click here for an audio-visual look at the gig highlights

***for full gig listings jump to the bottom***

Greetings:

In Phnom Penh on Friday get an early start with Rufus at Aussie XL, then Miss Sarawan plays a dinner at Ruby Jack.  Penh Pals give us a farewell show at Tacos Kokopelli, , while Atomic Pleng are at Botanico, JunRockz is joined by Aisha at Little Susie and Smack the Unicorn are at Hometown Hangout.  Later on We Are Ewe are followed by Pocket Change at Oscar’s on the Corner.   In Siem Reap Jam-Cha at playing in the street on Soksan Road, and Barang Barang are at KAPAL in Kampot.

Saturday night in Phnom Penh, Geography of the Moon are at Lantern while Miss Sarawan and Scoddy are at Botanico.  In contrast, visiting Chinese artist Wang Xiao presents Surviving Narrative at Cloud, and Angkor Classique are at Au Marche.  Matsumara Fishworks are at Back Street Bar and Trio Tropical are at Duplex.  Note the early start at Oscar’s on the Corner for the Kampot Radio benefit concert featuring Geography of the Moon, The Extraordinary Chambers, Coz Collective, Ariane Parkes, Pomba Gira (formerly Sinville Roadshow) and Green Leaf Motif.  In Siem Reap, Japan Guitar Shop are at Pomme.

Come Sunday, Miss Sarawan is at The Deck, while the Musica Felice choir celebrate Europe Day with a charity concert at Sofitel Phnom Penh Phokeethra.  Green Leaf Motif are at The Vine, the Sunday Sundowners open mic at Tacos Kokopelli will be hosted by Mike McCann, Joe Wrigley is at Bar Oz, Trio Tropical are at The Waterside and Virginia Bones and Brooke Palmer are at Back Street Bar.  In Kampot, the second leg to the Kampot Radio benefit concerts features Ant Colloff, Scott Bywater, Pomba Gira and Frankie Teardrop Dead at Kampot Radio Live Lounge.  In Siem Reap, The Blue Strangers are at New Leaf.

The LengPleng Interview

The parting of Pals: Penh Pals prepare to say farewell

Penh Pals was formed around a table at Tacos Kokopelli, the site of many a band formation, and will play their farewell gig there on Friday night.  The Pals – Ariane Parkes, Liam Garth Jones and Mike McCann – were good enough to sit down with LengPleng before their penultimate gig, opening for Shake 79 at Oscar’s on the Corner, to reminisce over the last 18 months and discuss the ups and downs of making a band work.

M:  The Tacos Kokopelli Sunday open mic changed my life, really.  Before that I had never sung in public ever before.  And the first time I quit half-way through the song, I walked off.

L: I wouldn’t say Tacos Kokopelli has changed my life, but I think since I was 21 I’d probably been on stage only once before moving to Phnom Penh, and that was at Tacos, where I began to relax and start doing it again.

Read the whole article here

Passing Chords – a few things you may not know about

Photo: Skinny Rogers

Roberto Salgado.  For the past decade, Roberto Salgado has been kicking around Southeast Asia with a guitar, leading a number of different bands and musical projects, spreading good vibes and funky grooves wherever he may roam. Petas y Cometas was an acoustic trio that he led in Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand; Fruition was an electric band with bass and drums that he fronted in Cambodia, until the COVID-19 scare shut the music scene down for a while.  He is currently performing with the Trio Tropical, as well as solo and in duos, all around Cambodia.  He calls Kampot home and has been an integral part of the town’s music scene since 2017, playing an eclectic mix of covers and originals in a wide variety of musical styles from around the world: salsa, samba, reggae, ska, bossanova, afro, rock, pop, funk, soul, jazz, and more.  He plays in Phnom Penh this weekend with Trio Tropical at Duplex on Saturday and The Waterside on Sunday.

What is your pet musical hate?

I love all kinds of music.  If I have a pet musical hate, I guess it would be the excessive self-consciousness that keeps people from participating in music.  I hate it when people say, “I can’t sing.”  If you can talk, you can sing.  Nobody goes through their whole life without singing; it’s a part of being human.  I’ve hosted a lot of open mic nights, and I often hear the same clichés, “oh you don’t wanna hear me sing. If I start singing everyone will leave.” But often with a little encouragement you’ll see someone overcome their shyness and bring out their voice, and it’s really nice, even if it’s not entirely in key.  Often you’ll see that once they get over the initial apprehension, they’ll get into it and want to keep doing more.  There are plenty of famous singers, like Lou Reed for example, that often sang a bit off key, and far from “technically perfect”, but still managed to use their voices as vehicles for self-expression and art.  I encourage everyone to let their voice out and see what it feels like, see what they can do with it.  Music is for everybody.

A private musical indulgence:

Well, not in the sense of being embarrassed about it or anything, but a lot of the music I love is stuff I can only really listen to alone.  For example, right now I’m listening to Anton Webern.  It’s complex atonal orchestral music with extended passages of pianissimo, so it isn’t something I would put on when hanging out with friends.  Actually I guess that goes for “classical” music in general, even the more accessible stuff. It’s something that I listen to almost exclusively in private.

The year you first came to Cambodia:

I arrived in Asia in Siem Reap in 2015, and have been in Southeast Asia ever since. I have been spending at least half the year in Kampot since 2017, often spending the other half in Vietnam, but I remained in Cambodia during the COVID years. I’ve moved so much my whole life since childhood, and my family is very spread out, so there’s no other place I would go to that would be going back home except Kampot.  Every time I return to Kampot, I’m received with the warmest of welcomes.  It’s a special community here that I am happy to be a part of.

An early music memory:

My earliest musical memories have blended together, but they involve hearing my aunt playing guitar and singing songs from Colombia and Brazil. And as I got older, I always felt a special connection to that music; it made me feel a certain way, and I was inspired to learn to play it myself.

What was the last thing you had to eat?

Durian. Delicious Kampot durian.  I feel blessed to live in a place with such an abundance of fresh local durian, and fruit in general.  It’s in season now, and cheap, so I’ve been eating a lot lately.

A country you want to visit:

I have travelled quite a bit my whole life since before I can remember.  My first favourite book was a children’s atlas, and I would imagine visiting all the countries one day.  There are many I’d still like to see.  One country that sounds fascinating is Bhutan, which is supposedly a secluded mountain paradise where happiness reigns supreme.  A Shangri-La of sorts.  They only grant a limited number of (very expensive) visas yearly and I guess there’s a waiting list of at least a few years, so I doubt I’ll ever make it, but if I won some kind of free all-expenses-paid ticket to any country in the world, that might be the pick.

A book or movie you keep going back to:

I think it might have been Ezra Pound who first sparked my love of poetry, inspiring me to start composing my own verses as well as to seek out and appreciate and assimilate fine poetry from throughout the ages.  I still have many of his lines and in some cases whole pieces declaiming themselves inside my head to this day.  I don’t currently have a hard copy of his work with me anymore, but much of it is available online, and I often go back to his early poems, which still strike me as utterly brilliant, before he devolved into a cantankerous crackpot fascist hack, aimlessly and humourlessly paraphrasing dull history books about the minutiae of Martin Van Buren’s economic policies and calling it poetry.  But all the best literature rewards repeat readings, at different stages in one’s life.  I still like to have fun with Finnegans Wake from time to time, which really needs to be read aloud to best be enjoyed.  It’s completely ridiculous and over-the-top and often indecipherable, but also funny and beautiful.  One nonfiction book that holds a great deal of practical wisdom that keeps me coming back is Montaigne’s Essays.  He weaves in a lot of examples from antiquity as well as observations of contemporary social trends and anecdotes from day-to-day life to create this eminently reasonable, relatable, completely unpretentious voice of equanimity and honesty, led by curiosity to speak on a wide range of topics in these short pieces for which he coined the term: essay.

In the world of cinema, I find myself going back for repeat viewings to the films of certain directors.  There are many auteurs of film from all around the world whose work I admire greatly,  but for me, if I have to narrow it down, the apex of cinema is found in the work of these three: Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, and Andrei Tarkovsky.  All three developed very different, very idiosyncratic approaches to the art of film.  To oversimplify, Kubrick is very cerebral, Fellini is visceral, and Tarkovsky spiritual.  They all have strong filmographies studded with masterpieces, so it’s hard to pick out favourites.

What languages do you have?

I’ve been speaking English and Spanish my whole life.  I learned Catalan and German when I was still young, growing up in Europe, and have kept them up more or less to a fluent level, though my grammar is not perfect.  I often sing in Portuguese, which I can mostly understand and am told I pronounce well, but I wouldn’t say that I quite speak it.  I understand much less of Swahili, but that doesn’t stop me from singing a few songs in that language too.

Your primary instrument, and when you started playing it:

My primary instrument is the Spanish classical nylon-string guitar.  I didn’t really start playing until I was about 18 or 19.  I had taken a few lessons on electric when I was around 12 or 13 but never really applied myself to it at that time. It was more like there was an expectation that I would learn some instrument, so I was like, “yeah, rock’n’roll! I wanna play electric guitar,” and before that there had been a bit of piano and clarinet, but I hadn’t really developed my musical tastes yet, and it wasn’t an impulse that came from me.  So after about maybe a year of uncommitted lessons, I just stopped everything musical altogether.  Then, years later, I found an old nylon-string in the closet and just really got into it.  By that time, my musical tastes had expanded, and I also had things I wanted to express musically.  I really devoted myself to teaching myself about music and practising guitar for hours and hours a day.  I would learn to play all different kinds of songs that I liked, and I started writing my own songs.  And then I started playing with other musicians, which opened up a whole new dimension of learning that continues to this day.

Something people might be surprised to know about you:

One fact of my biography that often seems to elicit surprise when I mention it is that I was married for 10 years to a woman from Tanzania.

You have a time machine and a magic ticket to one gig or festival in the past. What do you choose?

On the one hand, it’s tempting to say something like Woodstock or Monterey, but really, I think it would be wilder to go back way further, to some ancient music festival, like the Pythian Games or some grand Ancient Egyptian performance put on for the Pharaoh.

What emotional needs do you have that are satisfied by playing music?

Performance definitely satisfies some kind of need to express myself and communicate my emotions and aesthetic sensibilities to others.  If I go too long without performing, it’s as if I get blocked up, and then when I do to perform, it’s a kind of cathartic release.

Department of Radiothon

The newly rebranded Kampot Radio – the number one English language radio station in Cambodia – needs your help.  Since 2017 the station has worked to promote music made in Cambodia by locals and expats alike, seeking to widen exposure to sounds both old and new.  The annual Top 100 Songs of All Time poll has pushed local content to the top year after year, providing a platform for active recording artists in a range of genres.  The on-going playlist also features western music from the latest to the greatest – the east meets the west.

To mark seven years of broadcasting, and to ask for financial support to stabilise operations in the long term, this month’s radiothon will come to a finale on the King’s Birthday weekend, with benefit concerts at Oscar’s on the Corner in Phnom Penh on Saturday 11 and at the Kampot Radio Live Lounge on Sunday 12.  Great prizes – including photography, art prints and t-shirts – will be raffled off at both events.

LengPleng is working with Kampot Radio to ensure that this vital part of the local music community is strong, stable and able to perform to its best ability.

To donate directly visit PayPal.me/kampotradio or ABA Darryl Carter 887 285 115.

Department of Mutual Support:  Friends of LengPleng

Thanks to our latest Friend of LengPleng – photographer and music aficionado Steve Porte.  “Every Thursday afternoon I consult the LengPleng gig guide to plan which gigs to attend over the week to come, I find it an invaluable resource and one that ought to be supported, nurtured and, where necessary, funded.  Thank you LengPleng for your contributions to the musical life in Cambodia.”

Also thanks to The Deck for renewing for another year.  Upward and onward together!

Being a Friend of LengPleng gets your logo into the weekly email and onto the weekly wrap page and an automatically click through to a page on our website for further information, photos, videos and so on.   We also pay special attention when you have a good story for us – an upcoming event or an artist you wish to highlight.   Email gigs@lengpleng.com for further details or bail up Scoddy wherever you see him.

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Porte Photo of the Week

Daria Morozova of Maki Orkestr dancing in the crowd at Carnaval, Raffles Le Royal, Saturday 4 May 2024

 

 

If you wish to receive LengPleng in your inbox every Thursday please send a subscribe email to gigs@lengpleng.com.

Musicians, venues, punters:  if there are things you know that LengPleng should know, please tell us and we’ll do our best to tell the world.

See you around the traps.
your correspondent,

 

 

Guillermo Wheremount
LengPleng.com
gigs@lengpleng.com (mailto:gigs@lengpleng.com

Weekly Gig Guide – week commencing Thursday 9 May 2024

** residency/weekly

For DJs and clubs, we recommend Phnom Penh Underground

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

*Note that Wednesday events are often not announced until early in the week – check back here for updates*

Coming soon:

 

 

By Weekly Wrap