Art for Kep & James Speck: Where the Mississippi Meets the Mekong

James Speck built a career out of being early to new mediums. Now, a month into a residency at Knai Bang Chatt, he's writing a piece of music that puts the Mississippi and the Mekong in the same room.

James Speck

He introduces himself the way people do when they've told the story a hundred times and are a little bored of the short version: American, animator and art director by trade, fifteen years in Phnom Penh, Singapore before that. Before Singapore there was Los Angeles, and Montreal, and a stretch in the early 1980s when computer animation was still a novelty act. “The first time I did it, it really blew my mind,” he says. He'd figured he would end up doing illustration, or watercolour, something for print. Instead he stuck with the screen.

That stuck-with-it turned into a fairly big career. Hollywood productions. A posting to Singapore with a Montreal software company. An Asian Television Award for a real-time virtual talking character he built for MTV Asia, broadcast in four languages to something like a billion people across China and India — a number he still says with a bit of disbelief. The project also got him to Stockholm, for the European Music Awards, where he did the music as well as the animation.

When he was ready to leave Singapore, he could have gone anywhere. Indonesia was the obvious pull — he'd lived there, learned the language — but Jakarta is sinking and polluted, and Bali, he says, is full of expats doing their twenty years in Hong Kong or Bangkok and then retiring to a beach chair. “That wasn't my thing.” He'd been coming to Cambodia as a tourist for years by then. The plan was two years, maybe three. That was almost sixteen years ago.

The work changed shape once he got here. There was still the commercial stuff — beer ads, shampoo ads, television — but alongside it, a grant took him into a music program three hours south of Phnom Penh, teaching children with HIV twice a week. He brought in musicians from around the world to teach and perform there too, not just Cambodian players. The program eventually wound down, not for lack of funding but because antiretroviral treatment had gotten good enough that new cases simply stopped arriving. “Which was good,” he says. “It's a very good thing.” A couple of times a year, someone stops him on a street in Phnom Penh — an adult now, someone he taught at eight or nine in Takeo province. “It's a wonderful feeling.”

Ask him what he likes best about Cambodia and there's no pause: the people. If you're going to live in someone else's country, he says, you'd better like them, and you'd better not try to change how they do things. Sixteen years in, he says he loves it more than he did on day one.

He calls himself semi-retired these days, though that's a loose fit — four months ago he was in the Philippines working on real-time animation for an immersive theatre at a theme park, his first job of that scale in eight years. For a long stretch he also toured with a three-piece band, playing Meta House, the French Institute, venues in Thailand and Singapore, until he got tired of it. What he wants now, more than another commission, is time in places like this one.

Two Rivers, One Blues

The idea for the piece he's writing goes back further than Kep, actually further than Cambodia. The last American city Speck lived in was Minneapolis — Bob Dylan's town, Prince's town — and there was a small bar there where he'd go listen to blues that had drifted up from the Mississippi Delta. He forgot about it, more or less, for close to twenty years. Then he heard Kong Nay play the chapei, the long-necked Cambodian lute, and it stopped him: “I thought, wow, that's like John Lee Hooker.” Two rivers, as far as he's concerned, carrying the same kind of music.

What he's writing now tries to hold both of those things at once — shades of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, a Minneapolis bluesman named Willie Murphy that most people outside that city have never heard of, and Khmer instruments woven through it. He's hoping to pull in Cambodian musicians along the way. An Australian clarinet player is already coming. He's still looking for a cellist — he just loves the instrument, he says, no more explanation needed.

A Month at Knai Bang Chatt

Six days in, and it's already beaten whatever he was expecting. The crab market everyone comes to Kep for is a short walk away, but what's actually struck him is the resort itself — the trees they didn't cut down, the old buildings brought back rather than torn out, the recycled wood everywhere, including, he points out, the very table he's sitting at. On top of a private room for the month, they've given him a studio just for his piano. It's enough space that he's already thinking about who else to bring in.

“I'm just using this beautiful natural experience to channel that into my work,” he says, and leaves it at that.

Speck is the latest artist to pass through Art for Kep, the residency program run out of Knai Bang Chatt that has hosted painters, photographers and musicians from Cambodia and abroad, giving each of them a room, time, and the run of the grounds to make something new. The idea behind it is a simple one: put good artists in a quiet place by the sea and see what comes out. In Speck's case, that's a piece of music that didn't exist a month ago and, by the time he leaves, will carry a bit of Kep in it for good.