Cassette
Thai-born, Berlin-based Pisitakun Kuantalaeng fashions political dissent out of maximalist aesthetics. Trained as a visual artist at King Mongkut University who turned to music in 2014, Pisitakun’s overcrowded, bursting-at-the-seams style translates into noisy electronic pastiche informed by Thailand’s urban soundscapes. Listening to KUANTALAENG requires lending an ear to the contradictions at stake in a country whose image in the foreign imagination is one of delicious food and tourism, but whose domestic politics is characterized by martial law and censorship.
Each track is titled after a different Thai dish. “Khao Soi” douses the ear in clouds of pulsating noise; Thai singing lurks underneath. “Gaeng Massaman Gai” and “Khanom Jeen nam Ngiaw” combine shrill electronics with folksy instrumentation and chest-thumping kicks. It’s not all distortion and doom, however. “Pad Siew” is an aching duet between crisp guitar plucking and warm pi mon (Thai reed oboe) lines. Pisitakun chops up and layers the pi mon as the track progresses, creating not so much a wall of sound but a flowing curtain. True to the nature of censorship in Thailand, there’s no explicit criticism of the regime in the music; Pisitakun instead uses a potpourri of sound to hint at dissonances elided by the suppression of Thai voices. Through the Department of Export Promotion, the government of Thailand supports restaurateurs abroad with pre-fabricated restaurant plans; the context provided by this link between food and politics, the former mystifying the latter, makes KUANTALAENG all the more striking.
