How a Bangkok Label Turned Buddhist Chants and 90s Ghost Shows Into a House Genre

There's a needle-drop about ninety seconds into Meltmode's track "Pee Fah" where a warped, theremin-adjacent wobble drops out and the intro music from Pob Pee Fah, a Thai ghost anthology show from the 90s, floats in over a funk bassline. It shouldn't work as a house track. It does.

That's the whole pitch of Pissawong Records, the Bangkok label Meltmode co-founded in 2017 and the outfit that's spent the last few years building something it calls, without much modesty, "Thai house": four-to-the-floor drums built underneath Luk Thung melodies, Molam wind instruments, Buddhist Dharma recordings and, in Meltmode's case, samples ripped straight from Thai children's TV. The label's current roster runs to ten names, among them Wildealer, Ahivar, Yorsab, La Yumar and AN!KA, all working some version of the same idea: don't smooth the traditional sounds out to fit the club, make the club fit around them.

The Sound, Track by Track

Meltmode's catalogue is the clearest map of what Pissawong means by the term. "Local Wisdom of Phothi But," released on the label in 2024, opens with classic Thai poetry laid over rhythmic percussion on "Jai Manut," then slides into "Mat See," which runs Buddhist Dharma teachings under eerie synths, before closing on the off-kilter, vocal-sampling "AH-RR." It's a strange record to dance to and a stranger one to describe, which is presumably the point. A year later came "Echoes of Time," five tracks deep, with "Pee Fah" as its calling card and "Pong Prai" stretching past ten minutes of old-school drum grooves and Molam-style wind lines.

The interesting part is who put that second EP out. Not Pissawong itself, but M.A.D Records (Make A Dance), a UK imprint run by Ben Lewis and Josh Ludlow. The connection dates back to a Bangkok gig M.A.D played at a Pissawong party, and it hasn't stayed a one-way export. In March 2025, Pissawong marked four years as a label with its first-ever vinyl release, a 12-inch pressed with Hidden Tracks: Wildealer featuring Big Daddy Art on the A-side, a hypnotic, psychedelia-leaning cut, and Meltmode on the flip, weaving old-school drum grooves and Molam wind instruments into something built specifically for the format. It was exclusive to the launch party at BEAM in Thonglor and, as far as the label's put out publicly, hasn't seen a wider pressing since.

Not the Only Ones Doing This

Pissawong isn't operating in a vacuum. Bangkok's wider electronic underground has been leaning into the same instinct lately, from Yaboihanoi's AI-processed muay thai and ceremonial loops to Sounds Of Future Siam running folk field recordings through UK dubstep and breaks, and Sunju Hargun, whose own label Siamese Twins Records has been doing something adjacent with atmosphere rather than samples. It's not a coordinated movement so much as several producers arriving at the same conclusion independently: Thailand has decades of recorded traditional and pop music sitting in archives and on cassette, and almost nobody in the house and techno world has touched it. Pissawong just got there first and gave it a name.

Whether "Thai house" survives as a genre tag or dissolves back into the general Southeast Asian scene overlap this site has been tracking, from Bangkok's queer techno underground to Yogyakarta's gqom fusion experiments, is an open question. What's not in question is that a small Bangkok label just got a UK imprint to press its sound onto wax, which is more than most Southeast Asian house labels manage in year one, let alone year four.

Both EPs are streaming on Bandcamp now. The vinyl, for the moment, stays a Bangkok-only souvenir.