This year, the rains have been slow to come. Yields are in doubt amid talk of a sustained drought that may not only affect the rice – of which Thailand is the world’s leading exporter – but basic water reserves as well. The government is making price guarantees etc.

Since there aren’t many farms left in Bangkok, the issue can feel a little distant in daily life, even though the drought is a problem here, too. Downpours definitely happen, but most of them are very brief. An hour at 3:00 in the morning one night, another twenty minutes the next afternoon. The temperature briefly drops, which is nice, but the storms are so heavy that they can also leave side streets severely flooded for a little while while drainage systems creak beneath the load. These aren’t monsoon rains, but they are angry.

On Thursday, WV took cover in a Skytrain station during a heavy mini-storm. A freight train passed east to west.

The (long-delayed; sorry) second episode of “Bangkok is Ringing,” a podcast series about the politics of sound in Bangkok, is now up here at the excellent Triple Canopy. Future episodes will air ~monthly.

Enjoy!

Isaan songs are usually melancholy – perfect for drinking. A neighborhood man sitting in front of a shophouse the other morning knocked back a few Leos and started singing along.

Song: ช้ำรักจากเมืองชล (“Bruised Love from Chonburi”)
Written and originally performed by: Chatri Sichon
Covered here by: Ekkachai Siwichai

Life is hard for a poor person from Chonburi
Have a little pity for me
Don’t keep me waiting long
Take my love and let’s join hands

Although I’m very poor and needy
I’ll always be rich in some ways
I’ll try to provide for you
Listen to my rambling song and have sympathy

It hurts leaving Chonburi
I’ve gotta press on, endure the fire of sadness
Til the dying breath of love
Meet my new boss
My heart is lovesick

etc.

Thanks to Peter and WS for help with track ID and translation.

This was especially true for the networks of small-scale industrial/manufacturing labor situated on back streets, away from the main traffic arteries. These networks are vast and often informal, but they provide vital services for a big city and employ many people. Some businesses are run out of storefront machine shops, while others use little more than a patch of sidewalk. We’re talking small engine repair, recycling collection, welding, wire-stripping, and the like.

This montage includes five examples of the sounds of urban labor in a tense time. Each is about one minute; follow the annotations below as you listen.

0:00 – 1:07 A recycling facility on a large side street supports many young men in the neighborhood, who gather paper, cardboard, and plastic bottles from nearby buildings and bring them in for 2 baht per kilogram. Here, two men crush cans and stuff them into big clear bags, which they load onto a cart.

1:08 – 2:01 In the United States, ice cream trucks are just about the only mobile sonic advertisements we have. In Thailand, there’s a greater variety, including fruit trucks with speakers tied to the top, so the driver can call out that day’s price for mangosteens and lychees. In this recording, a mobile broom-and-bucket-shop plays its jingle again and again. Sonic ads for all kinds of businesses are more tolerated here, for whatever reason.

2:02 – 3:08 A welder fixes up a door. This neighborhood is a mixture of large, modern houses, international schools, and blue-collar family homes. Many of the blue-collar workers do construction work for their wealthier neighbors.

3:09 – 3:50 A pair of young men hammer thin metal poles into shape for use in construction.

3:51 – 5:45 Some of the more established shops supply parts for larger industries, including automobile manufacturing. Since most of the cars built in Thailand will be exported to other countries, these small shops are closely connected to global trade. As you can hear an example of from about five minutes onward, news reports were often the soundtrack to these shops in April and May.

The same sounds, repeated again and again, compel us to hear melodies and rhythms we usually ignore. Say the same word the same way fifteen times out loud – cookiecookicookiecookiecookiecookiecookicookiecookiecookiecookiecookicookiecookiecookie – and you’ll begin to hear it in new ways. It will seem both more and less familiar, more and less strange. You’ll notice pitch and texture irrespective of meaning.

A visit to the Bangkok Metropolitan Electricity Authority reminded me of this effect two weeks ago. You can usually pay your electric bill at the nearest 7-11, but if you’re delinquent like I was this month, you have to brave the buses on busy Rama IV Road and haul it over to the central office.

When I went, there were at least one hundred people chatting and killing time in the waiting room. I took a number. The process was so efficient that the automated voice was calling numbers in direct, almost uninterrupted succession for minutes at a time. I made this recording while waiting for my number:

For each announcement, the automated female voice began by saying Maai Laehk, which means “number.” Maai has a rising tone; you say it by starting from a low pitch and ending on a higher one. Laehk has a falling pitch; you start with a high pitch and end on a low one. Next, the voice announces the number, and since different Thai numbers have different tones, this introduces some variation. Then she says Deern Tawng, which means (roughly) “walk to.” Deern has a middle tone; you say it without any special inflection. Tawng has a falling tone. Finally, the voice announces the number of the desk that’s just opened up. Then back to the beginning.

The sameness/predictability of the announcement brings out the music in the automated voice, especially if you listen for it. In the middle of a tremendously boring situation, this kind of hearing can be a defense mechanism, a way of stepping away mentally for a moment.

Fashioning political analogies out of allusions to local religion, cycle and repetition have become a trope in recent reports from Bangkok. The reporters ask: is any of this really new? Is this place trapped in a cycle of suffering?

I’ll ask a different question: Are people hearing music here now? And answer it: yes, but music is not always beautiful.

This recording was made walking counterclockwise around the grounds of Wat Phrathat Hariphunchai, a Thai Buddhist temple built in the late 9th century. The temple is in the city of Lamphun, not too far from Chiang Mai. Its highlights are a giant golden umbrella and a purported relic of the Buddha’s hair. (One strand.)

From the beginning of the piece, a man speaks into a microphone. He repeats a short script with an insistent cadence that becomes musical after a while.

Around 1:10, I reach some candles burning at the rear of the chedi, placed in a trough and lit by worshippers. The candles must have been made out of some kind of fat; they sizzled loudly for a long time.

The UFO-like Chedi (inner memorial hall)

Dhammakaya is a very new movement within Buddhism, and breaks from many of its classical precepts. As a philosophy, it has roots in the early 20th century, with a revered monk named Luang Phor Sodh who purportedly rediscovered a long-lost method of attaining enlightenment. In fact, the current sect is a posthumous interpretation of Luang Phor’s teachings that wasn’t founded until the 1970s, and its leaders are at least as successful as entrepreneurs as they are as philosophers. Their brand of Buddhism could be justly compared to any number of religious movements around the world that seek to make worship relevant to the moods and mores of modern life.

This includes, for example, an overt and intimate connection between material wealth and spirituality. Pictured below is a bag, distributed by the temple for carrying shoes while indoors, adorned with Dhammakaya’s official slogan: “Quickly Rich/Powerfully Rich/Thoroughly Rich”

Relevance also means heaps of technology. And size. The central building of the wat looks a lot like an airplane hangar (note the people at the bottom of the photo for scale), complete with a logo that evokes a disc-shaped aircraft set to launch.

From the inside, see the tall ceilings, open spacing, and minimal design. The woman blurred at the front is on her cell phone.

There didn’t seem to be a single point in the entire complex where one was out of view of a television, or out of earshot of a mounted Bose speaker. Between the morning and afternoon meditation sessions, a panel of young men and women chatted and laughed at a long table, talk show-style, their faces and voices amplifying throughout the vast terminal. Though there must have been hundreds of small televisions, the two largest screens, standing some fifteen feet tall, flanked the main stage, on which a group of novice monks sat in a geometrical array on top of a dais shaped exactly like the other building, the aircraft/Chedi. During the talk show, the presenters appeared on the screens as gigantic talking heads; when formal meditation began, they were replaced by blue orb graphics and fiery orange Buddhas. Whoever orchestrated the program most certainly understood color theory.

My companion described all of this as a great example of the Thai concept of Riyap Raawy, or perfect orderliness. Every element of the space, from load-bearing poles to floor mats to the seating arrangement of worshippers, was made absolutely uniform. And thanks to the even distribution of media, every person in the wat could see and hear clearly from anywhere – this is critical, since the space is touted as being able to accommodate a stunning one million devotees at a time.

There are certainly examples from throughout history of religious structures that, like Wat Dhammakaya, were built to be huge and awesome (in the biblical sense), and to thus give everyone the sense that they were encountering transcendence. This experience is often audible. For example, in the whispering gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the acoustics allow you to hear another person with perfect clarity, even if they’re fifty feet away and whispering. The inner dome of the Taj Mahal has a similar effect. In both cases, the echoes suggest a sublime unity between the speaker, the space, and the cosmos – even the slightest utterance resonates everywhere. Upon speaking, you get the feeling that all things are connected.

However, the technological space of Wat Dhammakaya, although relentlessly amplified, works differently.

Around thirty seconds into the recording, we start to hear two speakers go out of phase, just a few milliseconds off from each other. The slight delay makes the voices (these are the talk show hosts again) sound warbly. Here, we become aware that this isn’t actually a space of unity, but of total atomization. For each area in the temple, there is a separate set of speakers – in accord with the mandate of mass media, each person is addressed in his own world. Although everyone hears the same thing, they never actually hear together, from the same source. In certain moments, such as when the speakers go out of phase, we overhear that others are also hearing, but the possibilities for joining them are limited. The only way to get the message is through your own private equipment. For a sect so focused on personal development, becoming thoroughly rich, and so on, this seems poetic.

To play legally, street musicians in Bangkok must be licensed. The licenses restrict when and where one can play – unlike some cities, the subway is not at all fair game – but they also protect musicians from getting hassled by the cops or anyone else.

The fellow we met was blind – music is a common vocation here for people with disabilities. Like many people from the rural Northeast, he came to Bangkok because he was no longer able to make a living in the provinces.

The field recording above has two parts. First, a song, and then (around 4:00) a short conversation, translated within the audio. The piece he’s playing is Northeastern string music, and he’s accompanied here by recorded drums from a tape deck. You see the instrument, the Phin, pretty often on the street, but the double-necked version is rare. Thanks to B for help with translation.

WV recently came across an impromptu bar set up on the sidewalk of a decently trafficked road in the middle of Bangkok. The proprietor, a 34-year old Bangkok man, has been running the place for about eight months. Against a corrugated metal fence that hides an empty field, he set up one big pink light and one big blue one, and in front of the fence an array of tables and chairs. A small shelving unit holds mixers and a selection of whiskeys and vodkas. He DJs from an ipod plugged into a small but pretty loud pair of speakers.

The bar exploits the same kind of free space as an average street stall – indeed, it might occupy the exact real estate of a daytime noodle stand – but its decor clearly hews to a “hi-so” (short for high society) aesthetic. The music, to a song, could be Hot 97, and there’s a kitschy, if never quite ironic vibe, in everything from the vintage furniture to the small plate of potato chips that comes with each drink.

One of the best things about this lounge is how unexpected it is. Without the festive lighting and pop music cranked up to fill the block, the corner would feel pretty dead, precisely as it had the last several nights when I walked by the exact same empty spot. This street has some foot traffic, but most of the restaurants are quiet, indoor-type spots, with little or no presence on the sidewalk. Cocktail’s Lounge stands out sharply.

As the owner explained to me in the recording above (right after you hear the music mixing with a sputtering tuk-tuk engine), he was able to set up shop without receiving zoning permission from the city because his brother is a police officer. He’s certainly lucky in this respect, as others in his situation would have to pay a bribe.

After closing up for the night, the owner said, he planned to join the evening’s rally.

Although the sheer variety of training routines is extraordinary and includes many very different kinds of practices, much of what occurs in this park is geared toward achieving unity and discipline. People of all ages and ethnicities work toward a kind of heightened togetherness; very few people do anything alone, and there are almost no competitive sports. Disciplining oneself to match the teacher or the group is the most typical goal for those who come to the park.

This video documents a half hour between 7:30 and 8:00 yesterday morning in Lumphini, from a singing class to an aerobics club. In between the action, everyone pauses for the public recitation of the national anthem, which happens twice a day, every day, at 8:00AM and 6:00PM. In fact, the anthem is broadcast over mounted loudspeakers in nearly every public place in the entire country at these times, as well as on television. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, you stop in your tracks and stand still for the song. In crowded or otherwise fast-moving places, this is quite a sight. The anthem, and the specific way that it gets recited, are deployed as regular reminders of state sovereignty, and of each individual’s place in a Thai nation that is supposed to stand as a single, unfractured entity. This video is thus a vignette about the pursuit of unity.