As Jersey club continues to infiltrate Thai music, it was only inevitable that it would be paired with the local homegrown sounds of 3cha. But when it finally showed up a couple of months ago, it took a surprising form, blending much of the genre’s traditional instrumentation rather than its updated, EDM-fashioned variety. VKL’s “ฟังกันต่อ,” produced by 19-year-old pvazzy, takes a stripped-down, fast-paced club beat and combines it with local instruments including a Thai guitar, gong, conga, and more. The high point of the track is when VKL takes a break from hopping over the beats with nimble vocals to let a surprising, 25-second phin synth melody solo rock out.
pvazzy is part of the growing underground Thai scene and produces beats ranging from Jersey club, to Eurodance and hyperpop, to plugnb and rage rap. He’s a multi-instrumentalist who’s been making beats since he was 14 years old, but has been playing the piano pretty much forever. “I hated it for the first seven years,” he laughs while speaking from his home studio in Chom Thong, where he grew up. “But I kept pushing and got over this hill and really started to enjoy it after that.” The hard work paid off and he’s taken that music theory and virtuosity he learned and applied to new musical interests. It’s made it easy for him to pick up pretty much anything, including more recently the drums and guitar. (He played the drummer in a recent Slur video casting younger artists in place of the famous band members.)
Artists like YoungOhm and Younggu spawned pvazzy’s interest in rap music, and he would sing along karaoke style to the elder artists’ songs with his high school friends during breaks between classes. Eventually, he decided he wanted to produce and asked one of his friends to rap over his beats. By his senior year, he’d released music with friends that his whole school knew and sang along to it during their graduation. By that point, he’d already gotten involved in the rap scene beyond schoolmates via the Facebook group Thai Trap, which incubated much of this young, new generation of Thai artists. When he produced his first song for a new artist, he says he put a lot of pressure on himself: “It was my first real hip hop track, so I put so much work into it. But the artist loved it; everyone loved it. So it really changed me. Like, why do I have to be so scared?”
In 2021 pvazzy helped start Litty Club, a collection of friends including Mis4kii, YoungTarr, $HOGUN, YungKillie, saksxn, and eventually fellow producer b!zxn. It was also the name of the Discord server where they connected to the wider scene on a deeper level than the larger Facebook group allowed. Last year they merged with the Dha Vision team, but pvazzy will work with pretty much anyone, as long as he likes their music.
pvazzy has hit his stride in the past year and is working with a lot of artists. He calls hip hop production a job, but says it’s allowed him to blend his love of music with the ability to earn a living. He’s continued infusing rap with Thai music and is working on a beat flipping samples from the Thai lullaby “Kang Kao Gin Gluay.” And he’s still making music for fun, working on stuff like the Europop roll-call track “Vamos” that lets him create without a strict plan and really go hard with the synthesizer. He keeps using subtle 3cha elements as well, but is quick to point out that it’s not the real thing: “It’s a very unique genre. It’s real. It’s impossible to make regular, local people to dance to it if you’re not that guy. I sneak it into my music though.”
That recognition of music’s place in the real world is something pvazzy has taken to heart in the past few months. He says music lives in the moment and changes depending on who’s listening to it and where. “If I play something for you, and then you’re gone and I play the song again at the same volume on the same speakers, it won’t have the same feeling,” he says. “The environment is an element of the music, even when the song is exactly the same.” Because of that, there’s a lot of music he doesn’t release. But you’ll always be able to expect something new from him—he’s always working on something different.
