure). However, the military Republic also forced musicians to dress in combat garb, jump out of airplanes, and sing songs about killing fellow Cambodians, or communists. The communist regime was the worst of all, exterminating an estimated 90% of artists in what the Khmer Rouge called “Democratic Kampuchea.” Before it killed 90% of them, the regime permitted musicians to play only traditional Khmer music—which, ironically, was almost permanently eradicated when the Khmer Rouge murdered nine-out-of-ten Khmer musicians.
I noted elsewhere, in a record review, that the trajectory of Cambodian musical history, lost and resurrected, loosely fits the arc of myth. The ur-myth of musicology: to hell-and-back. The tale of Orpheus, the first musician, who some historians and mythographers interpret as the archetypal healer, a Greek shaman who “raised the dead,” to paraphrase one of them. Not only does the history of Cambodia fit this narrative arc, as Dee Peyok’s interviews show, the personal histories of Cambodian survivors are suffused with accounts of individual salvation and musical healing.
While many were murdered for their music, Away From Beloved Lover depicts others who were saved by it. The tale of one yé yé musician (the type of guitar bands named after the chorus of the Beatles’ “She Loves You”—yeah yeah), is the most literal, and moving, salvation story in Peyok’s book.
After two years of complete deprivation from music, suffering from malnutrition, losing what was left of his strength to gastrointestinal problems, Minh Sothivann wished for one thing on his deathbed: his captor’s mandolin—“I wanted to hold this instrument before I died.” Fearing it was his last night on earth, he asked a friend to reach out to the owner, a Khmer Rouge cadre, who had presumably taken the instrument off someone killed by the regime. It was a calculated risk—“Normally the Khmer Rouge did not allow us to play modern music,” Minh recounts. “It was the first time in a long time that I had seen a modern instrument.”
The cadre demanded to know who asked to hold this stolen mandolin. Then he asked if Minh could play it; the guitarist lied and claimed he could, “because I desperately wanted to hold the mandolin.”
Even though I’d never played a mandolin before […] I could play! It was a miracle. I played Khmer Rouge music, and nobody believed that I could play, so they were really listening. The rain stopped and the Khmer Rouge changed their attitude and they were good to us. All the people around me could not believe it, and we were very happy. This one cadre had never heard the voice of the mandolin before. In the forest they never heard music, so the “new people” [enslaved prisoners] and the Khmer Rouge were both surprised to hear music, and we were happy together, the music brought us together.
With encouragement from his captors, Minh launched into a second song, but keeled over from exhaustion. The cadre asked what sickness Minh suffered from, and procured the only medicine he could find—from a wet, broken package, clueless of its proper indication. Hopeless, unable to refuse the Khmer Rouge, Minh ingested what he feared was poison, or expired medicine at best. Miraculously, it cured him.
When I woke up I had energy and I didn’t hurt in my stomach any more. The Khmer Rouge leader stayed with me, he didn’t leave the house. After that I stayed with him and I worked for him. There was lots of work in this village, but he changed my job to just playing music for him each time he returned home… Music saved my life.
Others are saved by music in Peyok’s chronicles—whether from conditions in the work camps, or post-traumatic healing decades after the conflict. Sinn Sisamouth, the archetypal songbird at the center of Cambodia’s musical self-image, it’s worth noting, was a trained physician—a healer turned musician.
These are some of the reasons Cambodians and Westerners alike find Khmer music so captivating: uncanny sounds, primitive archetypes, mythical overtones, healing potential—but why did it flourish here like nowhere else? Of all the countries in the region exposed to Western pop music in the 1960s (mostly via Armed Forces Radio transmitted from the neighboring war in Vietnam), no other culture seems to have absorbed and transfigured this music quite like Cambodia.
(However a glance at the SpaceFourZero shelves in Phnom Penh will quickly alert visitors to the presence of ‘Western’ music in Thailand, Indonesia, and other SE Asian nations at the time.)
For one thing, while neighboring Thailand and Vietnam did have domestic music scenes influenced by the West in the 1960s and 70s, it’s hard to appreciate a musical renaissance in the middle of a war—as Vietnam was at the time, and Cambodia would soon discover.
For another, between the end of the colonial period (Cambodia declared independence from France in 1953) and the beginning of civil war in 1970, Cambodian artists benefitted from a system of royal patronage unparalleled in the region, if not the world.
The rest, I suspect, has to do with historical colonial influences and Cambodia’s position as a “buffer state” between Siam (modern day Thailand) and Vietnam. In addition to being a “melting pot” of influences from France, Spain, and beyond, Cambodia remained a comparative neutral zone during the Indochina Wars, regional skirmishes between France and Britain. (It’s worth noting that Cambodia applied for protectorate status from France when the Kingdom of Siam and the Nguyễn dynasty of Vietnam began to encroach on its borders.) Post-independence, Cambodia adroitly transitioned from French protectorate to sovereign monarchy under the influence of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose only opposition came from a political party favoring democracy—neither were threatening to Western political ideals. The successors to French rule in Vietnam, by contrast, were the communist Viet Minh, which neither France, nor their former British rivals in the region (nor likewise, in the following years, the United States), were willing to countenance—as soon as France withdrew from Vietnam, it was obliged to return to “fight communism.”
Under Prince Sihanouk, between 1953-1970, Cambodia clung to a policy of strategic neutrality. While the surrounding region became engulfed in global conflict, Cambodia enjoyed a thirteen-year period of relative prosperity, modernization, and artistic flowering. During this “Golden Age,” all the diverse influences that had been streaming into the region since the colonial era were transformed into art forms that were novel, yet grounded in tradition, under the guidance of its royal patrons. People from Cambodia’s various ethnic minorities and border communities poured into the capital, where they were exposed to music from abroad.
As historian Ted Gioia notes in Music: A Subversive History (2019):
The clash of musical perspectives produced by such multicultural settings has often served as a foundation for new ways of singing […] When different races and ethnic groups exist in close proximity, the music flourishes. Just make a list of the music genres that came to prominence in port cities and border communities, whether we are talking about New Orleans, Liverpool, Kingston, Havana, Venice…
Or, he might have added, Phnom Penh. The same musical influences that poured into New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century—French, Spanish, and Afro-Caribbean (most of the early records that Sinn Sisamouth derived his knowledge of South American music from, were imports from Cuba)—contributed to the musical mélange of Cambodia, beginning around the same time. The “Motown to the Mekong” panel might’ve just as aptly been called the “From the Mississippi to the Mekong;”these influences flowed through another muddy river delta in the deep south, the Mississippi of the East, into the Pearl of Asia—like Louisiana, a former French territory, heavily influenced by Spain. The first palace music director in Phnom Penh was French, and his protege came from the former Spanish territory of the Philippines, whence brass horns and marching bands, and eventually American jazz, arrived in Cambodia, under the banner of “Manila Music.”
As Ted Gioia has also indicated (here), “Spanish” music itself entails much more than flamenco or the fandango:
New Orleans jazz legend Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941) claimed that all good jazz has a Spanish tinge. There’s a lot of wisdom in that statement—and more history than even Jelly Roll realized.
By which he meant that Jelly Roll’s “Spanish tinge” originally came from Northern Africa and Arabia, to colonize another diverse “melting pot,” the medieval city of Córdoba—on the Guadalquivir, the only major navigable river in Spain.
In other words, the “Spanish tinge,” whether it comes from Manila, New Orleans, or Córdoba, was already multicultural to begin with. Add to it French and Khmer influences, and later, American and British ones, plus Latin American music on records imported from Cuba, and you’ve got a pretty rich “foundation for new ways of singing.”
The medieval melting pot of Andalusian Spain—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—offers another parallel to the situation of precariously-neutral Cambodia in the 1960s. The “Spanish tinge” that Ted Gioia and Jelly Roll Morton allude to (like the Arabic word, “al-lude”), infiltrated Spain during the Muslim conquests at the beginning of the eighth century—one of the swiftest military campaigns in history. Until Spain started expelling Moors (Muslims) and Jews alike in 1492, the kingdom was a uniquely open society (one might say “neutral,” when it came to toleration of other cultures and religions—this all changed with the Spanish Inquisition). During the same years, Spain turned its attention to the New World. As it became less tolerant at home and more imperial abroad (including, some 75 years later, colonizing the Philippines), Spain exported its diverse musical roots to the rest of the world—it also began a slow decline, from its own “golden age,” or siglo de oro, into decadence and intellectual irrelevance.
This is all to say that French and American imperialism in Vietnam, like the Muslim conquests in Iberia, and Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, brought new forms of music to distant corners of the world. And to point out that, like Spain after 1492, Cambodia after 1975 became a closed, fanatical society. In both cases, art, and the majority of their peoples, suffered.
As important as these historical factors were in making 1960s Cambodia a crossroads of musical creativity, it’s possible none of this would have mattered if not for the patronage of Norodom Sihanouk and the royal family. I’ve written elsewhere that in certain places at certain times, the right admixture of civic, economic, and educational conditions have been present to nurture the much-lauded “golden age” across societies—Motown in the early 1960s, Harlem in the 1920s, the drama of 5th c. Athens, the court of Charlemagne, the medieval cathedrals of Europe, the Medicean Renaissance in Florence or the papal one in Rome, the Islamic Golden Age in Bagdad—take your pick. It’s likely that, whatever Norodom Sihanouk’s flaws, without the socio-economic prosperity initiated by the prince, and his personal and financial investment in the arts, the cultural renaissance in Phnom Penh, brief as it was, would never have transpired in the first place.
Sihanouk modernized Cambodia, grew the national radio system, and reinvigorated the arts. After the introduction of transistor radios in the 1960s, during his leadership, Cambodia boasted more handheld radios per capita than any other SE Asian nation; peasants working the rice paddies, like the future “Golden Voice of the Royal Capital” (an appellation bestowed by the prince himself, upon singer Ros Serey Sothea), could tune in and hear the latest sounds from the capital. The sounds themselves were transmitted by RNK radio, and many of the musicians it hosted were royally trained—such as the man who would befriend Herbie Hancock in 2011, Svay Sor.
According to Dee Peyok,
the palace provided a rich training ground for many Cambodian musicians of the 1960s […] Following a rigorous three-year training — talented teenage musicians from all walks of life, from paupers to royals, were welcome to join the ranks…
When they graduated, “paid jobs at the palace and most respected universities of the time” awaited these musicians. (Although many preferred to work outside the palace and universities—a number of the prince’s cousins and relatives moved on to pop music, or formed rock and roll bands.) In addition, once a year the royal court invited musicians from across the provinces to compete in Phnom Penh for national recognition, launching peasants into celebrity careers.
Likewise, Sihanouk’s mother,
Queen Kossamak, known as the patron saint of Khmer dance, invested her personal fortune to house artists and their families within the royal compound and to educate them all, not only in music [but in everything from] reading and writing to history
The royal family were not only patrons of the arts, they were artists themselves. Queen Kossamak was a respected traditional dancer who revitalized the form. Prince Sihanouk, a sort of Neronic figure, focused on his chosen art form, cinema—perhaps to the detriment of his statecraft. It was one of the factors that led to his eventual overthrow in the bloodless coup that installed the U.S.-backed puppet regime of Lan Nol, one of his generals. Like Emperor Nero in Rome, Sihanouk’s affinity for the arts did not endear him to the rest of the upper classes, and caused resentment, “in his own cabinet.”
The head of state’s increasing focus on the arts — he had by now produced, directed and scripted nine of his own feature films and recorded many songs — and handling of the anti-communist, anti-monarchist guerrilla force […] and other rebel factions, had turned opinion against the once popular leader.
In a textbook case of life imitating art, one Sihanouk film, the political drama Shadow Over Angkor—“about a state-run coup backed by the CIA”—premiered two years before the coup that deposed Sihanouk in 1970, also backed by the CIA.
Prince Sihanouk never got his republic of arts and letters back. Cambodian artists managed to compose and record for five more years, often dressed in combat fatigues, during the tumultuous Lon Nol era from 1970-1975, until Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge. As unlikely as it seems, in a country whose leadership positions were still held by ex-Khmer Rouge officials in the 2020s, one with little artistic patronage or copyright laws, this music continues to motivate and be made anew. Thanks to a handful of Western writers and film makers (the new patrons, you might say), plus many more Cambodian artists and preservationists, and a population whose scattered citizens see themselves reflected in the music of better times to come.