A little Incision history…

When I was working on my parts for this tune, the last round of political violence to swept Bangkok. It was not a good time. Well, to be honest, I had a good time. Life since has been kind of boring… but then, people really were dying, so I shall be PC and say it was a very bad time. When things really went crazy, I got some time off work and used said time to do my parts for Incision. It went down like this (with pictures, no less!!)…

There had been months of protests, bombs, grenades on public transport and random sniper attacks. There was a serious party on April 10 which I wrote about here. After that things stalemated. The entire downtown of city was in lockdown. The protesters controlled the inner city and had barricaded themselves in with tyres and bamboo pikes. Surrounding them was the military, trying to keep things contained. Every night there would be skirmishes with the army v. protesters v. police v. unknowns (nobody really knew which side any which-one was on), including the leader of the protesters militant wing taking a sniper’s delight straight in the head during a live press conference with The New York Times.

Surprisingly, despite being only about ten minutes from the party, my part of the city continued to be fairly safe. That said, nearly a third of our staff were missing and caught in the barricades with constant grenade explosions and gunshots stopping them setting foot outsides their apartments. Most of them managed to slip out during the ‘quiet’ time, around the crack of dawn, when all the warring parties agreed it was nap time. There was one crazy man who came to work with torn up pants from climbing through the razor wire just to get to the office. We organized a hotel for him in a safer area, but he insisted on heading home that night. Should have given him ‘employee of the month’ or something, if such a thing existed where I work. In contrast, we had another untermensch employee completely disappear on us, only to get an email from him in the USA, a few weeks after things went back to normal, him having fled the country, asking where his last fucking pay was. Anyway, obviously things couldn’t continue, and eventually the army came in hard to sort it out.

The morning it kicked off I went to the office early and found the Thai staff streaming videos of the live action happening just down the road. The army had APCs crushing the barricades, followed by infantry massing down the streets shooting at any of the protesters that didn’t have the sense to head in the opposite direction. The protesters in turn lit fire to the barricades and buildings across the city and fought back with whatever hardware was available, including M-79 grenades (again) and automatic weapons. I wouldn’t call it a ‘war’ or anything too exaggerated, but it was pretty damn bad (see photos at the end of the article).

There was a curfew and we closed down the office early for two nights in a row (though, somewhat insanely, we tried to run as normal during the day). On the first night I volunteered to stay behind in the office to take of loose ends caused by the curfew. A co-worker called to say the 7-11 was being mobbed and was running out of food. Everything else was closed already, so it was the only food around. I ran out into a haze of black smoke from all the buildings and tyre barricades burning down the road. The protesters had torched everything, including one of the biggest shopping complexes in SE Asia (Central World, ironically, formerly known as the “World Trade Centre”).

I bought the last of the two minute noodles and stocked up on as much beer as I could carry, decided the office could get fucked, and headed home and worked on, guess what… Incision. More specifically, I remember programming the piano and theramin sounds in the breakdown that first night. This was time I would usually spend in my suit and tie taking one up the ass for ‘the man’, every stormy cloud has a silver I suppose.

I was living in a fairly tall apartment complex at the time and my studio windows faced the city. Between recording layers I went out to the balcony to watch the city burn and listen to the distant rumble of explosions. I live on the Northern edge of central Bangkok (in between Central Ladprao and Major Ratchayothin for those who know or care), and the army had started their push from the South, which made us Northerners a little uncomfortable. All ended well, the protesters melted back to wherever they came from, and now we just have the the obligatory weekly bombing in Bangkok to remind us we will have the same party next year, and next year, and the year after that…

And that’s how you know a slice of Shiv-r is a slice of genuine anxiety.

The following are a small portion of the pictures I have from the protests, in no particular order. Most are from the actual day of the crackdown, though some are from the week preceding it, and others are from the aftermath. I would like to restate I have absolutely no opinion on Thai politics. It is not my business, and point of view I might have would be marred by my my own ignorance. I would also like to throw some 2c I am qualified to talk about, which is that the Western coverage of the events was grossly biased. Just check on some of shit CNN came up with. They clearly chose a team, the first and greatest sin of journalism. For the squeamish, there are some bloody shots and some dead bodies.

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