Cambodian music is the true shining star when it comes to South Eastern Asian music, so called khmer rock artists have come to light quite a lot lately on the back of Californian outfit Dengue Fever covering some of their songs and drawing attention to wonderfully cool pop and rock artists that were assasinated at the hands of the ruthless Khmer Rouge.

The Cambodian Cassette Archive Vol.1 is an album by Sublime Frequencies that has Khmer folk and pop songs, the album may be shorter than the amount of tracks usually on offer by this label's compilation but what's here is truly magnificent. Anyone who has dug around in the realms of Khmer rock will be familiar with artists like Ros Sereyosthea, this album goes one step further though and finds a real mixture of music, all of it extremely enjoyable.

There's plenty of nice eletric guitar solos, heavy organ playing and pretty much the whole album sounds like it's been produced with water from the Mekong seeping through the recording device. As with the majority of S.E. Asian music, the one drawback can be the listeners tolerance for nasally vocals.

Personally I would say that not all of it is from the late 60s and 70s Pol Pot era because there's one track with a rather 80s sounding disco beat to it, far too electronic for that era, the lack of info about artists is pretty frustrating with numerous just down as "unknown", these songs are pulled from over 100 cassettes that were found in the archives of Oakland Library in California and I'm intrigued to know what the rest of the songs sounded like and of course what happened to the original artists.