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Songs of the City of Four Faces - Cambodian Pop Music of the 1960's

by metal postcard records

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about

The best of 60's Cambodian pop

Cambodian rock of the 1960s and 1970s was a thriving and prolific music scene based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in which musicians created a unique sound by combining traditional Cambodian music forms with rock and pop influences from records imported into the country from Latin America, Europe, and the United States. U.S. armed forces radio that had been broadcast to troops stationed nearby during the Vietnam War was also a primary influence. This music scene was abruptly crushed by the Khmer Rouge communists in 1975, and many of its musicians disappeared or were executed during the ensuing Cambodian
genocide.(Wikipedia)

If this was a golden age of Cambodian music, it’s perhaps because of the coming together of singers steeped in traditional vocal techniques, with busy professional musicians attuned to the new sounds heard from US Armed Forces Radio, just across the border in Vietnam. The fluttering vocal line, baroque with strange yodels and ornaments, those gentle saxes and clarinets, exotic organ solos, the crisp beat combo drum kit – there’s a tropical sweetness here that’s hard to resist. Not that it’s all top quality. Even these compilations seem skewed toward a brash blues-rock with over assertive guitars(The Wire)


Sleeve Notes
THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHEDELIC CAMBODIA


A few years back I was introduced to the golden age of 1960s and early-1970s Cambodian pop and rock through the arrival in Hong Kong of two bands in a matter of months - Southern California's Dengue Fever and Phnom Penh-based, The Cambodian Space Project. Both acts entranced me with an exotic but strangely familiar take on beat and psychedelic music of the period. Hints of the Kinks, the Troggs and the Shangri-La's mixed with gutsy Cambodian female vocals had me hooked. I had to know more.

Within a couple of months I found myself releasing The Cambodian Space Project's debut single, a cover of Ros Seresyothea's 'Chnam Oun Dop Praya Mauy (I'm 16)'. The launch party in Phnom Penh was a celebration of such joyousness. Upon attending, I knew the story of this music's genocide and subsequent re-birth in the twenty-first century - like that of the people and the country - had to be told to a wider world.

I hope that this introductory compilation including songs by the likes of Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Sereysothea, Pan Ron and others - many of whom perished at the hands of Pol Pot's genocide regime - will start to document a music that blends elements of traditional Khmer music with the sounds of rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll and I think illustrates perfectly the confidence of that brief age between the Khmer independence from the French and the arrival of the Khmer Rouge.

It is said that Sinn Sisamouth, nicknamed the Elvis of Cambodia, wrote thousands of songs as well as introduced many well-known western pop tunes of the period. He would simply write new verses in Khmer for songs like, 'House of The Rising Sun', 'Black Magic Woman' and The Archies' 'Sugar Sugar'. An apocryphal story is told in Cambodia about his death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge before he was to be executed Sisamouth asked to sing a song for the Khmer Rouge cadres the soldiers, though, were unmoved and after he finished singing, shot him on the spot.

Female singer Pan Ron became well known after recording duets with Sinn Sisamouth from the mid 1960s onwards and like Sisamouth was a prodigious songwriter and recording artist with over five hundred songs to her name. Her younger sister said she survived up until the Vietnamese invasions in late 1978 when the Khmer Rouge launched their final series of mass executions.

The life and fate of the period's other great diva, Ros Sereysothea, was also one of difficult times and failed relationships, which were reflected in the sad and soulful ballads for which she has subsequently become celebrated. Many rumours surround her fate during the Killing Field years. One story relates that she was forced by Pol Pot to marry one of his assistants in 1977 and forced to exclusively perform songs for the new regime until she was told that she and her family would be moved to another village. Sereysothea was last seen departing by ox cart and disappeared under typically mysterious circumstances. Another account recounts that she died from being overworked in a Khmer Rouge agricultural camp. Her two surviving sisters insist that she, along with their mother and children, were taken to Kampong Som province and executed immediately following the fall of Phnom Penh.

So, whom do we have to thank for the survival of this music almost entirely eradicated by the Khmer Rouge? The Khmer people themselves who hid records or took them overseas and kept them as treasures of a lost past. When the country began to open up in the 1990s the vinyl recordings found their way back into the local markets and expatriate communities via cassette releases and, slowly but surely, this music has begun to seep into the consciousness of a wider world.

Sleeve notes by Sean Hocking

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released August 19, 2020

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metal postcard records Sydney, Australia

Metal Postcard Records is an independent record label based back in Sydney and influenced by the likes of Fast Records / Factory / Postcard / Island / Stiff and Bill Drummund's wonderful Zoo records

We believe in new music from around the world ... not world music !
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