Q&A With Dengue Fever - Magnet Magazine

Dengue Fever is anything but your average indie-rock combo. Based in Los Angeles, the exotic six-piece outfit is fronted by Chhom Nimol, who sings in her native Cambodian dialect, backed by guitarist Zac Holtzman, his brother Ethan (keyboards), Senon Williams (bass), David Ralicke (horns) and Paul Smith (drums). Some photos of the boys in the band from their three previous albums look like they’ve come from Homeland Security’s no-fly list. In reality, Dengue Fever may be the best U.S. cultural ambassadors to Southeast Asia since the glory days of jazz stars Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane 50 years ago. The band’s “new” album, Dengue Fever Presents Electric Cambodia (Minky), spotlights vintage performances by its favorite Cambodian artists from the late ’60s/early ’70s. Dengue Fever will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.

MAGNET: I spoke to you briefly after the live soundtrack show you guys did for The Lost World at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco last year.
Zac Holtzman: That was incredible. I’ve always loved the Castro Theatre, and then just getting to score that film, it was amazing. It was like having another member of the band that we need to pay close attention to and follow and work with. That was really fun. And there was such great claymation going on that it was insane. (The original) King Kong was one of my favorites, the first film I ever saw, when I was three years old. It was made by the same crew.

Tell me about how you score a film, since the prime objective is to arrive at certain cues with the appropriate music.
Well, here’s the way I did it. I started by sitting down and watching the film with a guitar in my hands, then taking notes and writing down how different parts would feel. Like hectic dinosaur chase, then a particular jam. Then I’d see that this part is really similar to that part, so we’d have to link-up thematically different parts of the film, so we didn’t have a hundred different parts. We narrowed it down to about 20 different pieces: romantic pieces, violent pieces, incidental stuff where not too much is happening and we’d just kinda lay low, depressing sort of heavy-thinking kind of music.

Were you a big fan of Cambodian music before you put the band together, before you found Chom Nimol?
We met Chom Nimol in Long Beach when we were searching for a Cambodian singer and going down to various nightclubs. My brother Ethan traveled in Cambodia and started collecting tapes, and I had some of my own Cambodian music that I was listening to. We thought, “Man, wouldn’t that be cool to base a band on this music.” So, that’s how it all started. As soon as we saw Nimol singing, we asked her if she’d come to an audition. And after that, it’s been just the six of us. She’s like a reincarnation of all the artists that were killed (by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge). They were all from the same city as her.

Your compilation of classic Cambodian rockers is really a trip. Any trouble licensing that stuff?
My brother and I were the ones who pulled that together. No, Cambodia never signed a universal licensing agreement. It’s all public domain. We put money aside just in case any family member says anything. And we also donate a whole bunch of the album to this group called Cambodian Living Arts. They teach underprivileged kids how to do traditional dance and play some of the old traditional instruments. We’re going to hook up with them in May when we go back to Cambodia.

I thought the DVD of your first tour of Cambodia was terrific.
Oh, thanks. We’re going to be playing with Kong Nay again, the blind chapai player with the smallpoxed face.

Right, the Ray Charles of Cambodia. You must get some weird crowd reactions, playing areas in the U.S., where they’ve never heard this stuff.
Well, one night in San Francisco at the Rickshaw Stop we got these guys from San Jose who started break-dancing and everybody went crazy, spinning on the cement floor. Mostly it’s just really good, positive reaction.

Well, what I was trying to get out of you was some hayseed sheriff pointing a shotgun at you and saying, “You boys better not let the sun set on you in this county.”
That’s never happened. Well, something happened. It was this Australian guy in Cambodia, and he had a club. I was warned about him. He was a speed freak. He was charging people to get in the show. We told him the equipment we needed, and he didn’t line up any of it. Then he freaked out on us when we got there. And he threatened to take us down for skipping out on his show. But he was kicked out of the country, and everybody knows what kind of a person he was.

Some of the band photos on your albums look like mug shots from Homeland Security’s wanted list. Ever have any trouble boarding a plane these days?
They dig into my pedal board a lot. They don’t really like that. They’ve wiped that for explosives many times. Once my pedal board case had a lock on it, and right by the lock I wrote, “To open do 999.” So, I get this announcement over the airport intercom, “Zachary Holtzman, please come to the security desk.” They had my case, and they couldn’t open it to search it. And I was, like, holding up the plane. And once Nimol got lost in the airport and had to catch another flight. Some of the hardest places to get into and out of are our neighbors, like Canada.

Yeah, MAGNET’s Jonathan Valania once had a major problem at the Canadian border involving porn on his laptop and the New Pornographers.
Sometimes it takes us four or five hours to get through. They do body-cavity checks. They caught my brother with Xanax and said, “What’s this?”

Any other exotic music that tickles your fancy?
I like a lot of the Sublime Frequencies stuff. It’s a label that puts out all these different compilations, including one of music from Iraq. They also put out this one called Shadow Music Of Thailand, all these Thai bands that were influenced by the British surf band the Shadows. We toured with this band called Chicha Libre who play Peruvian psychedelic music. They’re all French guys from Brooklyn. Chicha is a drink from Peru that they make with fermented corn. Old ladies chew it up, and the saliva mixed with the corn turns it into alcohol.

What was the best reaction you had to the band when you first played Cambodia?
The best reaction was the kids on the beach after we did that performance on their main television station called CTN. They played that four times a day the whole time we were there. We’d be out on the beach and these kids would come up and try to sell us trinkets or bracelets. And they’d say, “I know you. You sing Khmer. Sing for me! Sing for me!” Then we’d sing a song together. It was so cool, man. I was instantly accepted, not as a tourist, but totally there. And getting to enjoy the culture more than NGO guys who’d been there a year and were hiding out in ex-pat places. We instantly got to jump in and have a good time with all sorts of people.

Good for you, man. The world could use a helluva lot more stuff like that and a lot less shock and awe.

—Jud Cost

“March Of The Balloon Animals” from 2009’s Sleepwalking Through The Mekong (download):