The issue of Western musicians taking cues from Eastern music has always bit a tiny bit controversial. Usually it doesn’t amount to much more than giving Eddie Vedder or Alanis Morrisette a playful jab when they release an album with a sitar or two. But occasionally, the weird post-colonial backdrop is more obvious. Dengue Fever is a throwback Cambodian retro-pop band with a bonafide Cambodian pop star, but it was born in LA and the band is made up almost entirely of American musicians with no connection to Cambodia.

The story starts in the 60s, with Cambodian artists taking American rock songs and bending them to their own ends, creating a Khmer-inflected mixture of surf rock, soul and psychedelia. (On a side note, odd how we generally take a dimmer view of Westerners appropriating Eastern music than the opposite phenomena.) As the Khmer Rouge came to power, the music died out, and for the most part an interesting little slice of music history ended there. Enter Chhom Nimol, a Cambodian singer who has reportedly performed numerous times for the country’s royal family on several occasions. Flush with success, she arrived in Los Angeles on a tourist visa and began singing in nightclubs in the area. Once, after a performance at the Dragon House, she was approached by several men who were astounded by her singing voice, and asked her to join their band. Barely able to speak English, she was reluctant at first, but eventually she became the lead singer for Dengue Fever, singing in her native Khmer and (increasingly) in English as well.

That’s the story as I’ve decided to tell it, but in fact that’s not the way the story generally goes. Most articles about Dengue Fever start in Cambodia in 1998, with Ethan Holtzman hearing that 60s-era Cambodian rock during a trip to the country. One of his fellow travellers came down with dengue fever, and Holtzman returned to the U.S. with a lovely story about jungle diseases and a newfound taste for Cambodian pop. After gathering several like-minded compatriots to fill out the rest of the band, Holtzman went in search of his singer—he figured she could be Thai or Vietnamese, he wasn’t that picky—when he and the rest of the band walked into the Dragon House and discovered Nimol.

In interviews, Nimol is hardly front and center—somewhat understandable considering her limited command of english, but still somewhat unfortunate given her prominent role in the band. And for whatever reason, she’s the only one without a bio on the website. It’s really too bad—I’ve heard plenty of stories about North Americans backpacking around Asia. I want to know more about Nimol.