(Photo: Placebo leader Brian Molko sings before the iconic towers of Angkor Wat. 7 December 2008. By Isabelle Roughol)

By Isabelle Roughol

Angkor, Siem Reap province — One thousand had tickets but many more showed up Sunday night in Siem Reap, hoping to get a glimpse and an earful of the first ever rock concert to be held at the ancient temples of Angkor.

The event, organized by MTV and USAID to raise awareness about human trafficking, featured Cambodian and international artists, ending on a 40-minute set by British alternative trio Placebo, arguably the biggest rock band to have ever played in Cambodia.

Before the concert, packed tuk-tuks filed into Angkor National Park while ticket-less music fans were seen begging bouncers to let them in.

“I have lived here three years. I have never seen this…. It’s a major event, you can’t miss it,” said Sabien Lesecq, an expatriate concertgoer who was, like many others, excited to see Placebo perform.

But Cambodian youths seemed more enthusiastic about seeing the American band The Click Five.

“I’m so excited, it’s a big concert in Cambodia,” said Borin You, 20, who was attending his first rock concert.

Messages from the artists, speeches and videos were to be presented between performances and volunteers canvassing the crowd educated the audience on human trafficking issues.

“The fact that you have so many people in one spot at one time is fairly unique in Cambodia. I think that shows the message is getting across,” said Steve Morrish, executive director of SISHA, an anti-trafficking NGO associated with the event.

The goal of the concert is to educate people on how not to get into situations where they could be trafficked, for instance by thoroughly researching offers to work abroad, and to remove the stigma put on victims of trafficking, Morrish said. The Cambodian government has grown more aware and more proactive in fighting human trafficking, but the country’s growing openness to the world also brings in more traffickers and more sex tourists, he added.

The Angkor Wat concert, the third of four in the MTV Exit tour, stands out as the most intimate because the setting of the fragile temples forced organizers to limit the size of the audience.

Around 1,000 free tickets were distributed for the Angkor Wat show to populations vulnerable to human trafficking selected by NGOS and universities, and also via lottery, MTV Exit campaign director Simon Goff said. By contrast, there were in previous concerts 30,000 listeners in Kompong Cham and 10,000 in Sihanoukville. For those who couldn’t make it to the concerts, excerpts will be shown in a 90-minute program to be shown on Bayon TV later this month.

The smaller scale of the show and sacred surroundings inspired the artists to rethink their music.

“I’ve chosen songs that are more appropriate for a temple, so there’s no swearing or anything like that,” said Australian singer Kate Miller-Heidke. She rearranged her usual pop to an acoustic sound, including a surprising cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic.”

Cambodian artist Pou Khlaing chose not to adapt the volume, but the message to the audience, choosing to emphasize Khmer culture and the empowerment of the Cambodian people. In “Save The Khmer Music,” he pleads for Cambodian musicians to write original music rather than translate foreign hits.

“We have everything. We have our own language, we have our own culture, beautiful Angkor and everything. We don’t use it,” Pou Khlaing said.

But Placebo perhaps put in the most work in picking their setlist, spending hours in the studio to strip their classic songs to the bare bones of melody and reinventing the instrumentation.

“We’ve kind of created a new sound for us specifically for this performance. It may not be repeated. We love noise; we love massive, massive walls of sound, three guitars going crazy. We didn’t think this was going to be appropriate for this,” said Placebo lead singer Brian Molko.

Though Placebo will not be playing, massive walls of sounds will most likely be heard Friday when the tour culminates in front of an expected 50,000-strong crowd at Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh.

“The Phnom Penh show is a completely different set, completely different show,” said The Click Five drummer Joey Zehr. “I think it’s nice to give two different experiences in Cambodia.”

(Photo: The White Building in Phnom Penh. Designed as a model of modern, middle-income housing by Vann Molyvann in the 1960s, the decrepit building is now the symbol of the country’s urban ruin. 22 August 2008. By Isabelle Roughol.)

By Isabelle Roughol

It’s been two years since Vann Molyvann last stood here. He doesn’t like to see his masterpiece “because of all this,” he says, pointing with an air of disdain to a non-descript concrete box building standing on what should have been the 40-hectare, green grounds around the Olympic stadium. Now that much of the land has been sold off and built on, Vann Molyvann feels his vision for the sports complex, which he built in 1963 and 1964, has been compromised. So he stays away.

Narrating a tour of Phnom Penh organized by the French Cultural Center on Sunday, Vann Molyvann—the figurehead of the New Khmer Architecture movement of the 1960s—expressed deep concern for the state of urban development and the future of the capital.

“I am very worried. Look at the catastrophe that is happening here,” he says looking around the stadium grounds. “It is in danger of disappearing—this stadium,” adding the land there could go for $1000 per square meter.

Asked if he thinks the stadium could be razed to make way for development, he adds, “They are capable of destroying everything.”

Yet , while in the stands overlooking the football field, he points—with the knowing smile of a man who has seen what is now history—to the spot where General Charles de Gaulle made his 1966 Phnom Penh speech. He reminisces about the buffalo carts that carried the earth to build the stadium mount and the shaky introduction of motor vehicles. (A man flipped a construction truck into a pond and had to leap out “like a frog.”)

At every one of his works on the circuit—the Foreign Language Institute, the Olympic stadium, the Chaktomuk Theater and the Senate—he speaks with pride of his creations.

“He is someone who is fascinated and fascinating,” said Alain Arnaudet, director of the French Cultural Center, by telephone Friday. “It is rare to have the chance to bring together in the same place an architect and his work.“

The rarity of the occasion wasn’t lost on many: When the two planned busses quickly filled, Vann Molyvann enthusiasts took to motos and tuk-tuks, forming a motorcade of sorts for the 81-year-old architect.

“Vann Molyvann is my superstar,” said Yam Sok Ly, a 24-year-old architecture student at the Royal University of Fine Arts who found a seat on a bus. “It’s not because he is famous; it’s because of his ideas,” he said, adding he was inspired by Vann Molyvann’s use of natural ventilation and hoped to create “a building that’s really suitable for Cambodia, not a building that’s suitable for air con.”

But in most of the buildings shown, natural ventilations had been cut off with glass windows and open spaces filled up with more construction. At the Foreign Language Institute, for instance, Vann Molyvann had designed science labs with openings in the ceiling to shine natural light on each lab bench. With the room transformed into a language classroom, the architect’s choice now makes little sense.

With humor, Vann Molyvann apologizes for such modifications. He laughs off the destruction of his building for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers—“Here is the New Khmer Architecture,” he said jokingly, pointing to the glass structure of the new, Chinese-made building.

But his smile fades when the conversation invariably returns to the current evolution of the capital.

“Everywhere [in the world] you have parks that are not sacrificed to build Chinese blocks. That doesn’t exist in civilized countries,” he says of the filling of Boeng Kak lake.  “Internationally, there is absolutely no government that expropriates land to serve private interests.”

Things could be different, Vann Molyvann argues. In the doctoral thesis he recently defended at a Paris university and that he is making into a book, Vann Molyvann presents a development plan for Phnom Penh, Siem Reap-Angkor and Sihanoukville that centers on water: irrigation, potable water distribution, flood control and the development of coherent cities around their water points. (Vann Molyvann will present this thesis at a lecture in French and Khmer at 6.30 pm Thursday at the French Cultural Center.)

“We tried, for the city of Phnom Penh in particular, to develop normally with an urban plan…. We thought we were going toward a strong democratization of Cambodia,” he says of the early 1990s, when he returned from exile and helped draft building and zoning codes that could improve and preserve capital. But, “there’s no political will to enforce them.”