March 06, 2004
Various | City of Ghosts Soundtrack |Lakeshore | Cambodia
buy it
Matt Dillon's directorial debut, City of Ghosts evokes the traveler's experience of Southeast Asia like no other fictional film I've seen. Sure the plot's a bit rickety, but Cambodia comes off the screen so vividly, you can practically smell it. This is due in no small part to the soundtrack. Instead of commissioning a cliched "Asian" film score or a trendy backpacker's mix tape (a la Danny Boyle's wack 2000 travel flick the Beach), Dillon and music supervisor Dondi Bastone came up with a haunting combination: French and American 78s that conjure the colonial past and Cambodian pop classics that predate the bloody days of the Khmer Rouge... posthumous music that lingers like ghosts of the people who performed it.
Since it's outside the purview of this site, I won't go into the crackly hula, hot jazz and French torch song that add so much to this CD. Instead, I'll start with the standout--Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea. Aquarius Records calls her "the goddess of Cambodian garage." I think Romulan should give her an entire volume of their Girls in the Garage series. If you don't get a psychotic reaction from the opening riff of "Wait Ten Months" you must be on a Haldol IV. Fuzzed guitar wankery (including four twisted solos), cowbell, incongruous Mills Brothers backup vocals and a fast-paced rhythm section propel Ros's sassy-chipmunk-meets-Roland-Space-Echo vocal into the stratosphere. "Have You Seen My Love" can only be described as 60's Cambodian psychedelic ska. Musicologists might build entire careers on sorting that one out, but by god it exists and Matt Dillon put it on this CD for you to hear as often as you like. I don't know much about Ros Serey Sothea, but I do know that someone needs release an annotated compilation of her stuff cuz it is way out. Owners of Dengue Fever's debut CD will recognize Ros's third track on City of Ghosts, "I'm Sixteen." This older version is rawer and heavier.
Speaking of Dengue Fever, City of Ghosts provided me with my first exposure to them as their excellent Khmer version of Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" served to accompany the closing credits. Recorded with a live feel, the song glued me to my seat with its affecting simplicity--I don't think I was the only one in the audience squinting at the credits muttering "Who is this?"
Ros Serey Sothea isn't the only discovery on the CD. All four of the Cambodian songs with a writer credit are penned by Vor Ho, including "Wait Ten Months" and another track covered by Dengue Fever, Pen Ran and Sin Sisamouth's duet "Mou Pei Na."
But wait... On its album, Dengue Fever translates the latter track as "Thanks-a-lot" and credits it to Pen Ran and Ros Serey Sothea. So who really wrote it? A search for Vor Ho online nets nothing. The paltry four pages The Rough Guide to World Music devotes to Cambodia don't mention Vor or even Ros, though she is considered the Queen of 60s/70s Cambodian pop. For me, the confusion and lack of information simply underscore what a cool soundtrack City of Ghosts is. It's rough around the edges (in fact, it sounds completely unmastered), transports you into unfamiliar territory, confounds the guidebook and creates more mysteries than it ever resolves. In other words, it's a lot like traveling in Cambodia.