One Los Angelino musician had to quit his day job. One Cambodian singer had to chang her life. A bit player had to almost die contracting the disease that's the garage band's namesake.

It's a winding tale. Accordions were involved.

"I played accordion at a buddy's wedding in Philly," says Ethan Holtzman, Farfisa player and Dengue Fever leader, by phone. After sharing techniques with me, a fellow accordionist, Holtzman asks: "Are there thunderstorms? It was insane with thunder and lightning when I was there three years ago."

Um, no it doesn't always thunder and rain here.

But Dengue Fever makes noisy psychedelic pop that's like a thunder's clap — a sweet collision of singer Ch'hom Nimol's cool demure voice against the heat of revved-up garage noise.

Done with instrumentation rarely heard in psych-garage (hard sax, mono-stringed dan bau) it's a giddy hyper-snort that fills Escape from Dragon House, their sophomore CD.

"It's great playing with saws and guitars," says Holtzman, a Tom Waits freak in love with twisted arrangements. The Bollywood ambience of Escape signals as much.

But like Cambodian fuzztone classics from Meas Samoun and Ros Sereysothea, Dengue is rooted in a snarling swirl of simple pop melody not unlike, say, ?Mark and the Mysterians.

Nimol's tender Khmer vocals bring calm to the storm.

"The melody might be simple but my vocal has to change every time," says Nimol, her tiny voice shaded by broken English, about the problems she has with intoning through Western melody.

"But that's what made doing a Cambodian rock band cool," Holtzman emphasizes. "Nimol's vocals are an instrument. We didn't know what her lyrics meant at first. So it was just this sound that snaked through our songs."

Besides, convention hasn't ruled Holtzman's life.

He was working as a case manager for the mentally ill in Topanga Canyon, California logging 60 hour weeks when he quit his job, gave up his apartment, and bought a one-way-ticket to Southeast Asia and a backpack.

Once abroad, Hotlzman filled his bag with cassettes of native rock he found and bought a dan bau — an electric fretless one-string lap-steel with a whammy bar — after seeing Vietnamese street musicians jamming with the instrument.

Holtzman too became intimately acquainted with the haunting sounds of Cambodian pop legend Sinn Sisamouth when a mate named Ross and he were forced to ride in a pick up truck across rickety rope bridges in order to get to the hospital. The reason? Ross contracted Dengue Fever. "He was in constant state of turning different colors," says Holtzman. But the truck driver had tapes of Sisamouth during their trek to the hospital. So Ross' near-death was worth the vomiting.

"We never stayed in touch, Ross and I," Holtzman laughs sheepishly.

Two years after his trip Ethan and brother Zac decided to make a Cambodian garage act with Spaghetti Western guitars and pumping Farfisas. They had plenty of musician pals, some of whom have played with Beck and the Radar Brothers. Forming Dengue Fever was easy.

"But wouldn't it be great if we could find a Cambodian singer?" says Holtzman, reliving that first moment.

Somewhere in suburb of LA at about the same time, Nimol was working in a restaurant, the Dragon House, hostess-ing and singing in a house band that played three nights a week. "Mostly traditional music, some pop as well as the cha cha cha," said Nimol.

She'd gotten to Cali by way of Minnesota and had been entertaining since her childhood in Cambodia. "I wasn't a very good singer," she said with a giggle. But that didn't stop her from, at age 16, doing what sounds like a live TV version of Cambodian Idol. "I got number one best spot."

The Shangri-Las-like vocalist got another chance when Ethan — traveling through the Little Phnom Penn park of Silverlake auditioning singers — found Nimol at the Dragon House.

"She had a shine in her eyes and great command, like a princess," says Holtzman.

After the rigors of convincing her family Dengue Fever was trustworthy ("Go away! Nimol no sing with you" shouts Holtzman imitatively) the voice and presence that filled the Dragon would come to fill their albums.

There are sad stories like Nimol's boy-leaving-girl mini-drama that lines the prayerful "Sleepwalking Through the Mekong." And the lyrics Nimol co-written with the boys in the band about the female singers of Vietnam forced to sing to their death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in "One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula."

"Cambodian people understand my song," says Nimol in a near whisper, her throat sore from singing the night previous. Learning to sing American chord structures and western melodies is difficult.

"It's not easy... it's not. There are lots of high key changes and the improvising is something I've never done. But it's getting more pleasurable all the time. "

(a_amorosi@citypaper)