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.

Klong Toey market is a sprawling way station for something like half of the produce that reaches Bangkok’s restaurants every day, and no small amount of its meat and home goods either. Industrial-sized clear garbage bags full of limes are tossed from the backs of trucks, palettes of morning glory and parsley block the footpath, and whole pigs dangle freshly- swaying gutted at face level. It’s a bit horrific, not to mention a surrealist triumph of sorts.

Klong Toey is not at all for tourists. I saw no others and felt more than a few confused vendors’ eyes on me. The real action happens around four or five in the morning, with a noticeable slowdown by seven. As eight rolls around, the choice stuff is long gone. Some of the vendors, all but sold out, fold up their tables and enjoy a beer after a long night’s work. Come eleven AM, the place is a ghost town.

In addition to being gory and temporally inconvenient, Klong Toey is situated near one of the rougher areas of the city, a slum by the same name. The market is generally under the influence of the mafia and drug dealers who hold power in much of the slum. Every couple years, a bomb goes off late at night in the market, often with fatal results, as a warning shot in a turf war over stall position.

Given this humorlessness, it is undoubtedly a luxury to be able to aestheticize the sights and sounds of the market. And yet those dimensions are compelling. Like any tight and crowded space with a lot at stake, the vendors have refined a system of niche-based shouting to convey meaning amid the noise. What sounds like utter chaos to outsiders actually involves many layers of address – product pitches come one way, warnings to clear the path another, and machines another still. There is a kind of ecosystem at work:

Airline toothbrush seller, Klong Toey Marker. November, 2010. 3:01.

In this, a woman who got her hands on a bunch of airline freebies – toothbrushes, toiletry cases, eye pillows – is selling them for rock-bottom prices near a cooler of cold drinks, aided by a tape-recorded advertisement plugged in to a little bullhorn.

The repetitive, mechanical voice of the recording occupies a unique niche adjacent to the warmth of human chatter. The vendor echoes and so punctuates her own tape.

–

Many vendors also keep pets in the market. Cats and dogs, just like on the side streets in the rest of the city, may or may not have homes, but people look after them as a good deed, a means of what’s often called making merit. (This commitment is motivated, to varying degrees, by Buddhist principles). Thus the market is filled with mangy, un-spayed or -neutered, but nevertheless well-fed animals.

In addition to cats and dogs, people keep songbirds in wooden cages above the front of their stalls. These are kept specifically for the beauty of their voices, as aural trimming:

Songbirds in Klong Toey market. November, 2010. 2:01.

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The market, having been active for decades, is … seasoned. The people and objects that make it up have spent many years jostling for space (physical, political, sonic) until things have settled into a raging stasis. The result is not pretty in a conventional sense, save for the odd perfect pineapple, but there is grandeur in the coexistence of messy details, in the way that everything manages to work.

A vendor rolls coconuts into a basin:

Rolling coconuts in Klong Toey market. November, 2010. 1:51.

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.

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.

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.

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.