by Pierre Prouteau (CASE/CNRS ; CREM/Univ. Paris Nanterre)

In collaboration with LAMC

Low style is an electronic music – computer-composed with synthetic sounds – which has, since the last ten years, taken by storm Laos and Thailand (f.e. the mix entitled “Wheeling my motorbike into the jungle”). There exists equivalent of this kind of music in the whole Southeast Asia – and maybe in the whole world.

Influenced by EDM (Electronic Dance Music), the principle of low style is simple: an heavy-bass ultra-repetitive rhythmic pattern, with off-beat shouts, and typical rises in intensity with the beat stopped, followed by a rough punch line that brings back the beat and the bass, and with it the apex of the ambiance. The genre is associated with partying, youth and online streaming and sharing platforms (and videogames), but is listened to by all generations in Vientiane. In this talk, I will show the connections between low style music and previous musical genres of the region.

I will provide ethnographies of its listening in public and semi-public settings in Vientiane and North-East Thailand, as well as creation processes with an interview with DJ John, a Laotian DJ and composer. I finally want to investigate the relationships of this music with an imaginary associated with hypermodernity (new technologies and new futures).

Pierre Prouteau, young ethnomusicologist and anthropologist of sound, is interested in the effects of music, sound, and technologies that mediated it on individuals and societies. His PhD thesis, defended in 2021, and entitled “Buddhism, Bodies and Machines – the Sound Systems of Thailand” (Nanterre/EHESS, GIS Asia Thesis Award in 2022), analyses the potential and impacts of sound systems on humans and non-humans in Thailand in political, poetical, and aesthetical terms. Fieldwork ethnographer and Thai-Lao languages specialist, he pursues an engaged research on the relationship between sound, technologies, and intense forms of the collective. He is the author of "The Dual Fate of the Twin Horns – from United States anti-communist weapon to the Phetchabun processionnal bands’ sound system (Thailand)” (in Asian Sound Cultures – Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology, Routledge).

Thuesday 6th of may 2025, from 2 pm to 4 pm.

Salle P3.1.304
Batiment P3 - Niveau 1
Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 50
1050 Ixelles

Open entry