Artwork by Raimund Wong
Chris Menist is a writer, DJ and musician best known as the co-founder of the Paradise Bangkok label and band, alongside DJ Maft Sai. He co-curated the 'Sounds of Wonder' series with the Finders Keepers label, as well as the 'Sound of Siam' (Soundway) and 'Thai? Dai!' (Finders Keepers). He was also behind Dust-To-Digital's 'Qat, Coffee and Qambus : Raw 45s from Yemen', and wrote the 'Black Fire! New Spirits! Radical and Revolutionary Jazz in The USA 1957 - 1982' book for Soul Jazz.
Currently residing in the UK, he hosts a monthly show on NTS and his DJ sets (in Japan, Thailand, Australia and across Europe at Nuits Sonores, Glastonbury, Off Festival and Wax Treatment amongst others) encompass a broad mix of reggae, soul, african, latin and asian sounds from across the globe. He has also been featured as part of Boiler Room’s ‘Collections’ series as well as making a film for Vinyl Factory about searching for records in Bangkok.
Chris Menist, co-founder of Paradise Bangkok, has created a gorgeous soundtrack of original and existing music for the quietly meditative Japanese novel “The Guest Cat” by Takashi Hiraide and translated by Eric Selland. The book is almost a timeless parable. Even though it’s set in the 80s there’s very little giving away the era. It tells the story of a married couple in their 30s that rent a house just outside Tokyo and who form a bond with a neighbour’s cat that starts visiting their home. We come to understand the narrator is negotiating with the passage of time, the inevitability of change and our powerlessness to stop it. It’s a subtle, poetic novel that simultaneously stands still in time with beautiful pastoral prose and lyrical descriptions of the narrator’s garden, yet the years inconspicuously flow forward, creating a different sense of time.
Chris’ soundtrack perfectly accompanies this sense of time suspension using ambient sounds, at times with no beat or clear sense of time signature and percussive rhythms that are wonderfully disorienting. He has written some of his own original music under the moniker Awkward Corners, which were largely recorded as live takes on his home studio using percussion and vintage hardware such as a Roland 808 drum machine, Space Echo and DMX, then edited afterwards.
TRACKLIST:
Last Thought - Awkward Corners
Chat Two - Pontiac Streator & Ulla Straus
Dancers At The Spring - Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Just Around The Corner (demo mix) - Awkward Corners feat. Sarathy Korwar
Ghosts (edit) - Daniel Schmidt
Times Two - Awkward Corners
Le Temps d’Antan - Elodie
Ssumo (edit) - DJ Paradise
8 - SND
Shock Corridor (edit) - Awkward Corners feat. Ralph Thomas
Chanter - Sarah Davachi
The Guest Cat - Awkward Corners