Soundkoh Collective's Debut Sent One Bangkok Love Song to Korea and Germany

Catalog number KOH001 belongs to a label that spent three years getting to it. Soundkoh Collective, a Bangkok music and art collective founded in 2022, has just released its first record: a stripped-back, minimal-electronic love song called "Galactic Love," written by vocalist Chucheewa Cheepchoke and producer Vichaya Vatanasapt, better known as The Photo Sticker Machine. The EP was supposed to land in early 2025. It showed up in December instead, which tells you something about how small labels actually work.

From Church Choir to Boiler Room

Chucheewa's route into dance music did not start in a club. She sang in a church band at eight, joined a psychedelic dream-pop group called Cloud Behind at seventeen, and by 2014 was writing songs for an indie pop band, Fwends, alongside bassist Korn, whose stage name is Kova O' Sarin. It was Korn who pulled her into Bangkok's underground rave scene around 2015 and taught her to DJ. She has since played sets built on house, electro, acid and slow jazz, made her Boiler Room debut in Bali as half of the duo Acid Sister with DJ Takky, and promotes international bookings in Bangkok through Conflakes. She also co-curates Summer Sound, a monthly radio show that airs on Headstream Bali and Bangkok Community Radio.

A Label Built for Two Worlds

Soundkoh Collective started as something stranger than a record label. In 2022, Chucheewa, Korn and a third collaborator, Fook (also known as Human Spectrum, part of the same Bangkok underground lineage that runs through Bar Temp and Never Normal), set out to "combine the real world and the virtual world." Their first move was a party called Gadhouse, staged partly inside The Sandbox, the blockchain game, complete with avatars of the musicians and illustrators involved and a limited vinyl pressing to go with it. Three years, a pivot away from the metaverse experiment and one delayed release later, the collective's actual catalog is a single line: KOH001.

"Koh is a word in Thai that means 'island,'" the label said of the release. "We want to represent the sound of our characterised island and tell the story through it." It's a fitting description for a label whose founders keep working across disciplines rather than picking one.

One Song, Five Remixes, Three Countries

The original "Galactic Love" is deliberately unhurried: minimal electronic pop, restrained vocals, sparse synths, barely any kick drum. What Soundkoh built around it is the more interesting part. Mogwaa, based in Korea, turns in a soft-percussion "Whisper Mix." Kova O' Sarin, Chucheewa's old bandmate and Soundkoh co-founder, goes the other direction entirely with the "Bitter Bouncy Mix," a driving, industrial, EBM-leaning cut that barely resembles the source. Retromigration, working out of Germany, delivers a house-oriented "Juno 1am Mix" built for a specific hour of the night. Fellow Thai producers Chalo and Saranmy close it out with an atmospheric, pad-heavy "Secluded Mix" and a sparse, minimal "Gentle Mix." Six versions of the same eight bars, none of them trying to sound like the others.

The vinyl is out now through One Eye Witness, in co-partnership with Drop The Needle Collective, with sleeve artwork by Tobtoyong. It's a small pressing from a label that has released exactly one record, which is either a risk or the whole point, depending on how you look at a label whose founders have spent three years proving they'll follow through eventually.

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Bangkok's small labels keep finding different ways to say the same thing: that the city's underground is worth documenting properly, not just DJ-ing through. Sunju Hargun has been doing it with Thai folk samples on Siamese Twins Records, and a Bangkok label recently turned Buddhist chants and 90s ghost-show tapes into a house genre. Soundkoh's version is a metaverse party that turned into a vinyl pressing, three years and one very patient love song later.