The other two tracks - each side's last - are traditional Khmer instrumentals. Six of its eight tracks consist of nothing but this woman singing, sans accompaniment of any kind. It's 11 degrees as I type this, warmed by a hissing radiator and the voice - the virtually naked, unmanipulated voice - of what we must assume to be the woman pictured on the cover of this cassette found several hours earlier at Battambang Market II in the Bronx. If you had downloaded the previous rip of this cassette, it's worth tossing it in favor of this one, which was played at the correct speed and duplicated at a much higher resolution. This woman is most likely still alive, maybe 200 miles from where I write this, unaware of how many listeners she still has (nearly 8,000 via the Soundcloud post alone). The 1999 Sayonara Sound Productions cassette featured in today's post probably isn't a pirated version in all likelihood, the singer was a Cambodian refugee living in Rhode Island, or nearby Massachusetts. It makes this 2009 report about the Cambodian Ministry of Culture streamrolling 80,000 pirated domestic CDs and DVDs an occasion for mourning, rather than celebration. Say what you want about bootlegging, but p eople like Thoeung Son changed our perception of the world in ways that they may never have realized. I'm convinced that the most ubiquitous of these, the late Thoeung Son's Chlangden Production, provided the source recordings for Paul Wheeler / Parallel World's 1995 Cambodian Rocks, one of the most important - if ethically questionable - so-called "world music" compilations ever released. Sayonara is one of a handful of late 20th Century Cambodian diaspora-run production companies that trafficked in bootlegged compilations of sixties and seventies tracks and post-Khmer Rouge Cambodian-language popular and traditional music recordings. I have found maybe a dozen Sayonara cassettes and CDs in Cambodian immigrant-run grocery stores in the Bronx, Portland (OR), and Seattle. Sayonara Sound Productions was established in West Warwick, RI, in 1987 by Chang Leanghak Song.
(Ironically, one of the first comments I received after posting it to Soundcloud was from a beatmaker asking permission to use it in his work.) Its popularity had everything to do with its uniqueness - it's the only Khmer solo vocal recording without accompaniment I know of. I posted an earlier MP3 rip of this cassette on New Year's Eve 2017, and it has since become the most popular recording I've ever shared.
Note: Re-ripped to Audacity on iMac from a TASCAM 202MKVII project rate 44100 Hz exported as FLAC, 44.1 kHz, bit depth 24.
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