Neo Geodesia - Oknha Stamina (2026)

Oknha (Khmer: ឧកញ៉ា, Ŏknha [ʔok.ɲaː]) is a Khmer honorific. It has different meanings depending on the period it was used.

“I prefer to use the modern title for the new elite of Cambodia”

Oknha Stamina, Neo Geodesia’s latest release on Chinabot, reimagines traditional Cambodian martial arts music for the chaotic modern era

Inspired by sport and political clashes, the album explores the spectacle of power and conflict

Continuing his unique musical vision, Oknha Stamina merges classical Khmer pinpeat and vong pleng pradal with powerviolence and electronic experimentation

Traditional Cambodian orchestral music is reinterpreted for the chaotic and fragmented modern era in Neo Geodesia’s new album Oknha Stamina, his latest release on Chinabot. Inspired by the elaborate musical accompaniment to Khmer boxing, the album explores the parallels sport has with the ritualistic, gamified and violent dance of power in Cambodian and global politics. Oknha Stamina is a complex, whirling exploration of both the unifying and divisive power of sports.

The Cambodian honorific title of ‘oknha’, roughly equivalent to the British title of ‘lord’, is given to the elite upper class and cronies of Cambodia’s current ruling family. “The title Oknha Stamina is a metaphorical exploration of the entertainment of the elites from ancient times until the modern day,” says Saphy Vong, the artist behind Neo Geodesia. “But I also want to show sport’s playfulness with dancing, spiritual practice, ancestral worship, ceremonies, entertainment and community in street sport.”
The album often also references fight video game music from the 90s, like Fatal Fury or The Kings of Fighters. The Japanese creators “managed to bring an interesting idea of electronic music with martial art sounds,” says Vong. “My favourite one was the theme of Fatal Fury’s Joe Higashi mixing Muay Thai and electronics.”

Oknha Stamina draws heavily on the tradition of ‘vong pleng pradal’, which translates as ‘boxing orchestra,’ played before and during traditional Kun Khmer martial arts fights. The sport is so ancient it is depicted in Angkor Wat’s stone carvings and historically featured poor Cambodians entering often deadly combats to entertain elite society. The tradition was almost wiped out by the Khmer Rouge, who singled out musicians in their genocidal campaign. “Without teachers, I’ve decided to create my own version of Khmer music for a new era,” says Vong.

Title track Oknha Stamina reimagines this musical tradition, deploying a bouncing Khmer bamboo xylophone called a roneat. Soundtracking an imaginary conflict, its frenzied tempo changes recall not just the fluctuating rhythm of a boxing match, but Vong’s other great musical influence growing up in France in the 1990s: the punk subgenre powerviolence.

Powerviolence merges with pinpeat, the ceremonial music of the royal courts and temples of Cambodia, on the following track Phalanx Bodies. The two combine to create a track that holds both the aggression of hardcore and metal with the complexity and polyrhythms of jazz and the pentatonic scales of pinpeat. “I wanted to push the sound of my compositions into more extreme and chaotic territory with frequent shifts in tempo and dynamics and by tension and release of catharsis,” says Vong.

Written during the UK’s immigration riots of 2024, which saw attacks on migrant hotels, Phalanx Bodies explores the conflict and division sewn by the far right. “It made me really angry, as a refugee who restarted life in a refugee shelter,” says Vong. “But at the mass counter-protest in Brighton [where Vong currently lives], it was beautiful to see the phalanx against three racist thugs.”

Singer Alonē Etimis joints Vong on Tropaion, an epic minimal wave track recalling Chris and Cosey and Skinny Puppy. The song was inspired by the contentification of conflict and genocide, from the bombing of Gaza to the recent skirmishes on the Thai-Cambodia border that saw dozens killed, all rendered into decontextualised snippets on social media.

The latter conflict provides inspiration for the following track Temps Mort for 8 Limbs, whose rhythms and melodies that resemble Khmer folk lullabies. In contrast to the enchanting ambient soundscape, the title references the Art of Eight Limbs, a nickname for Muay Thai, and imagines a monstrous embodiment of a nationalist troll on social media, which became conflict’s second battleground. Translating as ‘time out’ from French, Temps Mort marks a break in a battle or sport and comes in the middle of the album.

Dream Team and Preah Khan, an epic, polyphonic, ambient track with an accompanying 3D animated video, tells the story of the Preah Khan Reach, the magical Khmer royal sacred sword. The album was started during a four-month stay in the Cambodian seaside village of Kep, which was once a popular retreat for the French colonial elite, and still holds a community of older French expats with a strong nostalgia for French Indochina. The surreal, atmospheric video for Dream Team of Preah Khan takes place in a hallucinatory landscape that recalls Kep, but with its contradictory beauty and dark history made explicit.

The track and video draw inspiration from the women reclaiming power through sport despite cultural taboos, from Khmer wrestler Chov Sotheara to the diverse women of the French national women’s football team, many of whom, like Vong, come from the country’s poor city suburbs. It features an imaginary sports team of women escaping through a kaleidoscope of powerful forces draining contemporary Cambodia, from exploitative garment production to sand dredging and artefact theft, as they reclaim possession of the Preah Khan Reach. Like the album itself, it explores Vong’s unique and powerful point of view, in which history and contemporary politics is refracted into a rich and surreal explosion of colour and sound.