Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band is a group of musicians from the Phetchabun Province in Northern Thailand playing Thai dance music on handmade electric phin, a Thai lute. Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band’s membership is always in rotation and spans several generations, from high school kids to men well into their 60s. A standard engagement has the band setting up at the hosting household during the morning rituals, playing several low-key sets
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Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band is a group of musicians from the Phetchabun Province in Northern Thailand playing Thai dance music on handmade electric phin, a Thai lute. Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band’s membership is always in rotation and spans several generations, from high school kids to men well into their 60s. A standard engagement has the band setting up at the hosting household during the morning rituals, playing several low-key sets from the comfort of plastic lawn chairs occasionally working-in a cover version of a foreign classic (The Cranberries ‘Zombie’ is a recent favorite) while the beer and whiskey flows freely. After a midday banquet, they start up the generator and lead a parade through the community to the local temple, picking up more and more partiers along the way. Attention in the west started in 2013 with the caption “MINDBLOWING PSYCHE- DELIA FROM THAILAND”. The music in the Youtube video that accompanied this headline on the Dangerous Minds Blog, while incorrectly described as "psychedelia", was certainly mind blowing. Here was a group of Thai musicians parading through a remote village hundreds of miles away from Bangkok playing electrified Thai dance music out of a home-made sound system. The Youtube clip quickly made its rounds amongst music enthusiasts leaving many in the Western hemisphere to question who this group of contemporary Thai villagers (loosely named Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band) was. Six months after that first encounter with Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band, a Los Angeles music producer named Josh Marcy used Facebook and some unlikely interpreters at his local Thai restaurant to get in contact with the band and inquire whether they’d be interested in having him travel to their town to record their music for a global audience. At first the band was naturally suspicious, but through subsequent interactions the group’s leader and namesake Khun Narin (also known simply as “Rin”) warmed to the idea of having Marcy come visit. And so began the journey of uncovering who these mysterious men from an obscure blog post actually were.
