Marmosets Wrote a Song About Bangkok's Curfew. Six Years Later, It Still Applies.
In 2020, Bangkok producer Marmosets turned a complaint every promoter in the city has muttered at 1:45am into a spoken-word techno single. Six years and one high-profile raid later, Krungthep Ratree hasn't dated a day.
A Complaint Every Promoter in Bangkok Already Knows
Every Bangkok promoter has muttered some version of the same sentence at 1:45am: the lights are about to come up, the crowd is nowhere near done, and it is not their call. In 2020, a Bangkok producer who records as Marmosets got tired of hearing that complaint secondhand and put it on a record instead. "Krungthep Ratree," Thai for Bangkok Night, is a spoken-word techno single built around a single, unpolished grievance about the city's club scene.
The track's own liner notes don't dress it up. "This single talked about Bangkok Nightlife, people in the Club Scene have no freedom," Marmosets wrote when he released it. "Clubs, events and festivals in Bangkok have issues about closing time. Police and government do not understand what we do for the club scene." Six years later, that sentence could open half the nightlife stories out of Thailand this year, including Loopliner's own reporting on which entertainment zones actually get to run past 2am, and a rundown of the club drug raid that tested 377 people at a single Nakhon Pathom venue this June. Marmosets didn't predict any of it specifically. He just wrote down what everyone in the scene already knew.
The DJ With Two Names and a Day Job
Marmosets is the alter ego of a Bangkok DJ and producer who has been working the city's booths since the mid-2000s under the name Kingkong, first cutting his teeth in bass music and drum and bass. He picked up the Marmosets name in the mid-2010s to make room for a different register: house, techno, ambient, and live sets played on modular synths and drum machines rather than a laptop. It's the kind of split identity a lot of working Thai DJs carry, one name for the paycheck gigs and one for the music that's actually his.
And Kingkong has had plenty of paycheck gigs. He came up through Bed Supperclub, Grease and the W Hotel before spending years as music director and resident selector at Beam, the Thonglor club, a role he stepped back from around the pandemic. Off the decks, he co-founded Zoo Studio, a small production outpost for Thai talent, and Tempo, the underground nightlife site and party series that's still putting on shows in Bangkok today. More recently he's picked up an unglamorous but telling second job: A&R at Warner Music Thailand, scouting pop and indie acts by day while running RAZE, a party series built around heavier electronic sounds, by night. It's not a rebellious posture. It's just what staying in the Bangkok scene for two decades actually looks like.
Poetry Over a Beat, Not a Chant
"Krungthep Ratree" isn't a shouted protest track. It's closer to spoken word laid over a slow, dubby groove, the poetry written and voiced by Tul Waitoonkiat, singer of the Thai indie band Apartment Khunpa. Marmosets produced and mastered it himself, then handed it to two of Bangkok's more respected names for remixes: Sunju Hargun, whose own label and sound Loopliner has profiled before, turned in an experimental Hadouken mix, while DOTT built a more beat-driven Quarantine Dub version, a title that places the release squarely in its moment: mid-2020, when Bangkok's clubs weren't fighting closing times so much as staying shut entirely.
Still on the Bill
Marmosets hasn't stopped playing out. In June this year he was on the lineup for TEMPO's TEMPORATURE night at Horn on Silom Road, the same strip whose entertainment-zone status lets clubs push past the citywide 2am cutoff, alongside a DJ going by DJ Dragon, the same stage name Marmosets cited as an early influence back in a 2016 interview. If it's the same person, a decade on they're still splitting a bill in the same neighbourhood the song was written about.
What's changed since 2020 is mostly the specifics, not the picture. The visa and entry rules have been rewritten more than once. A June raid at a Nakhon Pathom club put 76 positive drug tests in the news cycle instead of a closing-time dispute. But the underlying complaint in "Krungthep Ratree," that Bangkok's clubs answer to rules made by people who have never stood in one of them at 1am, hasn't needed an update. That's not much of a compliment to the policy. It's a pretty good one for the record.
