Kuntz: The Thai singer sampled by Butthole Surfers: “It just cracked me up”
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Crawling out of the hardcore underground with a distinctly acid-fried, mutated take on punk and noise rock, Texan misfits Butthole Surfers cut a potently surreal mark amid the alternative 1980s, forging a reputation for hellishly wild performances and experimental chaos that rejected political earnestness or MTV potential in favour of a horrifying brand of absurdism that’s both terrifying and queasily hilarious.
Meeting at San Antonio’s Trinity University in the late 1970s, singer Gibby Haynes and bassist Paul Leary were originally set on very different paths. Respectively pursuing accountancy and business studies, a mutual appreciation for hard rock and the avant-garde pulled Leary away from his course one semester away from graduation, and Haynes left his respected accountancy firm after being caught with the pair’s Strange VD in the workplace, a Xeroxed magazine featuring physical deformities and symptoms captioned with warped humorous explanations for the grotesque ailments collated within.
With the settled line-up of Jeff Pinkus on bass and the dual terror drumming of King Coffey and Teresa Nervosa, Butthole Surfers followed their acclaimed debut Psychic… Powerless… Another Man’s Sac and Rembrandt Pussyhorse with notorious live sets replete with punishing strobe lights, eye-watering smoke machines, and a rolling projection of gruesome surgery and genital reconstruction medical films played backwards, all splattered across a band typically battered on LSD and indulging in frequent venue destruction and casual on-stage arson.
Renting a small, two-bedroom house in Georgia’s Winterville in 1986 and scraping enough cash for two microphones and an Ampex 8-track tape machine, the band cut their defining and most scabrous record they’d ever unleash. Like an acid trip gone seriously wrong, Locust Abortion Technician is a psychedelic mulch of backwaters punk, swollen metal, and tape fuckery that oozes like a Dadaist The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Emblazoned with Arthur Sarnoff’s Fido and the Clowns‘ unnerving Pierrot kitsch, their third album thrust their creative arm elbow-deep into the stagnant pool of hallucinatory black humour they’d never reach again.
One of the LP’s weirdest cuts is ‘Kuntz’, a sample of a Thai song with gleeful emphasis on a lyric that sounds like its namesake vulgarity to English ears, stretched and elasticated through layer upon layer of vocal effects and Haynes’ ‘Gibbytronix’ sound-altering mayhem.
“Yeah, Gibby didn’t want that on the record, but I insisted,” Leary told The Quietus in 2017. “Somebody had given us some cassette tapes of music from different countries, and that song was on a cassette tape of Thai folk songs. It just cracked me up because there he was on the chorus going ‘Cunts, cunts, cunts’.”
For a long time, ‘Kuntz’ remained a mystery as to its source recording, but New Jersey’s WMFU finally discovered it to be ‘Klua Duang’ by Luk Thung Thai country singer Phloen Phromaden who died earlier this year in August, affectionately known in the country as Raja Phleng Phut (King of the Talking Song) for his spoken passages in his songs. Written by Kong Katkamngae and based on an old bawdy folk piece, the song’s protagonist is deploring an itch or ‘khan’ he can’t scratch, and ‘duang’, meaning ‘moon’, is also Thai slang for haemorrhoids. In an uncanny moment of warped serendipity, Haynes and co were gifted with a Luk Thung cut slyly touching on Strange VD‘s bodily drollery.
While Phromaden’s identity had long been forgotten, he left an impression on the band. “He had the weirdest soul button”, Haynes remarked to The Austin Chronicle in 2007, describing a small beard patch between the lower lip and chin. “It radiated like a spider, and we called him ‘Spider Chin.’ Forming a bizarre footnote in each others’ careers, Bangkok Post even mentioned Butthole Surfers’ “remix” in Phromaden’s obituary, the meeting of two different cultures married with a shared mirth in callow japery wraps ‘Kuntz’ in an extra knotty-web of weird happenstance.
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