Trail
The party
This trail starts on the dance floor at a Cambodian wedding or New Year party, where the romvong ring forms and the band plays songs from the 1960s. It follows those songs to the singers who made them, through April 1975, when the music stopped, and out to the collectors and bands who brought it back.
Here
Khmer social dances
Guests at weddings and at New Year join the romvong (រាំវង់), a slow ring of pairs; a group in Maine has run social dance classes for all ages.
Dengue Fever (band)
A Los Angeles band that found its singer, Chhom Nimol, among Cambodians, drew crowds in Long Beach's Cambodian clubs and plays 1960s and 1970s Cambodian rock.
There
Sinn Sisamouth
In Battambang an uncle drew him to music on strings such as the chapei; he sang on national radio by 1953 and recorded an estimated 1,000 to 4,000 songs.
Pen Ran
Born in Battambang, she sang rock, twist and a-go-go in a Western haircut, and answered Ros Sereysothea's "I'm 16" with "I'm 31".
Then
Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll (album)
The film's 20-song album gives full versions of its music: the Cambodian scene of the 1960s and early 1970s, before the Khmer Rouge came to power.
Cambodian Vintage Music Archive
Founded in Phnom Penh in 2010, the archive searches out surviving records and had digitized more than 500 of them by 2018.
Now
The Cambodian Space Project
Formed in Phnom Penh in 2009, the band first played wedding-band songs of Sinn Sisamouth and others, and has toured 24 countries.
In the Life of Music
Sinn Sisamouth's "Champa Battambang" carries this 2018 film through 1968, 1976 and 2007, when a young Khmer American woman seeks her heritage.
Cambodian community associations, Khmer Maine among them, are listed in the directory.