On a rooftop in Phnom Penh, at a riverside bar called Chew & Bash where the Mekong and the Bassac meet below, a grassroots radio station went live for the first time on the 1st of August 2024. Cambodia Community Radio broadcast that night from seven to ten, built on a conviction its founders had carried for a while: that Cambodia's music had never been given a proper channel to the rest of the world. The recording room was open to the public from the start. That was the whole point.
A rooftop open to the city
Cambodia Community Radio was co-founded by Rowan Steele and Myroslaw Bytz; Bytz also founded Da Nang Community Radio over in Vietnam. They set it up as an online station that records in the open, on the roof at Chew & Bash, where each broadcast premiered on YouTube and new shows landed every couple of weeks. The station calls itself grassroots, a platform to unite Cambodia's music scenes and carry their sounds to a wider world. Every session pairs Cambodian artists with guests from elsewhere, so a local selector shares a bill with someone who flew in. Nothing about it is closed off; the recording happens with an audience in the room.
Who has broadcast from the rooftop
The first broadcast set the template. It brought together Kaza from Cambodia, Rowan Steele, and Biliguudei from Mongolia, whom Mixmag Asia has called the country's unparalleled techno warrior. For a premiere in Phnom Penh to pull a Mongolian techno artist into the room says something about how far the station was already reaching. The second broadcast, two weeks later, paired Maily from Cambodia with Cyril Grouvel, who works between France and Cambodia. Two sessions in, the signal was already crossing borders.
What Phnom Penh gets from it
The sessions are free and open, which counts for a lot in a scene that has had few rooms of its own. Cambodia Community Radio gives the country's artists a place to play and a broadcast that lives on afterward, and it puts them on the same bill as international guests rather than in a smaller category of their own. The ambition was never modest.
Part of the coalition
That instinct, Cambodia first and the wider world alongside it, is what makes Cambodia Community Radio a natural part of Airtime Asia: the independent, decentralized coalition of underground radio stations from across the continent. The tie runs deeper than most. Bytz, who co-founded the station, also directs Airtime Asia, so the coalition and one of its stations were built by the same hand. From the 13th to the 16th of August 2026, those stations gather across Da Nang and Hoi An in Vietnam, with Sok Visal of KlapYaHandz, Justfin Live, and LnHD carrying the Cambodia signal into the lineup.
Feed your mind with high frequency vibrations. Join us in the Airtime.
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