Their work in an intersection of art, culture, music, and technology has earned numerous honors. In 2022, they won the Lumen Prize Gold Award for their collaborative project, Jitr (จิตร), and have received the Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellowship (2024) and the Processing Foundation Data Storytelling Fellowship (2025). They were artists-in-residence at Babycastles, the Institute for Electronic Arts, and CultureHub; members of NEW INC and its Y10 Art & Code and Y11 Extended Realities tracks and LivecodeNYC.
Kengchakaj is a Bangkok-born, Lenapehoking (Brooklyn)-based Thai diaspora sound practitioner and improviser. He makes sound rooted in his lineage as a site of repair, reconciliation, and transformation — holding space for unlearning and relearning. These sounds arrive charged with political complexity and contested memory that permeate both personal and collective experience. His practice spans electro-acoustic piano, Southeast Asian tuned-analog synthesizer, spatial audio, gong making, and live coding, harnessing technology to produce multisensory live performances. Kengchakaj holds a graduate degree from the Manhattan School of Music, is a Fulbright Scholar, and is a Gold Award Lumen Prize winner. He is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow (2025-2028) and Lincoln Center Collider Fellow (2024-2025).
Nitcha Tothong (Fame) is a Thai interdisciplinary media artist, coder, and designer based in Brooklyn. Her practice centers on computational experimentation and algorithmic processes, creating cross-medium works that bridge digital systems with analog materialities. Through live coding visuals and generative methodologies, she interrogates how computational tools and digital infrastructures shape perspectives influenced by soft power, colonization, and technological hegemonies. She is also ? of elekhlekha.
Kan-Ta has been deeply connected with Nora music and culture from Southern Thailand since childhood. He began studying traditional Nora music at a young age and has performed in ritual and ceremonial contexts ever since. As he grew older, Kan-Ta encountered and explored music from various cultures, embracing diverse influences and integrating them with his own musical roots.
Pitchaon Kanajaroen (Porjai) is a Bangkok-based drummer studying at the College of Music, Mahidol University. She has performed on various stages, including the Thailand International Jazz Conference (TIJC) 2026 with the Mahidol Jazz Orchestra and Monster Music Festival 2023 with Have You Heard? She has earned recognition across Thailand's competitive circuit: 1st place at the Hotwave Music Awards 2023 with Have You Heard?, 2nd place at the Thailand Jazz Competition (TJC) 2024 with Luminus, and finalist spot at the TIJC Jazz Band Competition 2025. Being passionate about musical expressions, she strives to create connections with fellow musicians through her playing.
Matas Masungsong (Percussionist | Drummer | Music Educator) Multi Thai Drummer and bandleader of Khamvisedth, blending traditional and contemporary sounds. Matas has performed with Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band, Maft Sai & The Isan Clan, and Electric Piphat, and has appeared at Wonderfruit Festival and on international stages in South Korea and India with Seathencity. His work includes global projects with Netflix, Riot Games (USA), and West One Music (UK).
Voratorn Peerapongpan formerly worked at SO::ON Dry FLOWER, an independent record label. Voratorn is currently working in the production design field as a designer and creative. He has been designing shows for various Thai artists such as Desktop Error, THE YERS, and Zweed 'n Roll.
Two works developed during the residency:
"ล้อมวง (surrounded)":
ล้อมวง (surrounded) is an immersive audio-visual music project by elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ, developed during their residency at Bangkok Kunsthalle. The work brings together Thai traditional instrumentalists — Kanta Kantaphong on Pi Nora and various Southern Thai instruments, Matas Masungsong on Thai percussion, and jazz drummer Pitchaon Kanajaroen — in a process that is as much laboratory as performance. Built through a series of workshops, it functions as a living knowledge-exchange platform, where each collaborator's distinct voice shapes a continuously evolving shared practice. The final performance will feature lighting design by Voratorn.
There is no stage, no fixed seating. Generative, audio-reactive visuals move across the floor beneath the audience's feet. At the center: a custom spatial audio system distributed throughout the space, and a prepared DC3X Disklavier Yamaha grand piano (ฆ้องเปียโน), its timbre tuned to evoke a Southeast Asian gong ensemble. Audiences sit, stand, drift — finding their own position, staying or shifting as the performance unfolds.
The sixteen-channel speaker array is not merely immersive infrastructure — it is a structural argument. Smaller units working collectively, the way a Southeast Asian gong ensemble distributes melody and rhythm across every player: agency shared, no single voice carrying everything. The architecture of the sound is the architecture of the work's politics.
The residency unfolds across four open workshops and one full performance. In each workshop, a collaborator brings a topic or idea to develop collectively with elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ; the second half of each session becomes an open rehearsal prompted by that theme. The entire process — from first workshop to final performance — is open to the public.
"เสียงมรสุม (Monsoon )":
A speculative sound piece series, transformed into a site-specific installation piece using the monsoon as a metaphor for exploring the disorientation of prediction.
A sound composition exploring a speculative dystopian near future. Throughout history, sound and sonic rituals have served profound spiritual functions—healing, celebrating, mourning, gathering communities, and connecting with the natural world. This work reimagines the relationship between these ancestral practices and their unexplored digital potentials, examining the fluid boundaries between past and future sonic functions. As we imagine what lies ahead, our current moment feels defined by perpetual prediction—a society obsessed with forecasting while the present remains precarious and tumultuous, where freedom of expression is increasingly constrained. In this speculative scenario, Southeast Asian sound cultures, particularly the ancestral collaborative practices of gong ensembles, evolve into a new mode of encrypted communication. These sonic systems become vessels for embedding narratives and messages within local communities, transmitting knowledge across generations while evading data mining and surveillance technologies designed for exploitation. This fictional ritual offers a poetic methodology for preserving and sharing knowledge through collective aural and embodied experiences—where sound becomes both archive and cipher, ceremony and resistance.
The script is a nod to Jitr Poumisak's writing and commentary on AI's wasteful use of energy, which contributes to the data-polluted Monsoon, not folk music, historically blamed for causing harmful and unpredictable weather. The piece was a collage using field recordings, disrupted data noises, and other sounds, an archive of propaganda radio recordings(unintelligible), a live coding imaginary gong ensemble, and a reading of a script.
Event Schedule
"Surrounded" Open Studio (1-4pm)
- May 23
- May 31
- June 13
- June 20
"Surrounded" Final Performance (8pm) (Ticketed, Price TBD)
- June 27
elekhlekha Open Studio (2-6pm)
- June 6
- July 4
Images for Social Media
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/xen0or875pwv1fpncfivk/ADyQU8MEDwhtkbPARFoLC6Q?rlkey=gwz43mlasd5tdy6d57y37cpic&e=1&dl=0
Content required by Yamaha
- Short-form content highlighting the Yamaha Disklavier
- Artist interview exploring the artistic process and relevance of the residency
- Behind-the-scenes documentation of rehearsals and creative development
- Coverage of two Work-in-Progress sessions and the Final Performance
