DJ Click Recorded Two Monks Praying Over Ambient Grooves Inside a Laos Temple

A Temple, Not a Dancefloor

Inside Wat Mixayaram, a working Buddhist temple a short walk from the Mekong in Vientiane, two monks lean toward a microphone and chant. On the other side of the room, a Frenchman with a mobile studio slows the tempo down another few beats per minute and lets the room's own reverb do the rest. That scene, not a booth in Bangkok or a warehouse in Berlin, is where Laos makes its first appearance in this magazine.

The producer is DJ Click, described on his own Bandcamp page as "a restless explorer of cultures and sounds" who travels with turntables and a portable rig rather than waiting for artists to come to him. His album Sukha Vipassana, released February 10, 2026 according to Bandcamp, credits two Wat Mixayaram monks, Vilarnath and Khammany, for vocals and prayers recorded on site, layered over what the release describes as deep, meditative electronic grooves. It is not a field recording dressed up with a beat. It is a produced, mixed and mastered album, with the temple's monks as billed vocalists.

Two Albums, One Bridge

Sukha Vipassana is the second half of a project that started with Dok Champa, released October 24, 2025 on the same pairing of artists. Both records were tracked across Laos: DokFa studio in Pakse, Anouxa Riverview in Champassak, and Wat Mixayaram itself in Vientiane, before the tracks travelled to Chez Oim in Montreuil, France for further work and Globe Audio Studio in Bordeaux for mastering. The through line is Laotian singer Wongpakai Sitthidet, whose voice carries most of Dok Champa, and Bouniang Sagnathak, who plays the khen, the bundled bamboo mouth organ that shows up across Lao and Thai traditional music, on both albums. Guitarist and bassist Thomas Julienne and, on Dok Champa, percussionist Nome Viengphumi round out the band behind the monks.

Not House, Not Techno, and That's Fine

Be honest about what this is before anyone cues it up expecting a peak-time record: Sukha Vipassana is closer to ambient and meditation music than to anything that would fill a floor at Savaya or Zouk Singapore. Bandcamp's own description calls it an invitation to "slow down, breathe, and find a moment of absolute clarity," and the tracklist backs that up, with titles like "Purification of mind" and "Wat Saket" running four to five minutes of patient, dub-heavy texture. The one track built for a room rather than a cushion is "Theravada," a remix by the World Beat producer Tikki Masala that stretches past seven minutes and leans harder into rhythm than anything else on the record.

What makes it worth flagging here isn't that it's a club record, because it isn't. It's that Laos has never had a story on this site before, and this odd, patient album, made with two monks as credited artists rather than a sample pack, is what showed up first. Southeast Asia's forward-leaning labels, like the ones we rounded up recently, tend to cluster in Jakarta, Manila and Singapore. Vientiane isn't on that map yet. This record is a start, even if it's a quiet one.

Listen

Both albums are streaming now. Sukha Vipassana runs eleven tracks and just over 38 minutes; Dok Champa runs fourteen. Neither is likely to turn up in a Southeast Asian club set this month, and that's fine. Myanmar's underground has made a similar bet on patience and traditional instruments over the last two years, and it's worth hearing that story too if this one interests you.

Cover art: Sukha Vipassana album artwork by DjClick and Laurent Wallon, courtesy of DjClick.