The story of Dengue Fever (as far as I can tell) is that Ethan Holtzman, one of the main guys, was backpacking around Cambodia, was taken by an old tape of 60s khmer pop, and somehow wound up (a) rereleasing it as “Cambodian Rocks” on an indie label in the US and (b) starting Dengue Fever, the band, as — yeah — a kind of covers band. Lots of the early Dengue Fever tracks are covers of the 60s tracks, although recently they’ve mostly written their own stuff. and very successfully too!

good interview: http://www.undertheradarmag.com/denguefever.html

Anyway, I have a copy of Cambodian Rocks vol 1 — it’s hard to tell if it’s the Ethan Holtzman version though, as there’s another album around with the same name and entirely diff tracks. It consists mostly of Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea classics… I’ve written another post about those two here: http://undersea.wordpress.com/2007/04/12/ros-sereysothea/

(btw I have a massive stack of classic Sisamouth/Sereysothea mp3s — let me know and I’ll Sendspace them over or something!)

also I can really recommend the most recent Dengue Fever album, Chhom Nimol has an amazing voice and they really make great music.

shameless link to post on my blog on the subject: http://inuitbikini.blogspot.com/2005/12/magic-of-khmer-pop.html

(ps: long time TRGAW reader here; hooked by the Eno reference ;)