Dengue Fever will perform Friday, July 25.

What happens when two all-American brothers from Los Angeles discover the mesmerizing sounds of Cambodian psychedelic rock music? Ethan and Zack Holtzman did whatever any true musical explorers would do: they dug deeper. And then they started a band.

Cambodian psych gained traction in the ’60s and ’70s as a mash-up of traditional Cambodian music and American pop music creeping into the culture from American Armed Forces radio stations during the Vietnam war. The genre, and tragically, many of its musicians, were all but destroyed by the Cambodian genocide in the late ‘70s, but when the Holtzmans heard recordings by artists like Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea they knew they wanted to be part of honouring that sound. They formed Dengue Fever in 2001 and recruited a full band including Cambodian-American singer Chhom Nimol, who comes from an established family of musicians in Cambodia.

Dengue Fever started by mostly performing covers of the Cambodian artists they’d grown to love, but over the course of the last 20 years they’ve grown into a sound of their own, mixing English words in with Nimol’s smooth Khmer lyricism and developing a unique musical language. Their original music often slips into a hypnotizing groove, combining uniquely Cambodian sounds and the floaty qualities of Nimol's voice with gentle rhythms and a hefty dose of Western rock ’n’ roll swagger. As it turns out, Dengue Fever replicates the spirit of its source of inspiration: not quite Cambodian, not quite American, not quite modern, and not quite traditional, but definitely original.

- Elizabeth Chorney-Booth