The Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band Is Still Touring, 14 Years After a Bangkok DJ Night Became a Live Band

A Phin Solo Under a Festival Marquee

The photograph that circulates most from The Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band's career was taken in a red-and-white striped tent at Field Day in London, 2016, not in Bangkok at all: a musician in a batik-trimmed jacket, eyes shut, grinning, working a three-string lute carved with a dragon's head at the neck. Behind him, a bass player in a lime-green shirt. In front of him, a few thousand festival-goers who had almost certainly never heard the word molam before that set.

Ten years later, that same six-person band is still touring, still built around a bamboo mouth organ and a three-string lute that almost nobody outside northeastern Thailand had heard of before this project started. The Bangkok bar that grew up around that same revival closed its doors this year. The band that predates it never stopped.

From a Record Shop to a Six-Piece Band

As Loopliner covered in September, the whole project traces back to a crate-digging habit. In 2008, Maft Sai and British DJ Chris Menist opened Zudrangma Records on Sukhumvit soi 51 and started playing secondhand molam and luk thung 45s at a DJ night they called Paradise Bangkok. The music ran on two instruments barely known outside Isaan: the khaen, a bamboo mouth organ that drones like a folk accordion, and the phin, the lute in that Field Day photo.

By 2012, the DJ night had become a live band. Maft Sai and Menist were joined by veteran khaen player Sawai Kaewsombat, phin player Kammao Perdtanon, bassist Piyanart Jotikasthira and drummer Phusana Treeburut, six people folding Isaan folk song into dub, blues and psychedelic rock under a name that was, by then, too good to change: The Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band.

Three Albums Into a Career Nobody Planned

The catalogue is short and consistent. 21st Century Molam landed in 2014 to a Guardian review that called it a rousing debut. Planet Lam followed in October 2016, around the same festival run that produced the Field Day photos, and the world music magazine Songlines later gave the same treatment to Araya Lam. In between, the Bangkok Post ran a feature with a headline that has aged well: "When Grassroots Sounds Go Global." Glastonbury, Off Festival in Poland and Festival Mundial in the Netherlands all followed, along with a Boiler Room session that is still the clip most people use to explain the band to someone who has never heard a khaen drone over a dub bassline.

None of that reads like a novelty booking circuit. London's Cafe Oto, a room that treats experimental and improvised music as seriously as any concert hall in Europe, has booked the band. So has Berlin's Humboldt Forum. Both are institutions that treat a khaen and a dub bassline as worth the same stage as anything else on their calendar, not a curiosity booked once and forgotten.

Touring Without the Venue

Maft Sai locked the door of Studio Lam, the Bangkok shophouse bar built on this same molam revival, for the last time on February 28 of this year, a real loss for the scene that grew up around it, and one Loopliner covered in detail at the time. The band predates that bar by two years and never depended on it for bookings. Its calendar has always run through festival fields and concert halls abroad, not one shophouse on soi 51, which is exactly why the closure didn't touch it.

Where to Actually Hear It

All three albums sit on Bandcamp and the major streaming platforms under Zudrangma Records, the label Maft Sai and Menist built around the same crate-digging that started the whole project. 21st Century Molam (2014) is the rawest entry point, built for a loud room. Planet Lam (2016) is the festival-circuit record. Araya Lam is the most recent, and the one worth cueing up first.

Photos: Jwslubbock, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.