orld Music sections of a record store often have a distinctive ambience: sound-proofed from the rest of the store and lined with pretty-pictured CDs as glossy as tourist brochures. Some of the more studious compilations are soberly packaged and annotated, as if scientific findings from far-off lands. Whether the packaging is flashy or serious, the music tends towards the controlled, the sanitised.

Sublime Frequencies' involvement in World Music takes a different tack, delighting in the unpredictable, the inexplicable and the bizarre. The label curators are more like eccentric nineteenth-century travelling aristocrats than simple tourists, returning home with untamed and obscure musical treasures that even they haven't quite figured out yet. It’s a strategy that has won as many critics as fans, but this CD of Cambodian pop is exhilarating precisely because of the lack of context. It’s a punch you didn’t see coming.

Cambodian Cassette Archives is certainly many removes away from presenting an objective picture of this mysterious genre. Some of the tracks were original songs cobbled together in Cambodia prior to the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge, but most were versions made much later by exiled ex-pats; when these tapes were discovered in Oakland public library, they were even slowly being erased by accident. Behind the music is a murky history—one of disintegration, of both a country and its culture.

Yet the music behind this story exudes a magically postivistic ethos of musical synthesis and reintegration. It’s as if the Cambodian pop producers on the CD were engaged in a struggle to heal over cultural and temporal wounds—pop music is after all a celebration, and the nameless musicians on the CD (many tracks are, due to circumstances, untitled and uncredited) would rather build new, idealistic pop idylls than waste time seeing old musics fall apart.

Each track is a minor miracle of pop miniaturisation, encapsulating multiple ideas and forcing them into compatibility through sheer joi de vivre. Bubblegum pop and hi-NRG are a recurrent, irrepressible energy source; dubby and phased psychedelic production shows a taste for cheap sonic thrills; reggae makes cameo appearances, in modes ranging from deep roots to carefree pop.

These influences are laid on thick and pungent, making Cambodian Tape Archives a playground of production styles. Lee Perry’s music seems emaciated compared to the almost edible layer of phase on top of one song. Vocals are subject to a seemingly omnipresent echo treatment, which makes the female vocals as shrill and urgent as prayer-calls. If Joe Meek was holed up in a Cambodian jungle studio with venerable folk musicians and Cambodian pop divas, they might have crafted a sound like this.

Even within the time frame of a pop song, the ability to mutate and subvert pop structures here is astonishing. A three-minute pop song develops a crack-like addiction to heavy rock, ending up with more guitar solos than choruses. “Don’t Let My Girlfriend Tickle Me”, credited to Sim Sisamouth, begins with a thirty-second burst of Wacky Races style cartoon music, before kicking back into a psychedelic R & B shouter. A two-minute track blares out repeated bubblegum choruses with the infectious optimism of a Japanese TV advert.

If there is a kinship between the music and advertising, it could suggest why much of this music, which so nearly slipped into the sands of time, now sounds so modern. Cambodian pop would be blaring out from radios and cheap music systems in bustling shops and bars, where only the most immediate musical ingredients—the fresh production flavours, mad pop experiments and novelty twists found here—would have the hook needed to force their way into your consciousness. It makes Cambodian Cassette Archives perhaps the ultimate in disposable pop thrills.

A flipside to this disposability is the haunting, confused historical context behind the music—every momentary musical thrill is also a record of time past, and these tapes seem like lost bulletins from a country in radical flux, a William Burroughs-esque interzone haunted by war and political unrest. In the end, however, it’s simply the electric thrill of the music itself that makes this release so essential. This degree of musical liberation is sublimely bewildering to the Western mindset, and it’s all done in the name of pop. A wild, weird and raw release, Sublime Frequencies have brought back a slice of pop music that is not so much exotic as from another dimension entirely.