Durian Radio Built Thailand's First Streaming Station in a Pandemic. Now It Sells Tuk-Tuk T-Shirts From a Weed Shop.
A pandemic streaming experiment that started with masked crowds at Commons Saladaeng now broadcasts four DJs a night, every weekend, from a raw concrete room above a legal weed shop on RCA. Nobody's complained about the noise yet.
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There is a photo in Durian Radio's own merch catalogue of a black T-shirt hanging inside a tuk-tuk, pink neon bleeding through the plastic canopy, the station's globe-and-antenna logo lit up like a pirate transmission. It is, by the team's own description, part of a "kind of a parody shoot," the same tourist-brochure Bangkok of tuk-tuks and scorpion skewers turned into merchandise by the people who'd rather you looked past it. That's the joke and the mission statement in one image: Durian Radio has never been interested in the postcard version of this city.
A Concrete Box Above a Weed Shop
The station broadcasts from a raw concrete room on RCA, above Green Ape, a licensed cannabis shop that doubles as the studio's landlord and, per the crew, one of its own. There are no soft furnishings to speak of and, more usefully, no upstairs neighbors to file a noise complaint, which means sets can run past 4AM on a weekend without anyone getting a knock on the door. That is not a small thing in a city where closing time is the whole ballgame. Every Saturday and Sunday, four DJs move through the slot, filmed and streamed live, mostly local names, occasionally someone passing through.
From a Rolling Weed Party to Thailand's First Stream
Durian didn't start as a radio station. It started as Dai Daeng, a roving daytime party named for the red string weed of Thai lore, the kind of event that would land on a rooftop along Yaowarat Road in the middle of Chinatown one week and somewhere else entirely the next. When the pandemic shut every room in Bangkok, the crew didn't fold, they pivoted, launching what they call Thailand's first internet streaming radio station from Commons Saladaeng. According to BLAQ LYTE's 2024 profile of the station, between 400 and 500 sets went out over that stretch, four DJs a session, and people still showed up in person, masked, standing around for hours to watch decks through glass during a public health emergency most cities used as an excuse to cancel nightlife altogether. Commons eventually got too busy with regular foot traffic for a station built around DJ culture, hence the move to the room above Green Ape, quieter on paper and louder in practice.
Five Names on One Frequency
The crew running it is small and specific: DJ Psynus handles event production, Diet Soon is art director, Joseph (also Green Ape's owner) runs business strategy, La Yumar is music director and Bunnyman engineers the sound. That's a five-person operation building out a visual identity pulled from street signage, old packaging design and jasmine garlands rather than the lotus-flower, floating-market shorthand most tourism boards reach for. "We're not traditional visual Thai style," is how the team has put it. "It's modern, everyday type shit, with elements drawn from diverse parts of the culture." The tuk-tuk shirt is that philosophy with a punchline attached: the icon everyone already associates with Bangkok, repossessed and worn ironically by the people who actually live there.
Local First, By Design
The station's stated priority is Thai DJs over imported headliners, a position that puts it in the same lane as the warehouse and DIY promoters keeping Southeast Asia's underground alive without a big-name booking budget. It's also part of a wider pattern this region keeps producing out of necessity: when clubs are expensive, over-regulated or simply not built for the music a scene actually wants to hear, DJs and crews build their own infrastructure instead, the same instinct behind the community radio stations now doing a club's job across Southeast Asia. Durian Radio predates most of that wave by several years and still streams weekly, which is the part worth noting: plenty of pandemic-era projects quietly stopped the moment clubs reopened. This one didn't.
Nobody at Durian Radio is claiming to have reinvented the radio station. What they've built is smaller and more stubborn than that: a room with a camera, four DJs a night, two nights a week, run by five people who'd rather sell you a joke about a tuk-tuk than another photo of one at sunset. Tune in on a Saturday and the joke is usually still funnier than whatever's playing at the club downstairs.
Cover photo: Durian Radio merch photography, via BLAQ LYTE.
