Folk Art & Blues Fest / Cambodian Space Project producer takes psych rock festival on the road
By: Tom O'Connell - Posted on: January 22, 2019 | Cambodia

Cambodia’s second annual Folk Art & Blues Fest rolls into Phnom Penh on a double-decker London bus in late January for the start of a 16-day tour that will take it all over the Kingdom. Julien Poulson, the guitarist/producer behind the famed Khmer rock revival band Cambodian Space Project, talks with Southeast Asia Globe about the country’s pre-Khmer Rouge rocknroll scene of the 1960s and 1970s that inspired him to launch both his band and Asia’s only rolling psychedelic rock festival

Go into any restaurant, bar or other business in Phnom Penh, and you will hear one of around a dozen songs from the likes of Ed Sheeran, Gnash, Maroon 5, Charlie Puth, Sam Smith and Camila Cabello. Thankfully, Cambodia has something of an underground music scene, though you have to look for it. Long-time Aussie expat Julien Poulson helped revive Khmer rocknroll by collaborating with Cambodian players in his great band the Cambodian Space Project, which headlines his second annual psychedelic music festival in the group’s latest incarnation. It’s now known as the CSP Mothership, renamed and reformed after the passing of its former singer and Poulson’s one-time wife, Kak Channthy, whose life was cut short last year in a tuk tuk accident.

For 16 days, kicking off on 26 January at Chinese House in Phnom Penh, the Folk Art & Blues Fest (Fab Fest for short) will be relieving sufferers of the Ed Sheeran effect as it tours the capital, Kampot, Siem Reap, Battambang and Mondulkiri. Poulson is also one of the minds behind the Kampot Readers & Writers Festival, along with organiser Tony Lefferts.

Poulson says Fab Fest was inspired by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who famously toured the United States in a psychedelic school bus in the 1960s while taking copious amounts of hallucinogenic drugs. It will be traveling 1,334km by London double-decker bus, tuk tuk, moto dop and train to bring “the most groovy, raw, primitive, primal, wild and bluesy sounds of Southeast Asia & beyond” to the provinces.
http://sea-globe.com/cambodian-space-pr ... -the-road/