Kangkao Spent Four Years Building Bangkok's Rawest Techno Room. Now DUAL Runs It Most Weekends.

Down a few wonky concrete steps in Bangkok's Trinity Complex, past two weathered fu dog statues standing guard, is a 900-square-meter shell of raw concrete. For most of the last four years, it belonged almost exclusively to a scrappy four-person crew called Kangkao. It still shows up there. It just doesn't run the room most weekends anymore.

It reads less like a decline than the opposite: Kangkao built something durable enough that someone else wanted to keep it running.

A Refuge From Commercial EDM

Kangkao formed in 2022, in the part of Bangkok's DIY circuit that treats a folding table, a fog machine and a stack of vinyl as a complete production budget. The name means bat in Thai, and the collective built its identity in direct opposition to the city's tourist-facing club economy. "A lot of events around here aren't really Bangkok," core member Mo told The Cold Magazine, which profiled the crew at its fourth birthday party in June. "They're all run by foreigners. Here, Horn and Bartemp. They're real."

The space they found, and kept finding their way back to, sits on the ground floor of Trinity Complex, a mixed-use tower block a few minutes from Silom that also houses Elsewhere, a ninth-floor bar known locally for staying open later than almost anywhere else in the city. "We just keep finding ourselves back here," Mo said of the concrete room downstairs. No tables, no bottle service, no backstage. Just a sound system and a floor.

Vinyl, Not USB Sticks

The bookings tell you what Kangkao is actually for. Past lineups have run from the internationally recognized, including DJ Masda, to Bangkok regulars like Tada and Liem, all filtered through a preference for vinyl-heavy, textural techno over the plug-and-play sets that dominate the city's bigger rooms. More recently the crew has leaned into handing off the booth: Mellecvm now plays back to back with Elila.b, a newer name Mo describes as part of the crew being "handed to the next generation."

The crowd matches the contradiction built into the whole project. "It's a whole mix of people," Mo said, gesturing at someone in an asymmetrically draped shirt and heavy metal jewelry a few feet from a cluster of tourists in glittery tops. "You get people like this, and also tourists. But that's Asia. It's not like Europe where the scene is so established." He's not bitter about it. "It's not new. We've been here for a while. It's just not... taken off. It's a small scene still. I like that. I know these faces."

The Room Changes Hands

The part that would sting a less secure crew: in May, Time Out Bangkok reported that a new club called DUAL had opened inside Trinity Complex, taking over what the write-up calls, plainly, "the Kangkao Collective space." DUAL now runs Friday and Saturday nights there, doors at 9pm, entry between B300 and B500, booking Southeast Asian selectors alongside visiting international names in a deliberately stripped-back room built to let the sound system do the work rather than a lighting rig. Time Out's verdict: anyone who knew the old Kangkao nights would recognize the camaraderie immediately, "just with a sharper edge and slightly heavier energy."

That framing is generous, and probably accurate. Kangkao was never a lease-holder in any formal sense: it was a crew that kept returning to a room it didn't own, in a building that also holds homes, shops and a hotel above it. DUAL picking up the same address on the same nights of the week isn't a hostile takeover so much as Bangkok's underground doing what it always does with a good room: passing it along before it gets discovered by anyone with a marketing budget.

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What's Left of Kangkao

The crew hasn't disappeared. It turned four in June with a party in the same concrete room, and it's still active as a name: recent Instagram posts document a Kangkao Recording series of studio sets, and the collective has run ticketed one-off nights before, including a two-day Halloween takeover of Trinity Complex last year with residents alongside Ryokei of Alien Sex Friends. What's changed is the rhythm. Where Kangkao used to be the room's default booking, it's now the guest that still gets invited back for the big nights, while DUAL handles the weekly grind.

It's a small, unglamorous story, but it's also the most honest version of how Bangkok's underground actually works. Crews here don't sign ten-year leases. They find a concrete room nobody else wants, make it mean something for a few years, and hand it off, or get handed off, to whoever picks up the thread next. Kangkao spent four years proving a room like that could exist in this city at all. That the proof outlived their exclusive claim to the address reads less like a loss than a job finished.

If you want to see what the room looks like now, DUAL runs it every Friday and Saturday at Trinity Complex, Soi Naradhiwas Rajanagarindra 3, from 9pm, tickets B300 to B500 via Ticketmelon. For more on how Bangkok's other DIY crews are holding their ground, see our look at where Southeast Asia's queer scene actually lives and how door policy really works at the region's toughest rooms. More on Bangkok's scene at loopliner.com/scene/bangkok.

Cover photo: dancefloor at Kangkao's fourth birthday party, by The Cold Magazine, via thecoldmagazine.co.uk.