Khun Narin Electric Phin Band: Thailand’s band for the people
From the deserts of North Africa to the jungles of Brazil, there is great music to be found all over the globe if you are willing to look hard enough. Southeast Asia, for instance, is rarely considered a hotspot for musical activity despite the fact that nations like Thailand have fostered some of the world’s most innovative and original musicians over the decades. In more recent times, listeners across the world have been captivated by the heavy psychedelic sounds of a mysterious new Thai group by the name of Khun Narin.
Operating out of the small town of Phetchabun, hundreds of miles north of Bangkok, Khun Narin is made up of a rotating cast of musicians and participants, ranging from local children to the elderly population. At their core is Khun Narin himself, a Thai musician and bandleader who has been the driving force behind this obscure ensemble for years now. Truthfully, there is no way of knowing for definite when the band first established themselves, but videos of their live performances have been uploaded to YouTube going back to the early 2010s.
During their early period, Khun Narin existed only in a live setting. Band members would often set up shop in somebody’s home or garden, playing music together for hours on end while parties and gatherings went on around them. The bulk of their material is improvised on the spot, which gives their music an innate organic nature, which is often difficult to find in the modern musical world. Nevertheless, their penchant for live performance does raise the question of how an ensemble from a remote Thai village suddenly became signed to an American independent record label, Innovative Leisure.
Back in 2013, American record producer Josh Marcy happened upon one of Khun Narin’s live performances on YouTube, which he soon shared around. All of a sudden, audiences everywhere were attempting to find out who this incredibly psychedelic band were and where they could find more material. From there, Marcy contacted the group themselves and organised a visit to Thailand to meet with the ensemble. During this meeting, the band recorded a live session and eventually released their first album, Electric Phin Band.
This album exposed the captivating sounds of this obscure Thai ensemble to the wider world, bringing them widespread attention and acclaim. Although the mid-2010s faced no shortage of psychedelic music, very few groups could compare to the compelling, realtor-infused stylings of Khun Narin. The group manages to blend traditional elements of Thai music and culture with a far-out psychedelic style which evokes the origins of psych-rock back in the 1970s.
The core of Khun Narin’s sound is derived from the phin, a traditional Thai instrument reminiscent of a lute. Typically, phins only have one or two strings, limiting the diversity of the music it can produce. So, to combat this, Khun Narin’s original phin player, Beer Sitthichai, combines the ancient instrument with a plethora of effect pedals, including phasers and distortion. As you might expect, the resulting sound is unlike any other.
This originality in their sound is further bolstered by the ensemble’s penchant for creating their own homemade instruments, often using guitar hardware coupled with wooden structures to create innovative new sounds and DIY instrumentation. This, along with their heavy psychedelic leanings, mean that Khun Narin sounds unlike any other group on the face of the Earth currently.
To date, Khun Narin has only released two albums, both of which were recordings of live sessions put out by Innovative Leisure. Given the nature of their existence, it is not known with any certainty that the group still exists, although the high turnaround of members between the first and second record would suggest that, if they do exist, they may do so in an entirely different form to their original incarnation. Nevertheless, the band’s material still holds up a decade on from its initial release, with its organic, improvisational, and psychedelic content remaining largely unmatched.
