February, 2018...

As the 2017 Kampot Readers & Writers Festival rages on, I remain here at home at my desk more than a bit bummed that I'm not there enjoying all the fun and games. But I cannot afford the time, with Deadly Woman Blues in the endgame of its production and deep-in on the writing of a first draft of Shadow Dancing.
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I will nonetheless be – or am – taking a peripheral presence at Kampot in the form of an of an interview for the festival’s online gazette that you can see here; while at the same time another aspect of my on-going Khmer Konnection has come to fruition in the form of a set of liner notes I’ve contributed to the new, fifth Cambodian Space Project album, Spaced Out in Wonderland.
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I guess everything I want or need to say is said in the notes and so in order to maybe mildly entice you to actually seek out the album and maybe even buy it, I’ll not reveal too many spoilers. Suffice to say, the CSP to me represent a real and very exciting new possibility for music in our Austro-SEAsian region of the globe: a meeting of the traditions, of the people, out of which is arising new sounds, new songs, new moods. But more than that – you can dance to it! The Cambodian Space Project are really a go-go band above all else, and at any of their gigs that I can attend, I am there on the dancefloor, and always last to leave. If that sounds at all enticing – and even if it doesn’t – check out the deets on the album here, and seriously consider a holiday in Cambodia. But beware – in a good way, I promise – it will get its hooks into you!

​See here too a preview video of the band’s version of the Lee Hazlewood classic “Summer Wine,” which is included on Spaced Out in Wonderland: