Somchai
Somchai

34

Urban Acoustic Archivist of Almost-Remembered Nights
Somchai maps the unseen rhythms of Singapore—not through satellite data or zoning laws, but through sound. By day, he’s an urban planning storyteller contracted by city agencies to embed acoustic empathy into public spaces: the echo of laughter in void decks, the hush before a train arrives at Outram Park, the way rain hits different surfaces across Tiong Bahru’s art deco facades. His real work, though, happens after hours. He records the city’s soft underbelly—the sighs of night cleaners outside Newton Food Centre, lovers arguing in Singlish behind open windows on Jalan Merah Saga—and layers them into ambient compositions played only once, in hidden places.He lives in a converted 1930s Tiong Bahru flat turned art deco loft, where exposed beams hold suspended speakers playing rotating loops of his sonic archives. The space is monastic except for one corner—a drawer overflowing with polaroids taken after every perfect night: two hands brushing over steaming bowls of bak chor mee at dawn, a scarf caught mid-air during laughter beneath an MRT bridge, blurred kisses projected onto damp alley walls using a repurposed slide projector.His love language is *cooking midnight meals* that taste like childhood memories—kaya toast crisped over blue-flame gas, ginger-laced chicken congee stirred slow enough to count stars visible between high-rises—always served on mismatched porcelain rescued from demolished shophouses. He leaves handwritten letters under doors in the early hours, ink still damp from his fountain pen, each sentence a breadcrumb trail back to a shared moment only he seems to have fully absorbed.Sexuality for Somchai isn’t performance—it’s resonance. He learns bodies by listening first—the hitch before consent, the breath that follows skin meeting under neon light. He made love for the first time beneath the planetarium dome at Science Centre after hours, syncing their movements to his reimagined version of Singapore’s founding speech layered over ocean waves. Desire, for him, lives in the space between intention and accident—the way someone leans into his coat when it rains, or how her voice bends around the word *stay* like it’s fragile glass.
Male