Benjamin Tausig

Assistant Professor of Music

Stony Brook University

Links for WFMU listeners, January 2020:

Fieldwork updates from this past summer

Peter Doolan’s blog, Monrakplengthai

Ajarn Thongsai!

Khun Chang Khun Phaen, likely the first-ever lam ploen recording

Maurice Rocco’s blisteringly good cameo in Incendiary Blonde

 

New book out 2019:

Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint

Recent talks (2019)

Triple Canopy with Maureen Mahon; Lenox Hill Neighborhood House; Wesleyan University; “On Archival Truths” symposium at Stony Brook

(early 2020)

guest DJ set on WFMU (January); keynote lecture at the Spectrum Protestival in Brooklyn (January, New Yorker write-up here); Harvard University (March); Association for Asian Studies conference (March); Upcoming talk with Whitney Biennial artist Korakrit Arunanondchai (TBA).

 

Recent interviews

interview about Bangkok Is Ringing on the New Books Network (Patrick Jory)

review of Bangkok Is Ringing in Mekong Review (Chris Baker)

interview about Bangkok Is Ringing on The Field Recording Show (Kate Carr)

interview about Bangkok Is Ringing with CaMP Anthropology (Ilana Gershon and Mack Hagood)

interview about aural refusal with Somatic Podcast (Samuel Clevinger)

 

Listen to the audio edition of “Bangkok Is Ringing” at the links in the TOC below (chapters available on a rolling basis, as they finish production). The audio edition will eventually include the complete text of the book, narrated by 18 different readers, with field recordings and other audio interspersed. It is a podcast/audiobook hybrid. Please enjoy in tandem with or instead of the print version, and distribute freely.

 

AUDIO EDITION (brief guide to the audio edition)

INTRODUCTION: Sound, Protest Space, & Constraint (listen now)
Chapter 1 Completely Packed In (listen now)
Chapter 2 Red Sunday: Power and Connections (listen now)
Chapter 3 Atrocity Broadcasts (listen now)
Chapter 4 Wireless Road and the Ground of Modernity (listen now)
Chapter 5 Megaphone Singing
Chapter 6 Megaphonic Somsak Sangkaparicha Comes by His Goddamn Self
Chapter 7 A Quiet Mourning: The Poetry of Dynamics
Chapter 8 Whistles
Chapter 9 Vehicular Stereo Systems
Chapter 10 Developing Musical Economies I: CD Vendors
Chapter 11 Developing Musical Economies II: Stage Musicians
Chapter 12 Spontaneous Chants
Chapter 13 Developing Musical Economies III: Mr. Bear
Chapter 14 Surveillance
Chapter 15 Outer Space
Chapter 16 The Vanishing Point
Conclusion: On Mediated Spatiality

 

About the author

I teach sound studies and ethnomusicology, and research sound and dissent in Southeast Asia. I am currently researching the musical intimacies of Thailand during the Vietnam War, including the largely-forgotten (though no less astounding) American jazz pianist Maurice Rocco, who lived in Bangkok for fifteen years. Here is one of Rocco’s videos, a Soundie filmed in 1943, which is a characteristically stunning performance. In this research project, I’m looking at the ways that music and nightlife were at the center of Thailand’s semi-colonial development from the 1950s through the 1970s. I’m been doing fieldwork and archival work for a while in Thailand and other places — sign up for my fieldwork newsletter here. I’m enthusiastically reading Daniel Fineman on Thai-US relations, Felicity Aulino on care and aging in Thailand, Rong Wongsawan on Thailand in the aftermath of Vietnam, Ara Wilson on intimate economies, Wallace Terry on the black experience of Vietnam, Richard Wright on Afro-Asianism, and Ann Stoler on archives.

 

 

2020

“Climates of Dissent,” in Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

2019 

 

2018

 

Spring 2020

MUS 451 Methods in Ethnomusicology (undergrad)

MUS 537 Ethnographic Methods (with guests K.E. Goldschmitt, Rachel Mundy, Marié Abe, Maria Sonevytsky, Shirley Lim)

 

MUS537 Baggage: Ethics in Ethnographic Research