New adventures in Cambodian psychedelia

The Cambodian Space Project are a combination of Cambodian and Australian musicians playing psychedelic rock, sung in Khmer with a distinct Asian twist.
Similar to, and possibly inspired by, their Californian counterparts Dengue Fever there is a whimsical infectiousness to their music.
The Cambodian Space Project tend to a slightly more rhythm and blues sound, although there is a charming smaltzy pop feel to some tracks.
Their first album, 2011: A Space Odyssey, includes a mix of Cambodian ‘pop classics’ from the 1960s and self-penned songs in Khmer by singer Srey Thy. There is also a Khmer version of Venus.
Stand-out track is Ban Juarp Pros Snae (I’ve Met My Love) – click here for a live version – and for the annoyingly infectious try out Pros Kangaroo (Kangaroo Boy).
Cannibal Courtship is the newest release by Dengue Fever and again combines 1960s Cambodian psychedelic rock with a Californian surf-music sensibility.
As with their earlier release Venus on Earth, some of the best songs involve a vocal interplay between Cambodian-born singer Chhom Nimo and guitarist Zac Holtzman.
However, the defining sound is Farfisa organ played by the other Holtzman brother in the band, Ethan – a swirling aural collage that conjours up trippy lights and out-of-body experiences.
Listen to a live version of Uku here.
There are more songs sung in English this time round – a mixture of geek humour “My boyfriend loves everything about bars, except the crowds, the smoke and the booze” from the song Cement Slippers and political commentary as in Family Business which critiques the arms trade.
Sister in the Radio is sung in Khmer and is a direct reference to the years of the Khmer Rouge when music was banned and thousands of musicians were murdered.
That is the dark current behind both albums, that a country that produced and inspired such endearing and layered music in the 1960s would be plunged just a few years later into the politics of Year Zero.
Read my experiences of travelling in Cambodia here.

Andy Kershaw’s passion for music developed into a compassion for humanity. A youthful devotion to the songs and social awareness of the early Bob Dylan set author Kershaw on a career path that would see him reporting on genocide in Rwanda, human rights violations in Haiti, and from the secretive totalitarian absurdity that is North Korea.
The British broadcaster’s biography veers from passionate and angry about global injustices to bewildered and contemptuous of the smug celebrities among whom he moves during his time as a DJ on BBC radio.
Many of his anecdotes are primarily pitched toward a British audience from age 35 to those in their 50s who listened to the BBC’s pop music radio station Radio 1 during the 1980s and early 90s and who will remember the self-important celebs Kershaw takes great pleasure in mocking.
From the start Andy Kershaw was an outsider who, along with the late John Peel, tried to create a counterculture among the bland pop and stadium rock that prevailed on the air.
American roots music — blues, country, soul, folk — and, most importantly, African music from the township jive of the south of the continent, to the desert blues of the west and Arabic influenced rai of the north—were his standard fare, while his contemporaries treated their listeners to Bon Jovi, Hall and Oates, and U2.
Although he is wary of the term world music Kershaw is regarded as one of its foremost champions. He has brought to the attention of western audiences such artists as Ali Farka Toure from Mali and the deliriously brilliant Bundhi Boys from Zimbabwe.
He is also obsessed with American roots music and takes us on his journeys as disparate as finding the grave of bluesman Blind Willie McTell to discovering neglected artists, such as Ted Hawkins, and securing them record contracts.
He is an obsessive traveler and seems to seek out the most obscure and often dangerous corners of the globe to visit, often at his own expense, to file reports from for the BBC and a range of British print outlets.
He visited Haiti more than 20 times in the 1990s; reported on wars, massacres and famines from throughout Africa; and in recent years made a series of radio documentaries on the “Axis-of-Evil:” Iran, Iraq (when Sadam Hussien was still in power), and North Korea.
Introducing us to North Korea he writes: “It is the most volatile place on earth. Panmunnjom, at the 38th Parallel, where North Korea meets South, is also the world’s last Cold War frontier. Here, the ancient tectonic plates of capitalism and communism still grind relentlessly and terrifyingly together. Concealed in the surrounding countryside, on both sides of the border, beyond the trim lawns, fragrant flowerbeds and ornamental shrubs, is rumored to be the deadliest arsenal in the world, a concentration of chemical, biological, conventional and nuclear weapons. And all just a minute or two from the gift shop.”
Things becomes personal toward the end of No Off Switch as Kershaw recounts the breakup of his 17-year relationship with the mother of his two children—one that saw him suffering a very public nervous breakdown and incarceration for contacting his ex-partner when a restraining order was in place.
His tone can often become flippant; and he interjects his life story with frequent asides and observations. He is probably trying to address too many audiences from those who are interested in celebrity gossip to serious music-heads to those who will be gripped by his insights as a foreign correspondent.
Although often self-centered and keen to make sure we know his opinion, Kerhsaw displays integrity in his journalism as well as a passion for music delivered from the heart—both of which lift this story well above the average celebrity bio.
This review was written for an first published by the New York Journal of Books.

Welcome To My World - Jah Wobble

Former PiL member Jah Wobble has been a long-term champion of 'World Music', albeit set against the reggae inspired dub-a-dub-dub sound of his bass. However, it is not only geography that comes in to play on Welcome to My World but musical genres.
Some tracks on this album could have been the soundtrack to Doctor Who in the mid-1970s, with its discordant synth runs heralding the emergence of the sea devils from beneath the waves.
Jah Wobble's previous two albums took him on a dub-inspired journey through China and Japan but this outing he has come for the most part back into the northern hemisphere.
Spain and North Africa and India provide the main inspiration, with a quick foray back over the equator into Brazil, and even the urban English 1990s for a few rave-infused tracks.
There are echoes of Miles Davis Sketches of Spain on three tracks while one of the London tracks, Putney, sound like it could have been lifted from Hendrix's Electric Ladyland.
It took me three or four listens to get into this as the first few times I just didn't get it. I've been caught out by Wobble turkey's before - Heart and Soul being a particularly miserable aural experience - and I thought some of the tracks on Welcome to My World were outakes from that. But it is a grower and a curiously addictive album that sounds as if it is soundtrack waiting for a film to be made for it in which a time traveller roams the globe and battles the occassional mortal enemy.

Tinariwen - The Academy, Dublin

I am very prejudiced against the hippy drippy-style of dancing of some people – mostly women – during gigs by African bands. This dates back to seven or eight years ago when I saw a group of tribal dancers performing in St Georges Market in Belfast. Each dance and its significance was explained by a group member - some were performed to celebrate a birth, a wedding or a coming of age, others were to mourn a death or berate a turn of bad fortune. The musicians would then start up and the dancers in full tribal regalia would begin their highly stylised moves.
Meanwhile, infront of the stage, where the dancers and musicians were symbolically lamenting the death of child, a dozen or so women in tie-dye teeshirts and floaty skirts kicked off their moccasins and started twirling their hands, gyrating their hips and twisting their bodies in a free-from style of dance that they presumably thought of as 'ethnic'.
So when Tinariwen took to the stage last night in Dublin and started clunking at their guitars and battering their drums my heart sank as a few people tried to clap along and totally failed to find the rhythm - most guitar, bass and drum concerts follow a simple 4/4 beat, but this seemed to be in 6.5/11. By song three, however, things had settled into a slightly more clappable and danceable rhythmic pattern.
As opposed to the tribal group in St George's Market, Tinariwen were clearly keen to see their audience move, with various members swaying and clapping their hands out over the audience to help them get their rhythm.
Their songs are often played around a single droning guitar note with staccato guitar runs cutting across it, backed by bass, tribal drums and whole clatter of backing singers - although none of the females whose wails are so distinctive on Tinariwen's studio albums were on stage.
Tinariwan's main singer Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, although exotically dressed, was the only one not wearing flowing desert robes that covered the entire bodies and most of the band members'heads. He left the stage after the first two songs, which he sang, and the vocals were taken over by various other members of the group, until he reappeared for most of the rest of the set.
Tinariwen's music has been described as 'desert blues'. It has been argued that the blues, in the sense of American blues, evolved among the descendants of slaves in the American deep south. Musicologists have looked to tribal chants and wails to find the source of the blues.
In the case of Tinariwen the music has come home and they have taken American blues and adapted it to create their own unique style and punked it up a bit. It was Andy Kershaw who described Tinariwen as the closest thing he had ever seen live to the Clash.
Tinariwen seem to almost slip into each song, find a guitar grove, pick up a bass line, drums and then vocals that builds into a creshendo. The effect is dramatic and while the lyrics are often about the effects of drought and population displacement, the songs are infections and entirely danceable.
Not that I indulged myself, apart from some foot tapping.

Imidiwan by Tinariwen

Tinariwen’s fourth studio album, Imidiwan: Companions, is no big departure from their earlier material, infact the tracks on it could easily segue into the playlist on their earlier albums (or at least the two that I have – Amassakoul, their second album and Aman Iman: Water Is Life, their third).
Chunking, hypnotic guitar riffs, bluesy lead breaks, guttural lyrics, tribal chants and the occasional female wail comprise Tinariwen’s trademark sound.
The mythology that surrounds the band is probably partially responsible for their success outside of north Africa - Touareg rebels whose sound was forged in refugee and guerilla training camps as they fought for an independent homeland in the deserts of Mali.
The Touareg are desert nomads who habitually dress in all encompassing robes, ride over sand dunes on camels and who have become almost synonymous, as far as the outside world is concerned with Tinariwen.
The band are led by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, a rangy, long-haired poet, who looks a bit like Phil Lynott after a month on the rip. Other singers, also described on their album sleeve notes as poets, occasionally take up the vocals.
Visually they are an impressive band, as a DVD documentary packaged in with Imidiwan testifies.
The fact that the tracks on this album are not, in terms of style that different, from previous recordings is not a criticism. Each song is unique but utilizes familiar Tinariwen elements.
I’ve only been listening to Imidiwan for a week but don’t feel it is as strong an album as Aman Iman, which seemed slightly edgier. Despite that the new album is still travelling between my car and house and is almost on constant loop, aurally dragging me from the damp and humid greenness of Co Down to sun-blasted rocky deserts and cool tents where mint tea is drunk.

Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom

Given that North Korea is so much in the news these days I dug out a copy of the CD 'Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom', which dates back to when I was an Andy Kershaw wannabe and writing a world music column.
The recordings were made by Christiaan Virant, who was living in China at the time, from broadcasts transmitted from neighbouring North Korea. The occasional hiss of white noise and distortion also gives the listener the impression of listening in on a shortwave radio.
The songs themselves are quite bland, a mixture of Asian-orchestrated pop that somehow combines a military four-four rhythm with sugary smaltz. There is nothing here to suggest that any of this music has its roots in native Korean culture. The music is interspersed with spoken announcements and news reports extoling the virtues of the secretaive communist state and its leader, Kim Jong Il.
There are some truly appalling pieces of music on this album - particularly a track of singing school children, who are probably praising grain production targets or something, in a sugary ditty that even their mothers couldn’t like. However, the album has its moments... well if you like Stalinist orchestration set to a funky beat, it has its moments.
It is an oddity that should only be played to close friends if they are very drunk and have a refined sense of the absurd and a passing interest in geo-politics.