This last episode takes us through some of the distinct sonic spaces of the 2010-2011 Red Shirt protests. The diversity of these spaces tells us something important about the movement, namely that it’s heterogeneous. The language of protest movements is often compressed by the media until it fits a single index of complaint – unequal rights, no jobs, censorship – and the Red Shirt movement was no exception. But protests are rarely that simple. People have all kinds of motivations for turning to dissent, and protesters often disagree with each other. Such (very normal) internal difference (see: Wall Street, Occupy) is taken by some as a signal that movements are disorganized, or at the extreme even pointless.

We might have to work a little harder to find patterns, but there are always patterns. History, anyway, will sort things out one way or another. But we can understand a lot in our own time. In the case of the Red Shirt protests, they raged with noise always, and that noise (music, speeches, conversation, etc.) was rich in meaning. The question is, what did we hear?

Or listen to it right here:

This episode discusses the state of the radio in Bangkok, with a focus on the recent history of Luk Thung stations. Briefly, Luk Thung is a genre with a strange double status, being both very popular and yet classed as old-fashioned. You hear this music all the time and everywhere – on the street, in cabs, in restaurants. Luk Thung is a big-time marker of displaced rural identity, which naturally alienates urbanites who hear its sounds as low-brow. And yet, today, the hundreds of thousands of migrants from the provinces who live and work in Bangkok are urbanites themselves. The tension in this transformation toward a new urban laboring class is never more obvious than when listening to people listen to the radio.

I spent a day interviewing Bangkokians, including street vendors who had their radios switched on while they worked, as well as teenagers in the mall whose lives seem to revolve around what they download onto MP3 players/cell phones. On another day I visited Jenphop Jopgrabuanwan, a former Luk Thung singer who now runs a community radio station (also available online)/CD shop, and generously answers questions about the history of the genre for anyone interested.

For those who know Luk Thung well, I apologize for any explanatory reductions in talking about Luk Thung and Mor Lam. There’s plenty more to say about the huge differences between these styles, but for the sake of clarity they are collapsed a bit in the episode.

Huge thanks to P.D. and J.J. especially, as well as Peter G., James M. and all others who provided input and suggestions.

Or listen to it right here:

A slideshow to accompany the piece:

Bangkok is a hot, humid, smelly, flashy, loud city. As with many metropolitan areas, this is a big part of its appeal. Lots of people are doing lots of (very different) things in a small space. The bustle is fun.

But eventually, the stress of the crowd compels people of means to differentiate their experiences from those who have less. They want to shop and work in spaces parallel to those that have been overrun, where sensation has become for them overwhelming. So new channels are carved. The city becomes sedimented, with layers corresponding to something like class. Money, or lack of it, enforces access to these layers, but so do composure and habit. (This theme was also explored in the 1983 documentary, Trading Places). The third episode of Bangkok is Ringing explores what different layers of transportation in Thailand’s capital sound like.

Division is now very much at issue in Thailand. This episode is part of a broader effort to understand division – what it feels like, why it’s happening.

The recording doesn’t sound like much on computer speakers, but with stereo separation (such as on headphones) the lateral motion of the volley is strongly pronounced. And the ball makes a cool noise when it rolls.

Players engage in all manner of flips and bicycle kicks, attacking the net to spike like volleyball players except with their bodies sideways or upside down to give the feet better position. This, of course, makes hitting the ball squarely a matter of greater coordination.

Takraw is a rarity in Thailand for being a very vocal game. Teammates shout to each other to coordinate their kicks, and opponents taunt each other good-naturedly. This particular match was played on a court next to several other courts – some for takraw, others for basketball, still others for regular volleyball. The basketball players, who pass selflessly in a way one doesn’t often see in pick-up games, are practically silent by comparison.

The takraw group wore squeaky, flat-bottomed canvas sneakers – school uniform standard. Two adults played against three students. I have no idea who won.

Last week, PD and I went to a carnival near Din Daeng. The main attraction was an outdoor Lam Sing performance starring จีรพันธ์ แว่นระเว่ and วัชราภรณ์สมสุข, which was just getting good when a heavy rainfall ended the night prematurely. Here is a snippet of the show, complete with a dramatic build-up and some positive mid-song adjustments to the mix:

Also noteworthy were the barkers outside of the concert. One in particular struck our ears. He worked a booth where customers threw rattan balls at whiteboards emblazoned with pictures of Mickey. The prize for hitting Mickey three times in a row was a stuffed animal. (Not bottles of cheap whiskey, as at several of the other booths.)

The text of her shirt reads: “Sunday feel the holiday atmosphere please. Here is heaven on earth.”

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.

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.

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.