Interview with Dengue Fever
***
This ring a bell?

“Now get your patchouli stink outta my store!”

Nothing? Well. Recall “rings on his fingers”… “awful cooking smells”… unbuttoned shirt and a greasy, salt/peppery ponytail. Light a little incense, maybe fondle some original-press wax. Is it coming back to you now? Are you thinking, “High Fidelity, circa early 2000?” If you are, you’re absolutely right: it’s that “f***ing Ian guy”.

That scene was poignant for two reasons. The first: a flinching, sympathetic pain elicited by Tim Robbins/I. Raymond’s teeth getting KTFO’d a la rotary phone. The second (and worse): the guilty pang concomitant with the peer-pressured titter I added to my friends’ anti-world music scorn.

In the years since that incident, the American attitude toward world music has shifted rather dramatically from disdain to respect to even adulation. This phenomenon, like so many others today, owes itself to the advent of the internet. Open online forums such as Youtube and Facebook, in allowing artists and audiences to connect over distances physical, cultural, and generational, have provided a means of sonic exchange formerly cost-prohibitive or simply unavailable. Expanding access has also produced a more informed listenership and musicians’ community; greater interaction, facilitated by technological advance, has promoted change via interchange of ideas and approaches. No longer the exclusive province of Birkenstocks-with-socks or Guatemalan pants, we have today a new world music – a worldly music – a necessarily dynamic music purveyed by such global players as Sean Kuti, Tinariwin, Gogo Bordello, Vampire Weekend and Ozomatli, to name just a few. And amidst the throng of international artists reflecting this movement, one band distinctive in its new-world output and character is spreading its sound like a most exquisite aural disease: L.A.’s own Dengue Fever.

Dengue Fever – “Tiger Phone Card”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Epi-Dengue-ology
A well-travelled friend of mine described her first experience of Dengue Fever this way: ‘I felt… transported back to some sort of olden days: walking down a crowded dusty street on a restless afternoon and this music coming out of roadside shops… or the bustling night life of a hot humid night with dancing girls, smoking men, free-flowing alcohol, romance, intrigue….’ Her response testifies to this band’s peculiar sonic ability to move its audience elsewhere in time and space, to wanderlust its listeners aurally.

When Dengue Fever was conceived in 2001 by Zac and Ethan Holtzman, the brothers had something very specific in mind: an indie band that would do late 60’s/early 70’s Cambodian psych/surf rock right. They sought other musicians with similar indie-music sympathies, eventually bringing together the sextet that comprises Dengue Fever. The group began by playing in and around Los Angeles and quickly garnered a sizeable local following. Critics, too, met Dengue Fever’s work with praise, a response that encouraged the music’s spread across city and state lines. With the implementation of English-language lyrics in its growing repertoire and the increased exposure afforded by song features in film and television (Jim Jarmusch’s “Broken Flowers”, “Weeds”, “True Blood”) as well as interviews on radio (“Fresh Air with Terry Gross”), the band began enjoying increased demand all around the United States.

In 2005, Dengue Fever took flight to perform in Cambodia. The journey, documented by John Pirozzi in 2007’s film “Sleepwalking through the Mekong” (also a track from the “Escape from Dragon House” album), was a first of many kinds: it was vocalist Chhom Nimol’s first trip back to her homeland since joining Dengue Fever; it was members Senon Williams, David Ralicke, and Paul Smith’s first visit to Cambodia; it was Dengue Fever’s first foray beyond the domestic indie scene.

Dengue Fever – “Sleepwalking Through the Mekong”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Two years after that inaugural trek, Dengue Fever travelled to Seville, Spain, to join the 2007 World Music Expo (WOMEX) and found itself the focus of attention on an international scale. It was also at WOMEX that the band received an impromptu invitation to join the World of Music and Dance (WOMAD) festival, a concert series begun by Real World Music founder, musician and human rights advocate Peter Gabriel. Though the group was unable to play WOMAD in November 2007, that contact proved pivotal: several months later, Dengue Fever flew to England to record at the world-renowned Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire; in June of 2008, Real World Records released “Venus on Earth” in markets outside the United States; and that summer, the band embarked upon its first European tour.

Such was Dengue Fever’s unofficially official initiation into the new world music scene. The DF-Gabriel affinity is also no puzzle. Peter Gabriel’s career has been grounded by an independent sensibility he has maintained since and through his beginnings with Genesis in the late 1960’s to mid-1970’s. It has been characterized, too, by an experimental bent informed by African music. Dengue Fever’s own development from local indie sensation to indie-global phenomenon bears clear analogues to Gabriel’s own. The most salient commonalities between the two beyond musical trajectory, however, may be movement, interchange, and cooperation. Through WOMAD and Real World, endeavours begun more than two decades ago expressly to promote music and dance, Gabriel has challenged Western audiences’ perceptions of world- genres. Building upon such legacy and partnering today with that forerunner, Dengue Fever has resuscitated 1960’s/’70’s Cambodian pop nearly snuffed out by Khmer Rouge suppression through new Khmer- and English-language songs that simultaneously reify the ‘new world’ concept and take the genre out of its former obscurity. That this partnering has taken Dengue Fever to so many sold-out performances in so many different countries across the globe attests to the genre’s – and Dengue Fever’s – new relevance in the music world.

Evil Monito spoke with founding Dengue Fever members, Zac and Ethan Holtzman about the band’s beginnings and evolution, its travels and its sentiments about shifting into the new world genre.

EM: You and Ethan came upon the Cambodian music DF now plays separately but contemporaneously. What was it about the music that so appealed to you in the first place?

E: I think that my brother and I have similar tastes in music. The music that I heard while first traveling in Cambodia made me excited. The kind of music I just kept on playing over and over again until the cassette tape broke and I had to tie a knot in it for it to keep playing. My first thoughts after hearing the music was that I wanted to get an undercover camera and do a documentary on some of the black market and expose the dark sides of Cambodia. This music would make for the perfect soundtrack. I actually looked into getting a baseball hat that took video. Too dangerous, so we decided to form the band instead.

Z: [For me, it was] the familiarity of the garage/surf rock sound combined with the Cambodian melodies and vocal techniques. A lot of the female vocalists crack into a falsetto they call “ghost voice”.

EM: How did the band begin penning its own, original Khmer-language music? And why did DF finally decide to incorporate English language into its lyrics?

Z: We wrote two originals on our first album, “22 Nights”, and “Connect Four”. We had a Cambodian friend help out with the translation. As Nimol’s English improved, we were able to have her sing parts of songs in Khmer and parts in English. It’s kind of like using a different instrument, sometimes a song will call for an electric guitar, and sometimes a classical. Having a few tunes in English helped pull in listeners that aren’t ready to listen to music in another language, yet.

E: On our last album, songs like “Tiger Phone Card” and “Sober Driver” helped us gain a solid fan base in some of the Scandinavian countries. We will often record the vocals to a song in Khmer and then in English and see which version seems to have more emotion and roll with that.

EM: What’s the story behind your being approached by Real World and invited to record at the Real World Studios?

E: We met Real World while performing at WOMEX in Seville, Spain. Shortly after that concert, at last-minute’s notice, they invited the band to perform at WOMAD (concerts around the world started by Peter Gabriel) in the Canary Islands. We were not able to make that show because it was so last-minute, but it started our dialogue. Eventually they put out our last album [Venus on Earth] all of the world [except North America], and invited us to the Real World recording studios to work.

EM: DF started out as a decidedly indie rock band. How do you feel about its present affiliation with world music? To what extent do you think DF might change perceptions of the genre?

Z: [World music] used to be a genre that I’d kind of avoid. It was more fake and whatever… positive vibrations-everybody happy, steel drums, Guatemalan pants, dreadlocked musicians in a feel-good festival. It all seemed artificial and not really what’s going on in the world. But then labels like Sublime Frequency, Buda Musique (which released the Ethiopiques series) came up. Now there are so many bands championing this new sound, like Chicha Libre… and then there’s those bands with a great combination of both world and indie rock like Beirut, Secret Chiefs 3, Gogo Bordello. So now I feel that world music is completely changing these days… world music in general has gone through some big changes for the better. Dengue Fever is part of that change. [It's] always walked the razor’s edge between being seen as a world music band and a rock band… the border between indie music and world music scene is getting foggy and it’s fun to be lost in the fog. People are realizing there’s more music to be influenced by than what’s playing down the street.

EM: How has the experience of travelling internationally and playing before diverse audiences affected DF’s sense of itself and the music it makes?

Z: We tend to view ourselves as foreign diplomats, representing Cambodia and the USA. When we play music we love it when people jump up on stage and sing and dance with us. It’s all about bringing people together and going crazy together.

EM: This summer’s tour in Europe was actually a return: what was it like to tour there this time? Did you notice any differences in reception? How did it feel for the band?

E: A lot of the cities we visited this time around were actually our second time playing there, but I would say about half of them were new markets… so… the entire tour was good, which is nice. I mean, we had 10 shows and they were all well attended. Like in Oslo, Norway, it was our second time playing there and it was at the same club, so it was a really good turn out. A lot of people that were excited came to the first show as well as the second show… we had run out of shirts, you know, we only had girls shirts? but they didn’t care, the guys just bought ‘em… so these guys [who] were all like six-foot-two blond guys wearing these medium American Apparel classic girl cuts… I guess they don’t care about the cut? That was fun.

The crowds were singing along… they did that last time but this time there was more of that when the songs were in English. You would definitely packs of people in the crowd singing, which feels good… it felt really nice.

There were [also] a lot of new markets. Like in Spain, we’d been to Sevilla and played, but we’d never been to Barcelona or Madrid. That’s kind of like saying, “Oh yeah, we played California, we played in L.A.,” but you didn’t play San Diego or San Francisco… there are just so many cities that you could do a whole tour in Spain. There was a good amount of people for our first time. We were excited.

Dengue Fever (f. Inara George) – “I Feel Love”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

EM: Can you tell me a little bit about your most recent single? And what else is Dengue Fever planning for the future?

E: Yeah, we have a new song, a cover of Donna Summers’s “I Feel Love”. We made it like a psychedelic disco track, and we have Inara George from The Bird and the Bee on it – she’s a childhood friend, we all grew up together in Topanga Canyon. She’s singing lead and our singer Nimol is singing a little backup on the track.

What we’re doing now that we’re back, and were doing prior to this [last European] tour, we’ve been working on material for the next record. We’ve been really busy this year. Like doing the score for the Lost World film that we performed live, that was a big undertaking. But we’ve been working on new material for the next record and that’s pretty much our main focus, just getting into the studio 3 to 4 days a week and writing new stuff… that’s where we are.

EM: Finally, what’s “wanderlust-y” about Dengue Fever, as a band that produces a certain style of music?

Z: Maybe when they check out our documentary of our trip to Cambodia they’ll get the urge to go there. We should be on the board of tourism for Cambodia.

E: The fact that the band started from a six-month backpack journey throughout SE Asia sounds like wanderlust to me.

***
For more on the band, visit: http://www.myspace.com/denguefevermusic

Art direction on feature story: Brian Yu