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YouTube has a way of inspiring obsession in music listeners. It’s an imperfect resource, sure, full of low-bit uploads and god-awful concert recordings taken on smartphones. But within the morass of dreck there’s a seemingly endless archive of jaw-dropping sounds and images from across the globe—clips of dance crazes, underground movements, hypnotizing jams, and more. Often these videos are mere fragments, capturing only a sample of the performance that actually went down, and in poor resolution at that. Yet the limitations of the medium only serve to make the music more intriguing, adding an extra layer of “rawness” to what already feels like raw material.
It’s been years since I went crazy for a random song I heard on the radio, but nowadays that happens to me all the time while trawling the Tube. On a couple occasions I’ve even considered booking a flight to a far-off locale just because of a particularly juicy find. But I’ve yet to take things as far as Josh Marcy, an L.A. audio engineer who recently trekked to north-central Thailand to record an album by Khun Narin, a folksy psych band he stumbled across while plying the YouTube interwebs.
Hailing from the province of Phetchabun, Khun Narin is like the Jimi Hendrix Experience, if Jimi & Co. were reared on luk thung and local parade/party tunes instead of LSD and the blues. A motley outfit of eight dudes, the group relies on a gas-powered generator and home-built sound-system to fuel their funky odysseys. One of their members, a fellow named Beer, plays the electric phin, a pear-shaped two-or-three stringed lute outfitted with metal strings. The rest dig cavernous grooves with bass and drums that resemble hand-me-downs from a high school marching band.
As Passion scribe Max Bell chronicles in a recent article for Red Bull Music Academy, the band recently inked a deal with Innovative Leisure to drop a new, debut album, Khun Narin Electric Phin Band. The album came together thanks to Marcy, who tracked the group down and then flew out to Phetchabun to record them. The obsession/adventure began when he read about them in a post on the Dangerous Minds blog. Curious, he started investigating and found Beer’s YouTube channel—a remarkable repository of videos, including one 12-minute clip in which the group serves up a blistering cover of The Cranberries’ “Zombie” while leading a parade of friends, family and neighbors through a village.
The album, Khun Narin Electric Phin Band, doesn’t have the same visual hooks as those videos, but it captures the band in their element: live, outdoors, jamming with abandon. The record is only four tracks long, and it blurs by in an epic swirl of dubby bass-lines, freewheeling break-beats and delay-infused, flange-kissed, semi-distorted phin licks. The nearly 12-minute opener “Lam Phu Thai” feels especially narcotic, as the band settles into a single-chord, mid-tempo rhythm before slowly picking up speed and finishing off with a series of daring solos. “Lai Sing,” meanwhile, shows off the band’s rhythmic prowess as they build serpentine riffs around some sweaty, insistent cowbell.
But it’s the album’s longest cut, the 19-and-a-half minute “Show Wong Khun Narin,” that finds Khun Narin really letting loose. Kicking things off with a propulsive riff that resembles theme music from an old Nintendo run-and-gun game, they eventually segue into punchy beats and spy-movie suspense. The track features nice melodic flourishes and several changes between sections, but, really, it’s all about the power of the unstoppable jam. At one point you can almost picture Beer wielding his phin like a laser rifle, ready to blow down anyone in his path.
Of course, this is no “Foxy Lady” or “Purple Haze”; on the psych spectrum, Khun Narin is on a more distant trip. But there’s plenty of ingenuity and verve to be found in their relatively messy style. And maybe that’s the best thing about YouTube: It helps us discover artists who exist far outside the usual industry scenes, who aren’t even necessarily trying to be discovered.
