Maft Sai and the Revival of Thai Molam and Luk Thung

Sometimes music finds you in the strangest ways.

I was making a video about the White Lotus season 3 soundtrack and slipped in a track from the Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band. Then my mum left a comment: ‘Very interesting. Loving your new style. Al’s wife’s cousin is in one of the bands you showed.’ Not long after, I had to fly back to Thailand because my mum got sick. She passed while I was there. In the middle of all that loss, I felt like I had to see where it led. So I messaged Al. He wrote back: ‘This is my wife Kim’s friend. He dated Kim’s cousin Yuki for years, and Yuki used to manage the band.’ Mum wasn’t exactly right, but close enough. On my way home, flying from Chiang Rai to Bangkok, I had a few hours before my flight back to Australia. I went straight to ZudRangMa, Maft Sai’s record shop.

This is Nat, better known as Maft Sai. He didn’t grow up surrounded by Thai music. His dad had maybe fifty Thai records, but he barely paid attention. He spent years overseas, school in Australia, then university in London. Studied fashion marketing, tried advertising, but what really stuck was music. Clubs, record shops, crate-digging. He was into hip hop, house, funk, disco, tracing those sounds back to their roots in soul, Afrobeat, Latin grooves. But Thai records? Not on his radar.

When he finally moved back to Bangkok in his twenties, he wasn’t chasing a big plan. He was broke, with time to kill, and started flipping through second-hand vinyl stalls, the kind people dismissed as grandfather’s music. But when he dropped the needle, it was different. Luk thung and molam records from the 60s and 70s: raw khaen drones, psychedelic phin riffs, disco basslines, brass sections. Music that was earthy and rural, but also cosmic and modern. That was the switch, the moment he realized Thai music wasn’t something to overlook.

And that’s where it all began.