Biography
Kantrum Dongman
Music collective from Ban Dong Man, Surin, Northeast Thailand who specialize in the traditional genre of kantrum.
This album provides a rare opportunity to hear a kind of music that has strong cultural significance, but was almost completely erased by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot in the Cambodia of the ‘70s.
Kantrum is not only of great value to the surviving Khmer people as part of their heritage, but is a powerful healing method in the first place.
In Khmer animism the people belief their happiness depends on the spirits that live around them. When a person becomes ill they believe the spirits are angry, and therefore need to be consoled by shaman-lead rituals with music and dance.
In the ‘90s the Khmer in Cambodia found out that a music that sounded familiair in language, melody, rhythm and instrumentation, but they didn’t know, survived on the other side of the border in Thailand.
Since then the soulful songs with deep grooving rhythms sparked a revival that has been growing steadily ever since.
One of the few surviving groups with knowledge of the original music has been recorded by Olivier Schreuder & Angkanang Pimwankum of Animist Records in the border-province Surin in Northeast-Thailand.
This album provides a rare opportunity to hear a kind of music that has strong cultural significance, but was almost completely erased by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot in the Cambodia of the ‘70s.
Kantrum is not only of great value to the surviving Khmer people as part of their heritage, but is a powerful healing method in the first place.
In Khmer animism the people belief their happiness depends on the spirits that live around them. When a person becomes ill they believe the spirits are angry, and therefore need to be consoled by shaman-lead rituals with music and dance.
In the ‘90s the Khmer in Cambodia found out that a music that sounded familiair in language, melody, rhythm and instrumentation, but they didn’t know, survived on the other side of the border in Thailand.
Since then the soulful songs with deep grooving rhythms sparked a revival that has been growing steadily ever since.
One of the few surviving groups with knowledge of the original music has been recorded by Olivier Schreuder & Angkanang Pimwankum of Animist Records in the border-province Surin in Northeast-Thailand.