Tuna Day

Aspara, Ta Prohm, Angkor, by Ian T Edwards

Sinn Sisamouth was Cambodia’s greatest singer and was a huge star.  Along with Pan Ron and Ros Sereysothea he was part of a vibrant music scene that existed in Cambodia in the late 60s and early 70s.  Sinn Sisamouth was a prolific songwriter and performer of traditional Khmer songs.  During the 60s western music found it’s way to Cambodia and many songs were re-worked with the original tune set to Khmer lyrics.  These weren’t translations or copies.

Sinn Sisamouth was just one of the people killed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, along with other artists and large numbers of the population in a genocide that wiped out 20% of the population.  Many others were tortured and terrorised and it has left Cambodia scarred to this day.  It is still a country coming to terms with it’s recent past, a county where people were turned on each other and themselves, children taken from their families and turned on them.

Today this beautiful county still has it’s political issues, but the people you meet seem to be trying to get on with it and make it better without necessarily forgetting the past.  When we visited the Angkor temples near Siem Reap, the taxi driver who took us round for several days was a wonderful lad who against the poverty and history was trying to make a better future.  We spoke about many things as he was learning English and at one stage we talked about music.  He was impressed that I knew the music of Sin Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea.  Once again they are recognised as part of the muscial heritage.  He dropped me off at a dusty music shop in Siem Reap at the side of an unsurfaced road where I was able to pick up a few CDs.  Quite what is on them I’m really not sure.  They are labelled in Khmer and where there are English translations it is suitably vague or phonetic.  As well as destroying the people the Khmer Rouge regime also destroyed most forms of art so master tapes just do not exist.  What recordings do exist, do so because of old cassette tapes that somehow survived. The CDs I bought are  not by any stretch an official release, coming from copies of copies of those old cassettes. Tracks are hissy and because of stretched tape the tuning can drift as can be heard in this particular example.

Away From Beloved Lover is a poor song title being a translation of something like Jed Umpole.  It’s to the tune of Procul Harem’s A Whiter Shade of Pale.   There is great beauty in this song, in Sinn Sisamouth’s fine voice and immense tragedy in the fact that these recordings still exist but only just.  There is no fancy production here.  It sounds haunting because it is.  This is all that is left.