Cambodia bands putting their own spin on pre-Khmer Rouge classics

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Cambodia bands putting their own spin on pre-Khmer Rouge classics

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By Matt Surrusco
Tuesday, 19 June, 2018,

Compared to Dengue Fever, the Playboys are “a little more straight-ahead rock 'n' roll, but the tro throws that all off,” says John Pirozzi, an American filmmaker who directed documentaries about Dengue Fever and Cambodia’s golden age musicians.

The band’s tro player, Vy Nget, 32, says he learned to play the bowed instrument at a traditional music school in Kampot and had never heard rock music before joining the Playboys in 2013. Today, locals tell him after the shows how they like the tro sound, which is prominent throughout the record. “They say it’s beautiful,” he says.

And while the band isn’t completely reinventing the Khmer rock cover album, golden age songs recorded by Dengue Fever, which is fronted by Cambodian singer Chhom Nimol, and Cambodian Space Project, whose singer Kak Channthy was killed in a traffic accident in Phnom Penh in March, tended to stick more to the source material. The boys from Kampot, however, often make the songs their own.

And while singer and guitarist Uk Sochiet and bassist Mark Chattaway founded the group in southern Cambodia’s Kampot town in 2011, the band only recently released their first album on May 30.

Full article http://www.scmp.com/culture/music/artic ... n-spin-pre
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