KUANTALAENG by Pisitakun

“When you hear the sound system in the morning and smell a big hit from the chili and fish sauce, it means we have a ceremony happening,” says Pisitakun Kuantalaeng, remembering the local festivals that bring together every small town in his home country, Thailand. After moving from Bangkok to Porto in 2021, before eventually settling in Berlin, his new album on Chinabot acts as a wild, vertiginous, homesick ride through Thailand, as intensely flavoured as any of the food each track is named after.

This album “Kuantalaeng”, his third solo release on Chinabot, riffs on the Thai-language translation of his last name [ควรแถลง], which means “should make a statement”. As reflected in the playful tracklisting and album art, he imagines the album as a recreation of his homeland, showing real wistful longing while making a sly dig at the naive vision of Thailand as it’s understood in his new home in Europe.

“The image of Thailand is the food and the traveling,” he says. “Many times, when you have a conversation with your friend in another country, they will mention the food or the travels from Thailand. There are Thai restaurants everywhere in Europe that present this Thai image. But the thing that is in my mind is politics.” Thailand’s powerful tourism industry also works to eclipse its grim political reality, which recently saw a democratically elected political party get blocked from power by allies of the monarchy and military in the Senate.

“Kuantalaeng” seeks to balance this perception, facing its seemingly endless political problems head on while celebrating regional Thai culture. The album captures the joyful spirit of rural and suburban festivals, where you’ll find food stalls, religious ceremonies, traditional แตรวง, a kind of brass band, and huge, colourful trucks blasting รถแห่ “rod hare” music accompanied by dancers.

Opener Khao Soi, named after the bright orange spicy soup, captures the sensory overload of these celebrations, as well as the dark, distorted current below, a political reality which, by law, cannot be publicly spoken about fully. Like much of the album, the conflicting pressures to stay quiet and to “make a statement” collide into a noisy palimpsest of rod hare, techno and experimental noise.
The uncanny party continues in Gaeng Som, in which complex, springy electronics dance around a speaker-fried luk thung beat. In contrast, the contemplative track Pad Siew uses a sample of a pi mon, a reed instrument used in traditional Thai music, building a mournful, winding call drifting like woodsmoke over the soft guitar.
“The thing that reminds me of Thailand the most is the food and the sounds,” Kuantalaeng says. “Food and sound participate in many ceremonies. Food and sound gather people together and make you feel like home again.”

About Pisitakun:
Pisitakun Kuantalaeng (b.1986) graduated with a BFA in Sculpture, School of Architecture, Art, and Design – King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Bangkok, Thailand.
Pisitakun has been weaving traditional Thai instrumentation together with pounding rhythms and rugged samples, building post-industrial noisescape since 2014. A large part of his inspiration lies in a frustration at his country’s political life and censorship rules, forging these protest songs to turn noise into fiery expressions of hope – and anger.

He has performed at CTM Festival (Berlin), Asian Meeting Festival (Tokyo), MEIA (Aveiro), Schiev (Brussels), Rokolectiv (Bucharest) and Cafe OTO (London). His previous releases on Chinabot are SOSLEEP(2018) created shortly after the death of his father from cancer, and combined traditional mourning instruments with harsh noise and techno beats, wrapping them around intimate recordings of the hospital machinery that kept his father alive during his final days. and Absolute C.O.U.P. (2020). He also released Kongkraphan (2022) on Yes No Wave, toured with Gabber Modus Operandi in Thailand. He’s also part of the SHAPE Platform roaster of artists for 2022 and has performed with the likes of Meuko Meuko, Abadir, Evita Manji.

Chinabot is a platform and collective created to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music.

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