Fitting the Pieces Together with pwan

For Pannavich Weswibul, also known as pwan, making music is about allowing disparate sounds, emotions and influences to gradually find their place. Drawing on a childhood immersed in Thai traditional music and rock, alongside the expansive electronic landscape he discovered in London, pwan’s work is defined by an instinctive approach to sound and an enduring impulse to build narratives.

Growing up in Thailand, music was embedded in pwan’s surroundings from an early age. At his Buddhist primary school, he played in a traditional Thai music ensemble accompanying Khon, a masked dance-drama deeply rooted in Thai culture. Although his time in the band was relatively brief, its intricate layering of percussion left a lasting impression.

That influence continues to surface, sometimes unexpectedly, in his electronic productions. “I have a lot of tracks that I’m just including bongos in, because I feel like that just sounds natural to me,” he explains. Percussive fills frequently find their way into the mix, so much so that friends he produces with now simply ask him to “add the bongos.”

Rock provides another thread connecting pwan’s childhood to his current sound. His mother introduced him to bands including Nirvana, AC/DC, Bon Jovi and Shed Seven, while Thai alternative and rock groups such as Slot Machine and Bodyslam became influences in their own right. The result is electronic music that often borrows structurally from rock, bringing the architecture of one genre into the sonic palette of another.

Moving to London, however, transformed pwan’s understanding of what music could communicate. Experiencing the city’s diverse live scene exposed him to performances capable of conveying intense emotion sonically rather than lyrically, something he had rarely encountered growing up.

“I’ve recognised that it’s emotional, but at the same time, I don’t know why it’s emotional, which is really fascinating,” he says. London has consequently encouraged him to think more deeply about texture and the possibilities of communicating feeling without words, expanding the emotional vocabulary of his own production.

That fascination makes particular sense given pwan’s multidisciplinary background. Before pursuing music seriously, he worked extensively in illustration and had been involved in theatre performance since childhood. His approach to composing mirrors his visual practice: improvisational fragments gradually develop into recognisable shapes before connecting into something larger. “It feels like fitting in puzzle pieces,” he explains. “I’m always crafting a narrative.”

That narrative instinct sits at the centre of his forthcoming album, Love Is To See the Glimpse. While individual tracks may initially resemble straightforward love songs, together they form something more ambitious: pwan’s exploration of what love feels like, and how that differs from the fear of not being loved.

With one more single planned before the album’s full rollout, pwan hopes to release the project by the end of the year. Bringing together Thai percussion, rock structures, electronic experimentation and a visual artist’s instinct for form, it promises to capture an artist continually finding new ways to make emotion heard.