As the apocalypse for all forms of recorded music you can touch draws near, Maft Sai, Bangkok’s resident record junkie, recalls the golden era of London’s vinyl district and tells all about his analog addiction.
In the 90s, Soho’s Berwick Street was lined with more than 20 independent stores and dubbed the Graceland of record shopping by collectors. The street even crossed over to pop chronicles when it was featured on the cover of Oasis album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory. But a combination of inflated rents and the MP3 boom turned a once-happening community into a ghost town.
Such swinging trumpets, crooners and tambourines get thrown into cellars worldwide and forgotten about until someone like Maft Sai comes along and digs them up. But without people like Sai, what happens to such cultural artefacts?
“Most old records are destroyed,” says Sai. “People don’t care about the value of them, not in terms of just money but in terms of their cultural capital. Sometimes they just burn them. It’s shameful.”
This is shown all too well in Take Me Away Fast, a documentary directed by fellow vinyl junkie and Berlin DJ Frank Gossner, screened by Sai at Opposite in Bangkok recently. The film follows Gossner journeying through West Africa to save one-off presses of funk and soul records from the 1970s before they meet their fate in a crackling fire fuelled by black wax.
When Maft Sai first started digging for records 15 years ago, he was mostly into funk, jazz, afro music and reggae. The more he heard, the more interested he became in the origins of the sounds. His search eventually led him to Nigeria, Ghana and other African countries. When he started delving into Ethiopian and Malinese sounds, he noticed similarities between them and the Thai country music genre, molam.
Band: Angkana Kuhn Chai
Album: Fan Ja Ya Leum, 1973
“They used a 10 piece molam band for the album. In the early 80s, the sound changed because of the introduction of Molam Sing, where you don’t need a full band, just a pin, drum machine, keyboard and singer. It usually only takes two people to produce it.”
Band: Le Super Djata Band Du Mali
Album: En Super Forme Vol. 1, 1982
“I love the strong vocals and the back up rhythms are very similar to those of Thailand’s molam music.”
Band: Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari
Album: Tales of Mozambique, 1973
“I can imagine myself listening to this when I’m really old. It’s just nice; that’s all.”