Bangkok's music-focused party series Mocana Sound is back for round two, taking over Helix Garden on the 9th floor of EmQuartier on Sukhumvit Road this Saturday from 6pm. If the first edition was a proof of concept, the second is a deeper dive into how the city's live musicians, DJs, electronic producers and even radio culture feed off each other.
The main room carries the heavier lifting, with sets and improvised collaborations from IYY, Beeteek, Yellow Fang, Maakornchai, Soulectric Jam and a Claude B2B ANIKA back-to-back. The bill is deliberately mixed: Yellow Fang bring a psych-tinged live energy, Maakornchai push an experimental approach to sound, and the DJ pairings blur the line between a performance and a club set.
What makes the night interesting for anyone who cares about music beyond the typical club format is the second space. A dedicated Listening Room, hosted by Durian Radio and Tom Aquilina, slows the pace down and frames the evening around deeper listening — a corner where instruments, samples, voices, machines and DJ sets all sit inside the same conversation rather than on separate stages.
Rather than splitting live music from electronic music, Mocana Sound II is built around the overlaps: a band that becomes part of a dance floor, an experimental set that shapes a DJ's next track, or genres borrowing from each other in real time. The curators frame it as an exploration of the city's evolving sound culture, and the lineup reads like a cross-section of Bangkok's independent scene right now — indie psych, leftfield electronics, club DJs and community radio under one roof.
For travellers, this is the kind of event that rarely makes the tourist itineraries but says more about a city than any rooftop bar. Bangkok's independent music scene clusters around Sukhumvit and the creative spaces that pop up in malls, warehouses and gardens, and EmQuartier's rooftop garden venue is an easy, central way in — air conditioning a lift ride away, Skytrain at the doorstep. Doors open at 6pm, so you can make an evening of it: catch the earlier live and experimental sets, then stay for the DJ side of the night as the garden turns into a dance floor. If you're in town over a weekend and want to hear what local musicians are actually excited about, this is a low-effort, high-reward option.
