Jack The Stripper and Mr. Green Genes join forces on Friday, September 15th @ 2PM to host genre-defying Los Angeles based band, Dengue Fever, for a special live in-studio performance and interview ahead of their KALX Co-Announce show at The Chapel in SF later the same evening.
Dengue Fever’s psychedelic take on the Cambodian pop sounds of the 60’s makes them one of rock’n’roll’s most unique success stories.
It’s odd enough for a group of white musicians to cover psychedelic rock oldies from Cambodia, but finding a bona fide Cambodian pop star to front the band — and sing in Khmer, no less — is the kind of providence that could only touch a select few places on Earth.
Formed in L.A.’s hipster-friendly Silver Lake area in 2001, Dengue Fever traced their roots to organist Ethan Holtzman’s 1997 trip to Cambodia with a friend. That friend contracted the tropical disease (transmitted via mosquito) that later gave the band its name, and it also introduced Holtzman to the sound of ’60s-era Cambodian rock, which still dominated radios and jukeboxes around the country. The standard sound bore a strong resemblance to Nuggets-style garage rock and psychedelia, heavy on the organ and fuzztone guitar, and with the danceable beat of classic rock & roll. It also bore the unmistakable stamp of Bollywood film musicals, and often employed the heavily reverbed guitar lines of surf and spy-soundtrack music. Yet the eerie Khmer-language vocals and Eastern melodies easily distinguished it from its overseas counterpart.
Full-length number seven, Ting Mong, captures yet another enthralling dimension of their genre-defying journey. A lot of groups working on their first new collection of songs in eight years would probably favour clamour and bombast – by contrast, Ting Mong seeks the sonic balm these times so desperately need.
