All of the moments and experiences that have shaped my view on music and life from these past 3 months are all thanks to my mentor CRSRCRSRRR and fellow Cornea Cochlear Club collective members, BEAST director and composer Scott Wilson and friends in the UK, my beloved colleagues at MSMU and the Triphens Ensemble, my parents, and my best friend + Rodent Radio collaborator Nattakon Lertwattanaruk.
To say that attending BEAST FEaST 2025 in Birmingham, UK, was just another festival experience would be an underestimation, as it had opened the door to many new sonic possibilities for me. In this blog post, I’ll cover the changes in my electroacoustic and audiovisual practices over the last 15 weeks or so and how my experience with BEAST FEaST has helped shape them.
A few days ago, I premiered my piece “khuu / คู่” on the TEAMSmulch (designed by me, President of TEAMS) loudspeaker octet at the Triphens Ensemble Pioneer Project as part of TICF2025. A month prior, I also had the pleasure of designing a sound diffusion system, along with premiering my new EP, “dadadadadatadada,” and providing sound diffusion for fellow live coders at Cornea Cochlear Club’s “Evals” show at Bangkok Kunsthalle. But how was there such a sudden surge in all this multichannel stuff when it wasn’t such a common thing in Thailand before, outside of cinemas?
The answer is actually pretty simple – someone decided to do it. After I returned home and completed the rest of my projects – Maxer-12 and From Node to Noise – one by one, my mentor CRSRCRSRRR gave me a heads up that the Bangkok Kunsthalle wanted the Cornea Cochlear Club collective to do a night with their 8 Genelec speakers. Coincidentally, I was also recommended by the PGVIM composer and graduate studies chair, Jean-David Caillouet, to send in a proposal for a BEAST show that would be held as part of the PGVIM’s annual symposium.
After I had my fair share of composition hiatus in the last week of May, up to the prize ceremony for From Node to Noise, I started the development of dadadadadatadada and another unnamed computer-based acousmatic work based on the interaction of a “complex voice” patch on a no-input mixing board (NIMB), which later became “khuu / คู่”. Up to this point, my buddy-best-friend-collaborator friend and composer Nattakon Lertwattanaruk (www.nattakonmusic.com) had returned to Bangkok to spend his summer break and compose a little bit more, which led to us hanging out super often and resulted in a Rodent Radio set which was performed at SYNAP home/lab (Rodent Radio works performed there are also available on our Youtube Channel).
Following the familiar feeling of slowly picking up the pace to composing everyday again, I had developed a set of Pure Data-based tools to aid me in writing dadadadadatadada as I live in a very cramped high-rise room with no possibilities for setting up multiple loudspeakers (although that is about to change very soon). One tool in particular, stq (and its counterpart, qts), can encode and decode stereophonic sound in a simulated quadrophonic listening situation in headphones to an extent that I could program spatialization and movements without the need for multiple loudspeakers. I also need to mention that I live-coded dadadadadatadada in 96kHz sampling rate thanks to the processing power of the MOTU MicroBook II. The main idea of dadadadadatadada is about blending the aesthetics of post-digital, audiovisual relationship, and micromontage “data” audiovisual works with concepts of electroacoustic composition, Dadaism, and performance art, composed especially for the 8 loudspeakers at Bangkok Kunsthalle. Similarly to my work for BEAST FEaST, sky@kys: ls -a, I did not go all out on spatialization techniques and “frequency content cleanup” as to let sound diffusion shine more than just turning volume on and off for distant pairs. Some sections in particular, like the ambient wash and the 2-minute sine sweep relied on algorithmic composition techniques to let me focus on diffusion while still being able to make changes to the patch.
Besides dadadadadatadada and kloz’s multichannel set, other performances in “Evals” were stereophonic, and just 2 speakers in an 8-speaker setting would not do justice to the performers in the space, which led to the creation of “CCCQuadDiffuse”, a Pure Data (Pd) based computer-assisted sound diffusion system for reinforced quadrophonics for use with the Behringer X32 digital mixing console (which also laid the foundation for what would later become TEAMSmulch). CCCQuadDiffuse was developed by SKYKYS and CRSRCRSRRR for the Evals show by Cornea Cochlear Club, based on the concepts of quadrophonic sound and the BEAST “Main 8” stereo diffusion system. The system is used for spatializing live-coded dance music on an 8.2 “reinforced quadrophonic” array, with options for spatializing stereophonic or quadrophonic sound. The system runs on Pure Data and requires a Behringer X32 mixing console to operate, which gives it the flexibility of digital mixing consoles and a built-in motorized fader control surface. Evals was a very successful show for the Cornea Cochlear Club with many old and new friends coming to the event. See below for some images that go super hard.
Aside from dadadadadatadada, I also performed a techno set at BLAQLYTE Rover and a duo set with Naknan at the EmSphere shopping mall, making July a very fruitful month for me in terms of discovering new listening situations as I perform in a diverse range of venues. This later led to an upcoming paper-performance research “spatialized algorithms: combining the practices of audiovisual livecoding and sound diffusion in the case of sky@kys: ls -a and dadadadadatadada” which will be presented at Most Wanted: Music 2025 Hybrid Music Lab in Berlin this November.
While July was a month full of livecoding performances, I had not dropped the composition process of “khuu / คู่” as the Thailand International Composition Festival 2025 (TICF2025) was coming up, along with the confirmation of the piece’s presentation at PGVIS symposium as part of the “BEASTs of Wonderland” performance. To say that composing this piece was hard would also be an understatement, as my background in electroacoustic composition is not one that includes training in composition for a linear medium (tape music, acousmatic music, etc.). However, my responsibilities as an artist-scholar and a seldom educator have given me enough insight into the creation process of computer-based acousmatic music.
For “khuu / คู่”, I wanted to create a piece in the style of elektronische Musik through the use of computer sound transformation, while still maintaining the aesthetics of (supposedly) composing with tapes. This, of course, means that I need to make every precise edit, stretching, and granulation by hand (or mouse). The sound material for the piece is a collection of stereophonic NIMB improvisations totalling about 5 hours with the NIMB. While this is a technique study and written in the aesthetics of “circlejerk acousmatic music”, I did not use any complex sound transformation processes at all, beyond reverb freeze.
The piece itself suggests the intersection of the old and the new – combining elektronische Musik aesthetics and unconventional feedback-based electronic instruments with computer music techniques and modern acousmatic aesthetics. The piece also investigates feedback itself as an instrument, recontextualizing recorded feedback gestures in a new linear timeline, which essentially creates another timeline on top of a timeline. Sonically, the transformation of recorded material resulted in all shapes and forms of sound – chirps and granulated clicks to resonant formant textures and huge, immersive drone walls.
“khuu / คู่” was commissioned by BEAST and PGVIM for “BEASTs of Wonderland”, a MiniBEAST concert at PGVIM, and was performed at the Thailand International Composition Festival 2025 at the College of Music, Mahidol University. This marks my second time working with BEAST in 2025, which led me to write a tape piece in stereophonic with diffusion as performance in mind. Diffusion, however, was originally not possible in the MACM Auditorium, where I first performed the piece. With help from my former audio engineering mentor and head of the Music Technology program at the College of Music, I received outsider permission to design and install a Non-Standard Multi-Loudspeaker (NSML) sound diffusion system for the Triphens Ensemble concerts during TICF2025.
This dilemma led to the creation of TEAMSmulch (https://github.com/skykys88/TEAMSmulch), an open-source Pure Data (Pd) based computer-assisted sound diffusion system for use by the Thai ElectroAcoustic Music Society (TEAMS). The Thai ElectroAcoustic Music Society (TEAMS) is a non-profit effort in promoting and connecting electroacoustic music and its practitioners in Thailand, led by me and several other Thai composers based in multiple parts of the world. The Society also publishes works and distributes open-source software which aids in the creation and performance of electroacoustic music. More information on TEAMS and its mother organization, Pan-Pacific Assembly of Music and Multimedia Arts (PPAMMA), soon.
Much of the code in TEAMSmulch v1.0 itself is largely based on CCCQuadDiffuse and still requires the Behringer X32 as its audio interface and controller, with added support for tape playback, internal stopwatch, oscilloscope, group sends, click track, and metering options with built-in master trim. TEAMSmulch v1.0 worked perfectly for the diffusion of “khuu / คู่”, Nattakon Lertwattanaruk’s “RedDeadRouletteReconstruction”, and Prin Varojtecha’s “Feed the algorithm, until…”, and has been described as “brilliant” by my mentor CRSRCRSRRR. The speaker configuration used for TEAMSmulch v1.0 at TICF2025 is mainly based on the BEAST “Main 8” main stereo diffusion pairs used in the main configuration of BEAST at the Bramall.
Fast forward 10 days from its premiere (to yesterday!), “khuu / คู่” received its “real premiere” on the PGVIM Woodbox, an 18.2 NSML-based loudspeaker diffusion system at the PGVIM designed by BEAST director Scott Wilson during his visiting professorship in 2024. Originally, the system was 10.2 until not many moons ago, when the addition of 2 subwoofers (to the audio engineers and post sound editors: sorry, we don’t do LFEs here :wink:) and an additional set of BEAST Main 8 setup in overhead position. After living through all the academic jargon during the symposium, the BEAST concert was the highlight of the day, with my piece (diffused with me sitting in the Thai Pab Piab position!) and many other fabulous pieces by BEAST composers Scott Wilson (Panjago, with Rani Jambak and M Hario Efenur), Annie Mahtani (Shimmer), Christopher Haworth (Correlation #1), and a collaborative piece between BEAST and PGVIM students (Through The Looking Glass, with Sara Marquez, Gianni Bencich-Grigore, Dhorn Taksinwarajan and many other PGVIM students).
I am writing this blog today (24 August 2025) after I woke up from a really peaceful sleep, a result of what happened last night at Beeru (that is, a copious amount of booze from a certain Birmingham-based Canadian composer). Hope anyone reading this is having a good time, and I hope to write a lifestyle blog like this again around the end of the year!
Love and take care