The crate-digging, beat-flipping, instrumental hip hop producer extraordinaire Onra is back at it again. This time, he’s dropped an album, called Nosthaigia, based entirely on Thai music plucked from the dusty, forgotten seven-inches of local jazz and pop from decades long past, all replete with fuzzy crackles, mournful melodies, and sweltering vibes.
The entire Nosthaigia album is built on samples from vinyl that the French producer collected in Bangkok, mainly throughout 2016. There was no artwork on any of the records, they were 45s covered only in paper slips, and everything was written in Thai, so he couldn’t understand even what year these records were released as he dug through them. But each record label had its own distinct, colorful logo, and he began to recognize them after a while, gravitating towards certain labels that he liked, and always trying out new ones he didn’t recognize. “The older the paper looked, the better,” he laughs. “When you see something rare like a dragon logo, you try it. Out of 100 I picked out, I’d buy 10 or 20.” There’s no molam on the entire album; he was digging in the cheapest crates, looking for stuff that was 20-40 baht each, and collectors were already driving the genre’s prices up by that point.
Most of Nosthaigia was written in 2017, using about 40 of the 400 records Onra had amassed the year before. Everything on the album is built from one of those samples, down to the individual drum hits. There isn’t a single snare or high hat that comes from a sample pack or software library. He didn’t even use a computer and played everything directly on the MPC. “There are no graphics or colors or anything, just numbers and characters,” he says of the machine. The next year he played at Maho Rasop festival and created another album’s worth of music built on Thai samples for that set. But those were bangers for a party, not the reflective journey that the album is styled on, and he cut them all from the final release.
Onra feels like he’s had trouble being pigeon-holed as “the dude who makes the Asian beats,” and he even swore off making any more of them after three Chinoiseries full-lengths and a Bollywood-inspired tape. (His heritage is French, Vietnamese, and a dash of Indian.) But he was here living in Thailand, just digging, doing what he does anywhere else, and he started making another album based on the records he’d been collecting.
The result is a very personal project, one he used to reflect on a time passed and a relationship lost. In 2020 he divorced his Thai wife, was isolated in the French countryside during COVID, and had to cancel several tours. Someone close to him died and he also had damaged his ears. “I was trying to finish this album that I nearly finished years before, but I had no energy. I was at rock bottom,” he says. “I wanted this to be an expression of what I was going through in my personal life. It wasn’t like taking my listeners on a trip to Thailand, which was what the Chinese tapes were meant to be. This was an expression of the sadness I was going through. I don’t even like to listen to it now because it brings back strong feelings. I’m healed now, but the project might have actually made that harder. I’m a romantic though, so I had to express it.”
Although Onra is back living in Thailand, it’s unlikely you’ll hear him play the album live, since it’s something he’s trying to move beyond now that it’s finally finished and released into the world. If you catch him out playing, you’re more likely to hear something along the lines of the Maho Rasop set or even his secret old-school house side project. “No one knows this, but I’ve been working on stuff inspired by late 80s, early 90s Chicago and New York house,” he grins. “They were making music with the same equipment I use every day, so it’s a nice challenge and overlap.” You’ll just have to pull up to his next party to hear what a live set by him sounds like these days.
