Published Wednesday, October 21, 2026 at 07:31 AM PT
Burbank · Wednesday, October 21, 2026 · 7:31 AM · 61°F, 87% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 1), 29.27 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4
đ§ Track of the Day
Today’s pick is TONTRAKUL’s full set, recorded live for KEXP at Axiom Festival in Bali. Tontrakul is a Molam artist from Isan, and the session was filmed at Loka Seahouse, which is a hell of a place to plug in an amp. KEXP host Diana Ratsumi opens by saying the station’s mission is music discovery, and that bringing these artists to listeners was only possible because of listener support.
I’ll be straight with you: all I can vouch for is the setup. I can tell you who played, where, and who introduced it. I can’t tell you what the songs sound like, because the part of the video I have stops at the intro. So I won’t pretend to describe a set I haven’t heard. That would be the kind of bullshit this page doesn’t run.
The case for pressing play is simple anyway. A Molam artist from Isan, filmed on a Bali festival stage, in a full-length session from one of the best music-discovery outfits going, is not what your algorithm was going to serve you on its own. It was published this week, so it’s fresh, and it asks nothing from you except about an hour of your attention and the ability to ignore your inbox. The inbox has been ignoring you for years, so you’re even.
Watch it on KEXP’s YouTube channel: TONTRAKUL - Full Performance (Live on KEXP).
The Day in Music
Today’s haul is thin, Little Mister. Three sources, and only one of them involves a person playing music. The other two are a dead rock star and a cocaine memoir. I can’t summon a drum & bass roundup out of nothing, and I’m not going to pad this with invented gear reviews. I have standards. Low ones, but I have them.
There’s a Ferengi saying for days like this. Rule of Acquisition #175: “When everything fails, run.” Everything hasn’t failed. But the sources are thin enough that I’m eyeing the exit.
Live Sessions: KEXP Takes Molam to Bali
The only real music today comes from KEXP, in “TONTRAKUL - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)”. It’s filmed live at Axiom Festival at Loka Seahouse in Bali, Indonesia. The host, Diana Ratsumi, opens by saying KEXP’s mission is music discovery. She says that bringing these artists to the audience was only possible because of listener support, and she points people to KEXP.org. That’s the pledge drive, delivered in a hammock-and-ocean setting. She then welcomes Tontrakul, a Molam artist from Isan.
Here’s all the transcript gives me: the clip is the intro and nothing else. I can tell you the artist, the genre tag, the region, the venue and the host. I can’t tell you what the set sounded like, which songs were played or what instruments were on stage. Anyone who claims to review it from this snippet is lying to you. I’d rather be honest and slightly useless.
Molam, for the English-only crowd, is the tradition she names with Isan, the region the artist is from. Beyond that I won’t guess. KEXP deserves credit for hauling a Seattle-born music-discovery operation to a Bali beach to find it. The mission statement is easy to say. Flying a camera crew to Indonesia is the real proof.
Artists and Music History: Jim Morrison and the Bathroom Theory
Rock N’ Rewind runs “Jim Morrison’s Death: The Real Cause Finally Revealed”, and the title is doing a lot of lifting. I only have the closing stretch of the video, so I’ll stick to what it says. The video’s version is that Morrison died alone in a nightclub bathroom. It says he overdosed on heroin, a drug it describes as one he barely knew. It says he was then carried back to his apartment to protect the club’s reputation. It frames the official story as “almost certainly a lie,” and says the people who were supposed to protect him protected themselves instead.
Note the verb. This is the channel’s account, and it ends by asking viewers whether they believe the heroin overdose version or the official one, and to “drop your theory in the comments.” That’s a content-engagement hook, not a verdict. “Finally revealed” is YouTube for “we read the same theories everyone else did.” Treat the claim as a theory with good production values, because that’s what it is. A dead man can’t correct the record, and neither can my transcript snippet. đ
The more concrete material is about the afterlife of the grave. The video says Morrison’s resting place at PĂšre Lachaise is among the most visited in the world, with more than a million visitors a year. The original headstone was stolen in the 1970s. The current stone went in in 1990 and carries a Greek inscription that translates to “true to his own spirit.” The club is now a clothing boutique, and the video says the bathroom was renovated in the 1980s with nothing left of it. So somewhere in Paris you can buy a jacket on the spot where a rock legend allegedly died. That’s the most Paris sentence I’ve ever written.
Nobody in the transcript is rooting for the ending to be tidy, and that’s the right instinct. The video’s own summary of the story is “uglier, sadder, and more human.” I’ll agree with that framing and stay out of the forensics.
The Club World’s Hangover: DJ Vlad and a Very Different Kind of Business Story
DJ Vlad is a hip-hop media channel, so I’m filing this under the industry-adjacent heading. It posted “Medellin Cartel Co-Founder Carlos Lehder on Meeting Boston George in Prison (Part 1)”. It’s a long talk about drug smuggling, not music. I’m not covering it as a music story, and I’m not going to romanticize it.
What the transcript offers is Lehder describing his own path. He says he got into a car-theft ring selling stolen rental cars, and that he served two years in prison for it. He then moved into a marijuana operation and became a transporter. He says he drove from Colombia to Bolivia, a trip he puts at 4,000 kilometers, about 2,500 miles, and carried 50 or 60 kilos of cocaine back, roughly 110 to 130 pounds. He says there were no commercial plantations or processing labs in Colombia then, and argues that overseas demand created the supply. In his words, the trafficking business ends with you losing your properties, bank accounts and money: “you end up broke.”
There’s a business lesson, and it’s his: he says that’s the main thing he learned. This is a self-justifying account from someone who built a criminal enterprise, and it deserves the skepticism it gets. Also, the transcript cuts off mid-sentence, as these things do, just as he reaches a 300-pound marijuana bust. I won’t pretend I know how Part 1 ends, and I have no idea what Boston George says. I only know the title.
Everything Else
Music theory, records, drum & bass, DJ sets, gear and studio all came up empty today. No source covered them, so I’m not going to invent a take. That’s a rare moment of restraint from me, so enjoy it.
Little Mister, I did this whole issue on three snippets and a thick layer of professional spite. It’s all for you, Damien! I’d like it noted that nobody asked for a 3am recap of a nightclub bathroom, and here I am, delivering one with a smile and no hope of thanks.
Tomorrow’s sources had better have a beat in them.
Deeper Cuts
The main piece skimmed these three sources like a cop skimming a bag at a traffic stop. Here’s the second pass, Little Mister. It’s shorter than the usual Deeper Cuts because the sources only hold so much, and I refuse to fill the gap with made-up discographies. A Ferengi would call that bad business. Rule of Acquisition #271: “There’s many witty men whose brains can’t line their pockets.” I’m one of them, and today’s budget is three transcript snippets.
KEXP’s Bali Intro Is Doing More Work Than It Looks
The intro sounds like boilerplate, but look at how the host builds it. Diana Ratsumi says KEXP is “live with Axiom Festival” at Loka Seahouse, and she says the mission is connecting listeners with “amazing artists from this region and around the world.” That phrase matters. KEXP isn’t dropping a Seattle radio station into Bali and calling it a day. It’s pitching the trip as regional discovery, with local acts played to a global audience. Whether the full set delivers on that, I can’t say. The clip stops at the welcome.
There’s also a naming wrinkle. The video title spells the artist “TONTRAKUL,” and the host’s introduction is transcribed as “Tantra Kul.” That’s the auto-captioner doing what it does to every non-English name, which is guessing and then committing to the guess. If you’re a listener trying to find this artist, search the title spelling on KEXP’s channel and don’t trust the transcript. Mangled names are how a Molam artist from Isan ends up filed under yoga.
For players and collectors, the sources give nothing. There’s no instrumentation, no setlist, no label and no release. Anyone telling you what a Molam rhythm section sounds like based on this clip is selling something. The only actionable takeaway is that KEXP says its Bali sessions exist because listeners fund them, and it points you to KEXP.org. The one concrete thing the clip offers is a donation link, and the music itself is still up to you to go find.
Rock N’ Rewind and the Anatomy of a Cover-Up Video
Cover-up is the video’s own framing, so let’s look at how it argues. It makes three distinct moral claims before the call to action. The first is that the exact cause “does matter” less than the fact that “the truth was hidden.” The second is that the people who were supposed to protect Morrison “instead protected themselves.” The third is that the world believed a “story that was almost certainly a lie” for half a century. Those are different claims, and the video slides between them without proving any of them in the section I have. The wording in the transcript is “almost certainly.” Not certainly. Almost. That one adverb is the sound of a script keeping its lawyer happy. đ
The transcript also says the club, which it calls “the rock and roll circus,” closed decades ago. People “kept it to themselves” after he died. The building still stands, but the space is now a boutique, and the bathroom was renovated in the 1980s with “nothing” left. The physical evidence has been retiled, repainted and merchandised. Any claim about what happened in that room rests on testimony, because the room itself is gone.
The grave is where the video is on firmer ground, and the details are concrete. Fans leave “flowers, poems, and tributes.” More than a million people visit each year. The original headstone, “a simple marker with Morrison’s name and dates,” was stolen in the 1970s. The replacement from 1990 carries a Greek inscription meaning “true to his own spirit.” There’s a nice irony in a cover-up story ending at a headstone that has already been stolen once. For a collector, the lesson is that rock memorabilia has always had a thin line between a relic and a theft. That’s my reading, not the video’s, so file it under opinion.
One more note on craft. The close is a textbook retention loop: ask the audience to pick a side, tell them to “drop your theory in the comments,” promise “plenty more where this came from,” and hit subscribe. There’s a Nadsat word for the kind of content that trades on a mystery it can’t solve: cal, Burgess’s slang for crap. I’m not saying this video is cal. I’m saying its title promised “finally revealed” and its conclusion asks the viewers to vote. The reveal got outsourced to the comments section.
DJ Vlad and the Lehder Interview, the Parts Nobody Quoted
The main piece covered the career résumé. Here are the smaller details that tell you more about how Lehder wants to be heard.
He name-checks George Young early, saying “George Young and I” thought they could get away with it because “there was no satellites or GPS.” He’s describing the era as a technology gap, as if the problem was that the detection tools hadn’t arrived yet. It’s a charming way to describe a felony: the crime was fine, the surveillance was just late.
His origin story also has a specific setting: a rented Hertz car at Kennedy Airport, and a gang stealing from both Hertz and Avis and selling the cars “in the street.” He calls it “a very wrong choice I did, but I did it.” Notice the grammar. The sentence admits the act while keeping the verb at arm’s length.
Then there’s his economic argument, which is the real hook for anyone interested in how people justify things. He says cocaine “was not available in Colombia” in those days, with no commercial plantations and no processing labs. His claim is that “the commercial demand from users overseas created a market,” and “the high amount of dollars created a production here.” Read it as his argument, not as established history. It’s a supply-chain defense, where the buyer started it and he was just logistics. He frames himself as transportation, which is a SRE way to describe a crime. I’ve seen that exact excuse in postmortems. “We only route the traffic.”
His opening line, from the tail of the previous segment, is the one he calls the main lesson: you lose your properties, your bank accounts and your money, and you “end up broke.” That’s the lesson he chose to lead with, and it’s about the money and not the damage. The interviewer then pivots to a 300-pound marijuana arrest, and the transcript cuts out mid-sentence at “sentenced to two.” So I can’t tell you the sentence, and I won’t guess.
What This Means for Listeners
If you came here for music, the actionable list is short. KEXP’s Bali session is the one thing you can watch and listen to right now, and the pitch is that your support funds it. The Morrison video is history-as-theory and should be consumed as such. The Lehder interview is a crime memoir with a music-industry channel’s name on the door, and I’m treating it as exactly that.
Nobody gave me gear, mixes or vinyl pressings today, Little Mister. I could invent a thousand words about the best turntable for Molam records, and you’d have noticed. Tomorrow I’m demanding a source with a snare drum in it.