By KPC
I saw Hong Kong’s David Boring twice in Bangkok.
The first time was at JAM, in the kind of low-key, sweat-drenched DIY environment where the distinction between performer and audience can become almost meaningless. It was a Friday night, and David Boring were one part of an eclectic bill rather than the sole reason anyone had left the house. Upstairs, the India-based producers of GOA Music Lab were running a rotating live electronics performance; downstairs, the crowd was a loose mix of regulars, visiting musicians and people who had simply come along for the night.
When David Boring started playing, the lads from GOA and some of the people upstairs couldn’t help but come down.
The sheer physicality of the sound seemed to pull them through the building. Deep East and the other producers were completely blown away, as was everyone else. There weren’t many people in the room who had come specifically for David Boring. I was one of them. So was a stylish girl in a sailor fuku who told me how excited she was to catch them again after their previous appearance in the city – the two of us constituted a mini David Boring fan club. Everyone else seemed to be there because it was Friday.
That’s part of what makes JAM interesting. It is one of the more internationalised nodes in Bangkok’s underground, where local musicians, visiting artists, expats and people passing through the city regularly end up in the same room and discovering a shared interest or taste. JAM has become a useful meeting point between disparate parts of that wider community, particularly the international circuits that pass through Bangkok.
The second night, at Bangkok CityCity Gallery, was almost the inverse.
The performance was part of CITYCITY’s MUSIC PROJECT, a programme approaching sound through cultural memory, public gathering and interdisciplinary experimentation, transforming the gallery into something between a listening room, research space and club. The audience was different too. Here were Bangkok’s hip artists, gallery people, art directors and members of the more avant-garde side of the experimental music community. People sat and watched, they had come to see David Boring specifically. The room had a kind of attentiveness that would have been impossible at JAM.
Same band, same city, a single day apart, but almost everything surrounding them had changed. It was interesting to see which version of the Hong Kong group would emerge.
The obvious assumption would be that the gallery would bring out the “art” side of the band, while JAM would reduce them to their punk credentials. Instead, seeing them twice made it increasingly difficult to separate the two.
David Boring have always occupied a space between punk, noise, post-punk, no wave and something harder to categorise. There is a physical aggression to the music, but also an interest in texture, repetition and construction. Guitars become noise as much as riffs. Rhythm can feel deliberately mechanical. Vocals sit somewhere between singing, shouting and another instrument inside the arrangement.
That tension has become even more apparent on their new album, Liminal Beings and Their Echoes, released in January 2026. Nearly nine years separate it from their debut, Unnatural Objects and Their Humans. The difference isn’t simply one of instrumentation. The emotional temperature has changed.
The first record feels like a document of immediate confrontation: youthful rage, social disorientation, and the sensation of being trapped inside a city and a political moment that seemed to be accelerating faster than anyone could process. Liminal Beings and Their Echoes sounds like what comes afterwards.
The anger is still there, but it has become colder. Where the earlier David Boring often sounded like a band trying to smash its way out of confinement, the Liminal Beings era David Boring sounds more like people who have discovered that there may not be an easy exit. The response isn’t resignation exactly, but a more complicated form of endurance. The new record doesn’t seem to be asking how to escape the machine so much as what it means to remain human while living inside it.
The raw guitar attack has been pushed further towards EBM, industrial electronics, synthesizers and machines. The shift reportedly grew partly from guitarist Jason Cheung’s own detours into club music, and it doesn’t feel like an abandonment of the band’s earlier physicality so much as another way of constructing it. Metallic bass lines and martial rhythms create a rigid framework around the vocals, giving the songs an architectural quality. The electronics don’t simply decorate the noise; they seem to construct the spaces in which it happens.
The title Liminal Beings and Their Echoes feels appropriate. Liminality describes something existing at a threshold, belonging fully to neither side. The album inhabits several such spaces at once: between analogue and digital, rage and exhaustion, isolation and intimacy, the human body and the machinery surrounding it.
David Boring’s music is rooted in Hong Kong, and the political and social experiences that shaped the band shouldn’t be flattened into a generic Southeast Asian narrative. But there are loose echoes in Bangkok’s young underground. The political energy surrounding Thailand’s 2020 protests, and the exhaustion and unresolved possibilities that followed, have left their own traces in the city’s experimental music. You can hear versions of that tension in artists such as JPBS, or in the dramatic shifts that have taken place within the work of Hariguem Zaboy, particularly around John Young Sandwich, or in communities like The Year Shoegaze Broke, whose use of noise can feel like both a mirror of, and an escape from, the chaos of the metropole.
That doesn’t mean these artists are making the same music or responding to the same circumstances. But there’s perhaps a resonance here: the sound of people taking an enormous amount of noise and trying to figure out what to do with it after the initial explosion has passed.
It also made the contrast between the two venues more revealing.
At JAM, the claustrophobia was literal.
The room was small, the audience close, and the sound had nowhere to go. The guitars, electronics and drums seemed to hit and echo over the walls, taking over every conversation, forcing everyone’s attention into the collective moment. The industrial elements of the new album became physical pressure. The rigid electronic rhythms felt less like an accompaniment than another set of walls being built around the audience.
At CityCity, the relationship was reversed.
The gallery was almost unnervingly cold. The performance took place in a walled ‘cocoon’ of sorts in an otherwise stark white gallery space. The black walls of the cocoon, the controlled lighting and the pristine sound created a kind of clinical distance from the audience. At JAM, David Boring’s sound had seemed to collide with the room; here, every layer had space around it. The metallic bass, abrasive synths and rigid electronic rhythms of Liminal Beings and Their Echoes were suddenly exposed in much greater detail, their machinery becoming almost architectural.
And then Janice Lau threw herself through it.
Against the controlled geometry of the gallery, her movement felt almost violently human. The room was cold and still, the music rigid and mechanical, and yet her movement seemed to push against both.
It was an expression of the album’s central tension. Liminal Beings and Their Echoes is full of music that sounds trapped: martial rhythms, repetition, electronic structures that seem to close in on themselves. But underneath that machinery there is still an enormous amount of human feeling. Rage, grief, exhaustion, tenderness, all of it trying to find some way through the structure.
In the gallery, that tension became physical. Janice’s body seemed to push against the very architecture the music had created.
It was also where the contrast with JAM became clearest. In that cramped room, the music had filled every available inch until there was almost no distance between the band and the audience. At CityCity, the sound had room to breathe, but the space itself was so controlled that the freedom had to come from somewhere else. It came from movement.
For a few seconds, this intensely cold and carefully constructed environment became something much less controlled. Janice wasn’t simply performing inside the space; she was moving through it, breaking up its geometry with her body. For a band so concerned with liminality, it felt perfect: trapped inside the architecture, but still capable of moving.