A Cocktail of Beers, Psychedelica and Thai Molam

8 hours ago

3 min read

This is a follow-up to my previous post, Rockin’ At Speakerbox, in which I mentioned Makara's canceled concert due to flooding at the venue. But actually that concert got just moved to October 11!

This was fine for me, but not for Wilhelmus, as he wasn't available that day - bummer.

Anyway, on the 11th I made my way to CampYard, a completely new venue to me, which turned out to be a really cool place. Inside, it wasn't too crowded; beer was flowing, and vibes were positive!

A little later, the warm-up band started: Anthropol, another local band who played an alternative rock/garage style set, not bad at all.

During the break, a lottery seller did the rounds, something I couldn't imagine elsewhere.

Next was Makara with their distinctive mix of psychedelica and Thai molam, delivering both original English and Thai songs which were all well received by the Thai audience (I was the only 'farang' there and probably the oldest as well).

For me, however, these songs were unfamiliar as I had only seen their KFEX performance on YouTube, but I wasn't complaining, on the contrary...

Afterwards, getting home was a piece of cake as it wasn't that late.

The next day I shared my positive impressions with Wilhelmus, who came up with another concert on the 17th at Speakerbox, entitled Siam Psych #3, incl. Makara and a few other bands! This time, together with his daughter, he would be going, so I decided to join as well and bought a ticket online.

However, something else happened at the same time... After posting a video of Makara at CampYard on X, I got an enthusiastic comment from an old student: Aww, do you remember Of? (The bassist in the middle of your video) from my batch! This needs a bit of explanation: way back in time, from 1997 to 2003 in fact, I was an English (with a Dutch accent...) teacher at an alternative school. After leaving the school for a job in tourism, I lost contact with most students over the years, which is understandable. But in 2023 I suddenly got a friendship request from one of those students, as my name suddenly showed up on a list of people she might find interesting; sometimes those algorithms are useful!

After reading her message slowly, an image of Of appeared in my mind, but as a 12-year-old kid... No surprise I didn't recognise him!

So that was another reason to see Makara again, saying hello to an old student!

I arrived a little early at Brew and had a beer while waiting for Wilhelmus and his daughter, Naomi, to show up. They did before I had finished my beer, and we ordered more drinks and pizza. Conversation was a bit different from usual as the focus was more on Naomi, whom I hadn't seen in years either. Of course I told them about Of, which they found hilarious.

Energised by pizza and beers, we hopped over to Speakerbox where we weren't allowed to enter until shown some kind of identification. You'd think my old fart appearance would be clear enough to qualify as older than 20, but rules are rules, right?!

Once inside, we stepped straight into some performance art by an outfit called EXPERIMENTIVE, which sounded rather creepy. Sadly enough, none of us were very impressed by this 'happening'; a monk-dressed character dragging a supposedly corpse in a bag behind him didn't help much either...

We moved over to the main stage area and watched ZeitGeistS, an instrumental heavy psych/doom band, perform. It was kind of OK-ish, but the sound was rather muddy, and some instruments like the small percussion bells were completely drowned out.

During their performance, Wilhelmus suddenly noticed Of standing behind me, so I turned around and greeted him. It took him also a few seconds to place me (no surprise!), but after that we had a short chat outside the main area where Wilhelmus (and later Naomi) joined us. Of told me that he has been active as a musician after graduating from Silapakorn University and enjoyed his time playing with Makara!

He had to cut it short as Makara was about to play, so we said goodbye and wished him all the best.

Makara's performance was quite similar to the one I had seen earlier, but they invited ZeitGeistS' flute player to join them on stage. As expected, Makara didn't disappoint; Wilhelmus and Naomi were well impressed.

By the time the last band started, Chladni Chandi, it was already midnight, so after 2 songs we decided to call it quits and go home. Of course it was raining steadily again and getting home wasn't that easy, but I made it as usual.

All in all, another musical outing worth remembering!