Just when I’m pretty sure I’ve exhausted the more interesting and obscure pop music fusions from around the world, someone has to come along and show me otherwise. The other day a photographer friend of mine mentioned the film Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a unique treat. Shot in a casual documentary style, the film follows the LA band Dengue Fever on a tour through Cambodia, explaining how five American musicians hooked up with a Cambodian singer in LA to form a band to play 60′s Cambodian Pop. And before you laugh at the idea of Cambodian pop, give the stuff a listen; it jumps on the wave of 60′s surfer psychedelia and takes it to the tropics with a sort of plaintive island sound that’s probably unlike anything you’ve heard before. The film also explores a painful aspect of Khmer music and Cambodian pop; since many of the original stars of the genre (Sinn Sisamouth, Pan Ron , Ros Sereysothea) were were creating their music in the years just prior to the Pol Pot massacres, they all are presumed to have been killed in the mass slaughter of Cambodia’s legendary Killing Fields. I frankly cried during a profoundly bittersweet moment in the film in which a music teacher who was alive – but of course unable to sing Khmer pop music during the Khmer Rouge regime – was able to see her young students gleefullly performing the happy pop songs she was denied. And ironically, with a group of Americans who have a genuine passion for Khmer culture rather than a passion for carpet bombing their country and looking away as a demented leader slaughters nearly a third of their population. By the way, Dengue Fever not only serves up some heartfelt and authentic pop, they’re apparently commited to assisting the wildlife of Cambodia.