This is a hip hop instrumental soundtrack for an abandoned skyscraper in Bangkok. The developers called the building Sathorn Unique, but the locals think of it as the Ghost Tower. 50 stories tall, built to show-off the mighty rise of Asia in the 1990’s, it was abandoned in 1997 when their economy dried up and capital fled to better markets. It remains as a hollow monument, nearly complete in the lower floors but slowly de-rezzing as it gets taller until the bare and open rooftop stands jagged above the Bangkok skyline. It lives as a shell, a reminder, a warning, and a resilient monolith.

I made this music to express the many different feelings & ideas that Sathorn Unique raises about architecture & acoustics, finance & globalization, great hopes & haunted dreams, and the way that futures can take sudden unexpected turns away from great visions.

I saw it first-hand in 2009 from a boat plying the green & dirty Chao Phraya river. I was captivated and haunted, deeply affected but unable to articulate why. It just seemed so odd. In the Summer of 2011 I found this post from Abandoned Journeys, revealing its so-very-appropriate science fiction name, Sathorn Unique, along with a beautiful photo journal documenting an urban exploration up into the tower.

This project has been an attempt to express the character of Sathorn through sound and to document the process as a meditation on the many curiosities about modern life that unfold from its story. If you scroll through this Tumblr, you’ll find my own thoughts about making the music and wrangling with the ideas & emotions behind the work. I hope that, in my own way, I’ve helped flesh out a brighter afterlife for the Ghost Tower.

Approach - 1st single from Sathorn Unique now available for free download.

Here’s the very first post that kicked off this project.

8 hours in the studio with the mix engineer has produced some fine & punchy pre-masters. On Wednesday night we go back in to do the final masters. Can’t wait to run the signal through some of the sweet outboard compressors & limiters at Gadgetbox to add the secret sauce. It amazes me how much space and depth can be gained from some solid mastering…

After that, I’ll get the visual assets together and post everything to a new Bandcamp page. Details to follow…

Torre De David, Caracas supersquat.

This is what I imagine Sathorn Unique might be in an alter-present or future timeline…

The takeover of Torre de David began four years ago when 300 people forced their way into the derelict building. “The night we came in, I was scared, but I was also excited to finally have my own home,” says Jhonny Jimenez, 31, a member of the founding group and now one of the tower’s main co-ordinators. “We organised people according to their needs: the elderly who can’t go up flights of stairs would go in the lower floors and large families would get more space.”

Torre de David still lacks basic services, but the building functions well. Each of the 22 inhabited floors has co-ordinators, like Jimenez, who oversee the general functioning of their assigned area.

The management of the building is divided into three departments: health services, recreation and security. Space is granted free, but people pay a monthly fee of 150 Bolívar fuerte (£13) for improvements such as a recreation room for children and an evangelical church being built on the ground floor.

“It’s a city within a city, with corner shops on every other floor, cybercafes and apartments that double as hair salons and other types of informal businesses,” says Leo Alvarez, a lawyer who has documented these informal settlements. “It functions, and quite well, with no authority other than their pastor.”

I’ve sent my final mixes to our neighborhood studio, Gadgetbox. Their mixing engineer, Gabe, is working on nailing the pre-master mix for each of the tracks, tightening up the low-end, adding space to the mids, and reinforcing the rhythm section. Once the pre-masters are done I’ll send them to mastering for the secret sauce.

It’s great for me to let go of the mix at this stage and get another set of ears in there. It’s really easy to get lost in an endless cycle of polishing and nudging. Then you listen to the song so many times that it starts to sound boring. I’ve signed off and it’s now in Gabe’s hands.

A brief note on mastering: Good mastering engineers have exceptional ears and a battery of hardware at their disposal, like 40yr-old valve compressors and crazy high-end expanders that add warmth, beef up the mix, and bring a truly phenomenal degree of depth and presence to the mix. To me, it’s really magical what good mastering can do to the sound and I can’t wait to hear the final product.

Here are all 5 of the songs I’ve produced for the Sathorn Unique project. These are pre-masters so I’ve left them as stream-only. Eventually (ie. when I can afford it) I’ll have these remastered and then post them on Bandcamp as free downloads.

Approach (final premaster mix) by chris23

Entrance (final premaster mix) by chris23

Rising (second mix, formerly Climbing) by chris23

Rooftop (final premaster mix) by chris23

Sathorn (final premaster mix) by chris23

Sathorn (final premaster mix) by chris23

If the Rooftop represented the peak of the Sathorn Unique experience, then the 5th & final song, simply titled Sathorn, is the come-down & resolution. The track opens with sounds of the street under falling stars. The beat is more syncopated and there’s a roots vibe, accented with a guitar & organ skank. There are more obviously-melodic elements in this song suggesting the enduring vitality of the creative act, in spite of decay & downfall.

And really, Blade Runner futures aside, amidst the endless rise & fall of empires people will always find simple ways to sing & make music. The electronic studio I’ve used to produce these songs could dry up with my ability to pay utilities, or be looted by desperate & displaced interlopers. I’d still have an acoustic guitar. No blips & bleeps needed.

This final song is more about the reality of the street below the Ghost Tower, and the necessary persistence of urban life proceeding whether or not Sathorn Unique was ever a success. Indeed, for most people, such overly-ambitious and incomprehensibly expensive skyscrapers have always been barely real. Such towers are not made for commoners. This one in particular emphasizes the tension, standing as it is now, hollowed and broken, once flush with moneys now vanished & moved on to better investment opportunities.

This is where the lavish imagined timeline of Sathorn Unique collapses back into the local reality, like the moldering brochures showing off a future that never was. This is where the ephemeral whims of capital touched down long enough to leave an indelible reminder of their ultimate disloyalty. The final movement of Sathorn, the song, reinforces the hard facts of life and the brutishness of the global money game. The droning wall and the whining worm throw up the fierce edge of survival.

And yet, the tempest sputters out and returns, as it always does, back to the streets where life continues, for good & ill, unabated for millenia thus far. This is the resolution: that, despite the great power elites and their fantasies & seductions, despite the shell games and ponzi schemes and cronyism and backstabbing… Despite all this the people persist. And they make music to express their lives, ease their burdens, and tell their stories. For most, the Ghost Tower is like the global elite: more easily forgotten in its decline than challenged in its prime.