Pam Anantr Built Bangkok's Own Sound Room. Then Darker Than Wax Came to Her.

This past Friday at Siwilai Radical Club in Thonglor, Pam Anantr shared the decks with Marco Weibel, the New York-based co-founder of Singapore label and collective Darker Than Wax. It was billed as a 15th anniversary stop for the label, the second time this year the celebration landed in Bangkok. It was also, less officially, a homecoming: Anantr has spent the last three years building the kind of infrastructure, a room, a festival, a community of regulars, that makes a scene worth flying into.

From New York's Jazz Rooms to Bangkok's Decks

Anantr lived in New York from 2014 to 2019, a period she has described less as a DJ apprenticeship than an immersion. She went to 718 Sessions, Body & Soul, The Loft and Cedar Room, the disco and house lineage's slow-burning Sunday-into-Monday parties, and spent as much time in jazz rooms like Nublu, Headz and Pioneer Works as on dancefloors. Friends working record stores and door shifts pulled her deeper into the city's music underground before she ever touched a mixer professionally.

She brought that record collection's worth of reference points back to Bangkok, DJing casually before turning it into a full-time practice built on disco, boogie, jazz-funk and house. It made her a natural fit for Darker Than Wax, the Singapore label turned creative agency that has spent fifteen years scouting exactly this kind of eclectic, crate-dug taste across Asia. Anantr is now part of its core team, alongside co-founders Dean Chew and Weibel, playing dates that stretch from Wonderfruit and Magnetic Fields to Circus Tokyo and Zodiac Jakarta, with residencies at Transport and The Standard Hotel Bangkok.

A Room Designed Around the Sound, Not the Crowd

In July 2024, Anantr and three collaborators, filmmaker Natchanon Vana and stylists Pornchanok Dibdee and Wipada Piriyapokai, opened Salon Kiku, a sound room and wine bar on the second floor of the Thonglor building that once also housed Studio Lam, the molam and electronic room that closed earlier this year. Where most new Bangkok venues chase a look, Kiku was built around Altec A7 speakers and a rotary mixer, a roughly 60-capacity room designed so the music, not the crowd, sets the temperature. Anantr curates the booking as the venue's music director, mixing jazz sets, DJ nights, open decks and DJ lessons with pop-up chefs and natural wine tastings.

"We really want to move away from being 'trendy,'" Anantr has said of the space. It is a small, specific ambition, and a telling one in a city where nightlife openings are routinely built for their opening week rather than their fifth year.

A Festival Built Like a Room

The same instinct produced Ritual Rhythm Weekend, the festival Anantr founded in 2023, first held at Baan Trok Tua Ngork. It folds design workshops, a crafts and food market and live instrumental sets in alongside the DJ lineups, a format closer to a long weekend than a rave. In March, Ritual Rhythm Weekend hosted the opening date of Darker Than Wax's 15th anniversary tour at THE WAREHOUSE in Talat Noi, with Chew, Anantr and label mate Dexter Colt on the bill.

Friday's Siwilai date closed a loop that started there. Weibel came in from New York for a label that has spent fifteen years insisting, through its own account, on "diversity and depth in music" over chasing a single sound or a single hit. Anantr, spinning alongside him, is the clearest local proof that the approach works: a DJ who took what she learned in New York's jazz rooms and built her own room, then her own festival, out of it in Bangkok.

Date: Friday, September 4, 2026 Venue: Siwilai Radical Club, 148 Thong Lo, Khlong Tan Nuea, Watthana, Bangkok

Cover photo and event image: Mixmag Asia / Darker Than Wax.