Cambodia Rocks: Interview with Dengue Fever

For almost twenty years, Dengue Fever has performed on countless stages, filling a void for music inspired by Cambodian rock and pop of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Made up of vocalist Chhom Nimol, guitarist Zac Holtzman, Ethan Holtzman on keyboards, bassist Senon Williams, multi-instrumentalist David Ralicke, and drummer Paul Smith, Dengue Fever makes music that’s as significant as it is fun. There’s plenty of electrifying groove with an indie twist. It’s both exotic and familiar rooted by the mesmerizing vocals of lead singer Chhom Nimol backed by a full-bodied line-up.

The Los Angeles-based act broke out in 2005, with its sophomore album, “Escape from Dragon House.” Dengue Fever toured in support of the album including in Cambodia, where its resulting performances were documented in the film, ”Sleepwalking Through the Mekong.” Peter Gabriel’s label released third studio album “Venus on Earth” (2008) and it was followed up with “Cannibal Courtship” (2011) and “The Deepest Lake” (2015). The albums were not only well-received, they also earned Dengue Fever a spot on the music landscape. Cambodian Rock Band, a touring play since 2018 features actors who perform Dengue Fever and Cambodian rock songs.

Your correspondent tracked down band co-founder Zac Holtzman to ask a few questions. An edited transcript of that conversation follows.

WG: How have you and the band been during the pandemic?

Zac Holtzman: We’ve been staying apart, it’s been kind of rough. We had to cancel a few shows that we booked and we had to put work on our album on hold. It’s about eighty percent done and we haven’t been able to get together and work on that either. Besides that everyone is doing well, no one has gotten sick.

Would you care to give your fans an idea of the direction the new album is going in?

I like the way it’s sounding. There might be a few instrumentals on this one. Some of the songs have a laid-back, way more even chill than anything we’ve put out before. It’s sounding neat but it’s still taking shape so who knows what the finish will end up sounding like.

How do you keep the music fresh without compromising some of your Cambodian rock traditions?

We just try to be true to ourselves and do stuff that we like… sounds that we’re inspired by and sounds that we are feeling, you know? We don’t worry too much about the stuff that we’ve done in the past.

For people who don’t understand world music how does Dengue Fever win over fans?

I don’t think it’s any big deal. I think they hear our music and feel the energy and some of the songs are in English anyway. As far as world music, yes Nimol sings in Khmer and yes we have all sorts of influences but also we’ve been able to play regular rock venues and dirty punk rock clubs and all different sorts of places and that’s been really neat about the band, we’ve never been pigeonholed into playing one type of thing. One of the shows that got cancelled this year (Psycho Las Vegas), and it’s like psychedelic metal and they asked us to play it last year. I was like, “What? We’re not really a metal band.” When we got up, people knew our lyrics and were singing along, it was a totally different crowd than we usually end up playing for. That was kind of neat, and that event was one of the shows that got pushed back this year due to the virus.

1,000 Tears of a Tarantula could maybe qualify as a psychedelic metal song. 

It’s definitely psychedelic. I wouldn’t call it psychedelic metal but I can see how it being guitar driven, it can go off in whatever direction you picture it.

Who are some of your not so obvious influences?

I like listening to a lot of people that don’t even have a band and are sort of messing with some piece of electronics like synth gear on YouTube. My friend Frank has this thing called almighty Opp. I love what he does. It’s tied together to this performance he puts on every Saturday with puppets. He writes all the songs, plays all the instruments, and builds all these amazing looking puppets. He calls it a service, like a community service that is supposed to uplift everybody in one way or another.

Tell us about the project Cambodian Rock Band.

Years back, Lauren Yee the playwright met with us and we were talking about ideas. She had just gotten a grant to work out an idea to write something and she was going to Long Beach, California to hang out with the Cambodian community to get an inspiration for her play. She based her play on a band in the Late 60s Early 70s in Cambodia.

There were 3 or 4 of our songs within the play. We would go to the workshops with the actors and teach them the songs and give Lauren feedback on how the play was coming along. It took all these great turns and huge changes that she would write between each workshop. And then it started happening and it’s been really cool.

Every time they are putting on the play if we are able, we try to play a show in the same city and on the same night after the play. The actors from the production will join us on stage and if time permits we’ll go see the play and join them onstage to sing a song for the encore. It’s been a real fun thing to bounce off each other.

What song should everyone hear?

One of my favorites, you already mentioned it is “!,000 Tears of a Tarantula.” “Uku” I like a lot too.

Dengue Fever still has its original members. What’s the secret?

It’s been great. One thing that really helps is that we share everything. It’s not like Nimol or me or somebody flies into the shows, while the rest of the band drives in with all the gear, you know what I mean? We’re all in it together. We write all the songs together and we don’t claim or get paid for individually writing stuff.

We’re kind of socialists within our band. So that helps because there’s no bad feelings towards the one person that’s the star and getting the bulk of the attention and money. For us, it’s like almost any of us can do an interview and any of us can bring a song to the table that we’ll try to turn into one of our songs. We all contribute. We’re open to anybody’s ideas within the band. But you’ve got to choose your battles, you can’t keep crying about everything like “you got your way on that one so why don’t you let this thing that’s bothering you go now;” You can’t constantly complain. We love touring together. We’ve gone to all these great places like Russia twice, Asia probably six or seven times, and across the US, I don’t know how many times. My brother is in the band so that’s good and bad, we get along great and love each other but also we’re brothers so we’ll complain heavy-hearted on each other too. It’s great playing live and it’s also great recording, we really like doing both. Paul our drummer is an engineer so he really learned his trade so that makes recording ourselves possible. All of those things contribute to us lasting a while. And we’ve gotten involved with charities and been able to work with different organizations that help animals or underprivileged kids. That’s been really cool.

Where is the most unusual place a Dengue Fever song has been played?

In “True Blood” they named an episode after “Escape from Dragon House” the song and we also have that as the title song of our album. They were playing it in a car and the lead girl, the main starlet was like, “What are we listening to, what is she singing?’ “It’s Cambodian,” says the main Vampire guy. And then she was like, “Ugh, can we turn it off?” That was so funny that they played it, they even called it out, were talking about it, named the episode and then said can we turn it off.