The Paradise Bangkok Third Anniversary at the newly opened club Sonic in Ekkamai last Saturday Feb. 25 was, in a word, tremendous.
Leading up to the show it seemed as if the retro mor lam and luk thung (Northeastern country music) club night had fully hit the bigtime with a profile in the Wall Street Journal – and Paradise Bangkok didn’t disappoint.
We love mor lam and luk thung here at Coconuts Bangkok, but we can’t say we know much about it.
All we can really say about the performers is that they rocked our socks off.
The band, Wong Dontri Molam Theppabutr, featured a charismatic blind khene (it’s a mouth organ, we looked it up on Wikipedia) player. What he lacked in sight the khene player made up for in soul, swaying his body to the funky rythms and tooting that horn with reckless abandon. The conga drummer was also a star, doing a repetitive hip-hoppy, arm-swaying dance as he provided percussive backbeat accents.
Mor lam is highly psychedelic and we can see how the music fits well with the consumption of substances. In this case it was Tiger Beer and shots of ya dong (flavored moonshine) – one of each were included with the THB400 entrance fee, which was quite fair.
Check out the intro and the first song of Theppabutr’s set below. They start out a bit wobbly, but then tighten things up and start really jamming.
