Chiang Mai is MUSIC CITY
Last week, I saw friends from home in Indonesia (shoutout Erin and Ella). This was the first time in 2 months I’d spent serious time with people I already knew. I know many Watsons out there will probably go much longer without seeing friends, but two months still feels like forever. The Watson-induced isolation is harder than I ever could have imagined. I’ve made plenty of connections in the places I’m working on this fellowship, but there is absolutely nothing like kicking it with someone who I spent a year brushing my teeth with nightly in Carleton’s luxurious Watson Hall (shoutout Erin).
I met Erin and Ella for a few days back in Kerambitan, Bali (a village they studied abroad in). They forced me (just kidding) to hang out with their old study abroad teachers and I forced them (not kidding) to export a musical windmill back to the homeland with me. You read that right, Carleton College is now possibly the only higher education institution in the United States in possession of a pindekan. The exporting mastermind at Carleton who made this happen refused to officially name the device in my honor (the Henry Burkhardt Pindekan of Academic Excellence didn’t land with the higher-ups). I forgive him.
I will spare you all the details of what it takes to export a wooden musical windmill from Indonesia, but just know it involves motorcycles, cars, and a 21-year-old Balinese guy with a saw and an absolute knack for fitting weird fragile objects into DHL-approved boxes. During this completely amorphous year I’m starting to savor the times when I have a clear, digestible purpose. Pindekan Exporter was a title I wore with great pride. Now I’m trying on Guy Showing Up In Southern India’s Biggest City With Vague Plans To Join An Experimental Electronic Music Collective.
Shipping the pindekan, this sort of token of the relationships I’d built and journeys I’d gone on in Indonesia, was kind of a beautiful way to move on from the country. One of the first things I did there was learn about these windmills and decide to find them. Now the last thing I was doing there was supporting Kanten, the man who makes them, and spreading the windmill love back to America.
The instruments I found in Indonesia and people I learned from were amazing and fulfilling in all sorts of ways, but honestly my stint in the hospital and Jakarta’s abrasive urban weight had worn me down. I was ready to go. I still had a week, though, before I had to be in India, so I impulsively bought a flight to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. I’d read an article about a guy making modular synths in the outskirts of the city, and decided I would show up, check out Chiang Mai, and drop by for an interview. I soon found my way to Chiang Mai’s community radio station as well and within a day of being in the country I had meetings set up. I’d sort of accepted that this would be a slow week, perhaps devoid of project work, but that turned out not to be the case at all.
More Modular
I stopped by Siam Modular, on the outskirts of Chiang Mai, earlier this week. The place is run by a British expat / producer / DJ / engineer named Pete. I’m still a total beginner to modular, and he was gracious enough to teach me more of the basics. We spent the morning looking at his designs, and he showed me his live rig. We talked a lot about music automation. Usually, I leave AI music conversations deeply possessed by a barbaric rage. But this one was different. He confessed to me that while he was worried about automation in music to some degree, he really wasn’t concerned about it touching the modular community. This is, he told me, because the vast majority of people doing modular work are hobbyists. And I don’t mean that word to say that they are not serious people, making serious music, but rather they are not doing it for profit and professional release. Often, modular artists aren’t even recording their music at all. They’re making music because they’re just addicted to the process: the construction of modular rigs, the knob-turning (and also probably the consumption of gear. I can relate!). Pete made the argument to me that these people are never going to automate their craft, because the process is why they’re into the craft in the first place. Modular hooks a very specific type of person, with musical aspirations and also a love for tinkering (this is something Lintang, the synth builder I met in Yogyakarta, also expressed: his interest in hardware comes from the love for and interest in the purity of physical process).
Back to the airwaves.
Finding community radio stations feels like a tradition for me now. It worked out so well in Bali, I figured I’d try again in Chiang Mai. A few Instagram messages led me to drinks with Earng, a Chiang Mai musician/creative/all-around-cool-person behind Tempo, the city’s music zine and radio powerhouse. Tempo (the zine) has been around for a number of years, but I just happened to be here during their first full week of radio programming. Despite being ridiculously busy with radio-station-admin work (something I have soooo much empathy for), Earng made time to hang out with me.
She told me Tempo’s main purpose is putting Chiang Mai on the map. The city has an insanely generative music scene given its relatively small population, and, at least Earng thinks, deserves more attention. There’s a sort of drain going on here where Bangkok sucks people in for work (creative or otherwise), and people leave the places in Northern Thailand where they were born or went to school. Earng is fighting back through Tempo, platforming Northern Thai artists. Their (easily digestible) mantra for Chiang Mai is “Music City.” I thought this was funny at first.. but if you think about it I’m pretty sure this slogan is unclaimed by any other city. Start spreading the word…
Like PUTS in Bali, Tempo is built off relationships. A bunch of friends or scene-partners who get together, get some investments, and decide to pull off something to help their local music ecosystem. What Tempo has pulled off is pretty dang nice. They have a beautiful location, basically a little treehouse tucked away above a creative complex in West Chiang Mai. I was lucky to hang out here for the week I spent in Chiang Mai, and add Earng and a few others to the ever-growing list of people I’ve been able to connect with on this fellowship. I’m excited to get to the end of this year and feel like I have a small army of cool people I know around the world.
Te Na Ku victory
One of my best friends from home, Pah, is Karen (an ethnic group from south/southeastern Myanmar and parts of western Thailand). Months ago he told me about an instrument called the Te Na Ku that I might be able to find in Northern Thailand. It’s a harp indigenous to the Karen people. It’s tuned to a pentatonic scale (fairly common in traditional Thai music, as far as I can tell). It sounds beautiful. A Google search will also reveal that it is one of the rarest instruments in SE Asia (Pah even valiantly reached out to some people he knew in Chiang Mai to try and get me access to a Te Na Ku, but had no luck). So I had long since given up on encountering one by the time I got to Chiang Mai.
But then… in proper Watson-luck fashion*... Earng randomly invited me to a small debut album-release performance by one of the most famous contemporary Te Na Ku players (he goes by Klee Bo). I was so lucky to be in Chiang Mai for his performance at the radio station.
(*I have empirically observed this year that Watson-luck appears to be accompanied by an equalizing amount of Watson misfortune.)
Two days after meeting Earng, I found myself sat on the floor of the Tempo treehouse, feet away from the Te Na Ku, listening to Klee Bo play his new album and talk about it on the air. He spoke in Thai on the air as he talked with another host, but Earng would hop in and translate every word into English (I honestly think this might have just been for me – I was the only non-Thai person in the audience). Klee Bo’s new album is a layered masterpiece of field recordings of his tiny Karen village and psych-grooves featuring the Te Na Ku. I can’t link to this album because it’s not out yet, but it will be (soon?) on his Spotify / Apple Music. Totally worth a listen once it’s published.
After the show, I talked to Klee for a little bit and mentioned I was into instrument building. I think he thought it was amusing how interested I was in the Te Na Ku, but he immediately offered to let me play it. So I sat for a bit in the treehouse, carefully fiddling around with the harp. Klee kindly showed me a couple techniques. I was a little too sheepish to ask someone to take a picture. I think it would’ve ruined the moment. So you’ll just have to take my word for this one. It was totally surreal to get to mess around on an instrument this unique: another Watson pipe dream come true.
The Next Thing
I’m writing this blog on the plane to Bangalore, India. I am coming here to work with sonic-mad-scientist Yashas Shetty at an experimental music collective called the Indian Sonic Research Organization. It’s sort of impossible to explain exactly what this elusive Organization does… but some of their research themes include: acoustic archaeology, new instrument-building, and ecological sound….. so yea, it’s pretty out there.
The collective runs a full sound studio / maker space in the north part of the city, and I’ve managed to finagle my way to a mini-residency there. I will spend time creating works (of some sort) with other artists from around the world who are at the studio. I’m not quite sure yet what I’ll do, but I’ve been dying to play some instruments and record new music… so hopefully that will happen!
A big reason I’m coming to Bangalore is also to help develop a piece of software the ISRO is building. It’s called Lekha, and it’s a content management system (CMS) designed for artists and creative / archival institutions. I will spare you the nitty-gritty, but the idea of this project is to make software for the preservation and distribution of art works that is built with the artists and archivists in mind. If you’ve been following along with my other posts you will appreciate how this kind of perfectly goes along with the themes of music / technology / archiving I’ve been thinking about.
I’ve also connected with a rural farm / hacker space designing radio station technology for small Indian villages under the direction of another mad scientist, T. B. Dinesh. I plan to go live and work with this collective after a month or so with ISRO. I, once again, really didn’t think radio would be such an important part of my Watson… but it keeps pulling me in, and I’ll keep rolling with it.
In reality I have absolutely no idea what I will create, or what these two experiences will look like. But fear not, I will dutifully blog about what happens.
Yesterday, I accidentally met a tie-dye-clad Australian expat entrepreneur + sound healer + festival organizer at a hippie cafe in Chiang Mai. He told me his name was Sea. I wanted to ask to verify this with his passport, but that felt rude. He warned me that Bangalore was not, in fact, a nice city to go to. His worldly intelligence, it seemed, steered him more towards the bountiful spirituality of Goa. Bangalore – like Jakarta, perhaps – is not a place people (Westerners abroad, at least) tend to visit on holiday. It’s busy, and boasts some of the worst traffic in India, I hear.
I struggle sometimes with why exactly I have been taking myself to huge, difficult cities when I could literally be anywhere. I keep reminding myself, though, why I am traveling on this fellowship. The goal has always been, and will always be, about people. I’m interested in activities and ideas, and cool places, and doing some sort of personal informal ethnography. But more than anything, the idea of connecting with other people interested in similar things is what keeps me going. And sometimes that connection happens at a beautiful gamelan pavilion in Bali, and sometimes it happens in the urban heart of Bangalore. I’m anxious, but also really excited to dig into a new city, and see what it can bring me, and how I can be a part of it for a short while.
Sea also makes AI music. So on principle I refuse to take anything he says seriously.
That’s all for now.
In the meantime you can pray for me getting through Indian customs with 100 days of malaria pills for The Gambia (a country which I have no concrete proof I am going to), while also pretending I’m here for sightseeing and not explaining the Watson Fellowship because I got a tourist visa and not a research visa.
If you’re an Indian Immigration Officer reading this I am COMPLETELY JOKING Please let me in Please let me in Please let me in 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳
