Getting to Know… Santipreecha | Interview 🎤

In the 238^th interview in our Getting to Know…series, Thai electronic musician Santipreecha wows with a stunning, incredibly intellectual conversation.

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repare to be wowed. 🎙 Santipreecha delivers one of the most impressive interviews to ever grace The Musical Hype, and we are 238 interviews in! Deeply intellectual and passionate about all facets of the arts, the talented Thai electronic musician doesn’t ‘hold back,’ giving his all in an incredibly expressive fashion.  I could spend the time summarizing and pulling out the many incredible quotes, but how about we dive right in! Without further ado, here is 🎤 Getting to Know… Santipreecha: Interview 238!

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Starting things off, for those who may not be familiar with Santipreecha, what would you say makes you distinct or unique? How do you rock the audience’s socks off?

🎤 People have said to me what they’ve liked and found unique about my music is that it’s always a bit off-kilter in a cinematic way; cinematic in the sense that it has a kind of journey perhaps more akin to something of a story. This probably comes from my background both in classical music and in film but also my love for literature and stories and what I love most about music for myself as well; there’s always a sense of journey, of inner journey, of self-realization whether it’s internal or external to you, whether it’s immediately comprehensible or not. That’s what I love about music and all art actually. I’ve spent many years trying to find the balance of internal and external, of those darker interior explorations but also something that can feel visceral as well in the present tense and I think in a lot of the pieces I’ve done, especially with this last album Round a Roo which just came out on February 2nd, has this interplay.

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Okay, let’s explore some juicy backstories. How did Santipreecha begin, and what were some of the goals or visions you had early on?

🎤 The name santipreecha means ‘the ability to be at peace’ in Thai (where I’m from) and that was a very important part of this project for me personally. Working on the music I do brings me a calmness that is rare and fulfilling but in a broader sense, it also has cultural implications for me as well. Music, like all art, is about community and deals just as much with the past as with the present. If you’re performing live, you are of course working in present time, but you are also evoking things created or conceived in the past. Music itself exists in linear time and our limitations in time perception are something we must contend with in both the creative process but also in the process of listening to music. In a more cultural sense, music is always dealing with the past in terms of musical culture, form, style, and content and now more than ever that is being questioned. Our identities musically today are vast and diverse, more so than perhaps any other time period in history, and we must find ourselves within that and allow ourselves to embrace all that we are and that made us while finding a voice within that. This is a hard one both personally and artistically for me but one that I continually strive to find.

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Let’s talk more about goals. Have your goals or your perspectives changed since first starting out? What do your aspirations or goals look like now?

🎤 Oh definitely. It’s been a long journey for me from my early days in ballet and classical music to my over ten-year stint in film music to five years of writing a failed novel and poetry which ultimately helped me return to music in a much more personal and open way. A lot of it was coming to terms with a lot of personal things including musical/cultural/artistic identities. And of course, there have been several key people along the way who have helped me shape my thoughts and perspectives. I think my main goal musically now, or aspirations, is to explore it as openly as I can, both as a listener and as a creator. We live in such a genre-defined world these days which of course has to do with markets etc. that if we are not careful, we find ourselves living contently within these designated boxes and we think ‘this type of music is this because of x-y-z only’. This is natural to a degree, but it can also be stifling. I’ve been writing and thinking a lot lately about musical material as they are in themselves, how they’ve existed over time and how we interact with them, and I try to interact with that in its raw form as much as possible. For example, why is it that over many centuries and many different musical traditions all around the world we tend to find a similar use of the triplet which seems to evoke this sense of excitement and movement? Does this have to do with the fact that we are bi-peds and therefore this sense of subdivision by three gives us that skipping feeling? What about tonality and atonality?

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Everybody is influenced by somebody else. Whom would you consider some of your biggest musical influences and how are they influential?

🎤 I don’t distinguish between musical and other non-musical influences much. All the arts influence me and are incredibly important to me, in some ways more so with other art forms; it allows you to see outside your bubble which is something we must constantly strive for especially today. I would say some of my biggest artistic influences are the writer/playwright Samuel Beckett, the poet Edith Sitwell, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. There are many more but let’s keep to our theme of three.

Beckett is influential in a very broad sense which goes very, very deep for me. I’ve loved everything I’ve read or seen of his. The exploration of humanity is so profound and incredibly moving. The pointillistic nature of his writing; how on the surface things may appear absurd and comic but how the further in you get the more you start to feel that darker underbelly, always incredibly human, very profound. Molloy remains a favorite, of course Waiting for Godot, and also his short play Ohio Impromptu which Jeremy Irons brilliantly performed in a short film.

Edith Sitwell. Her exploration of poetry and language and breaking it into its minute elements, vowels, syllables and building it up again into something all her own is a great influence on me and my own explorations. Her poem March Past is still a favorite, about the beginning of the first world war (like Beckett, she lived through both). As an aside, the way she engages both with the present and the past in her works is incredible.

Stockhausen, well, he was one of the grandfathers of electronic music and the way he thought about it and its possibilities are still in many ways ahead of its time now. His piece Gesang der Jünglinge (1955- 56) is regarded as one of the first masterpieces of electronic music and for very good reason. An incredible piece which, again, deals beautifully with both the present and past.

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Ah, the fun stuff. What’s your craziest tour story or the wackiest thing that’s happened during a performance? Feel free to be creative.

🎤 Most of my work has been studio-based but I’m planning to get back into performing live especially with this electronic work which will be exciting and new for me but who knows, I may get back to breaking piano strings accidentally during a live show or playing through the electricity going out, though the latter would be hard with electronic music, haha.

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Up until this point in your career, what would you describe as your favorite song you’ve recorded or performed live? What makes that song special?

🎤 I would say 🎵 “Round a Roo Round” from my latest album 💿 Round a Roo. It was one of the last pieces I wrote for the album and it all came together rather quickly, and I really felt I was able to express certain musical gestures that I’d been trying to a long while now from my own Thai musical heritage in a way that felt natural and exciting within a completely different context of sounds and instruments while still retaining that exhilarating character I’ve always loved of particularly Isaan (north-eastern) music.

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Is there anything else awesome, cool, or left of center the world should know about you? Secret talents or surprising tidbits?

🎤 Hmm, maybe that I’d never planned to pursue music originally. My first love was art (painting to be specific). Then came literature. I painted a copy of the Mona Lisa for my ninth-grade art project, haha. And in many ways, both the visual arts and literature remain very important and very much a part of how I create music, particularly the visual arts. I’m very visual and I’ve always had very strong musical/color associations in how I view/hear things. I try to explore these as much as possible. Going back to earlier in the interview, I think that’s the greatest challenge nowadays: to both broaden your musical palette but at the same time hone it down to as unique and coherent a palette as you can; ultimately this has to come from within you, within your own history and past as much as the present. The artist and sculpture Louise Bourgeois is another great example of this and an incredible influence.

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Closing things out, what are you currently working on, promoting that you can share with us or want us to know about? We love secrets, but there’s no pressure.

🎤 My second album, 💿 Round a Roo, just came out on February 2nd. I’ll be releasing an album of an original score I did for Guy Longstreet’s psychological thriller 🎦 Black Jade in the not-too-distant future and I’m currently working on a new project though I’m still deep in the experimental phase, so we’ll see what it ends up being.

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Thank you so much for sharing taking the time to answer these questions, and best of luck moving forward.

🎤 Thank you so much for having me!

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🎤 Getting to Know… Santipreecha: Interview 238 [📷: Brent Faulkner, Guy Longstreet, The Musical Hype, Santipreecha]

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