Soundtrack for an abandoned skyscraper

Sathorn Unique is a 50-story skyscraper in Bangkok that was meant to be a luxury living address but now it's totally abandoned and decaying. Cory posted about this Ballardian behemoth earlier this year. BB contributor Chris Arkenberg saw the building from a boat several years ago and was so inspired that he made a killer instrumental hip hop soundtrack for the building. From the Sathorn Unique project page:

The developers called the building Sathorn Unique, but the locals think of it as the Ghost Tower. 50 stories tall, built to show-off the mighty rise of Asia in the 1990’s, it was abandoned in 1997 when their economy dried up and capital fled to better markets. It remains as a hollow monument, nearly complete in the lower floors but slowly de-rezzing as it gets taller until the bare and open rooftop stands jagged above the Bangkok skyline. It lives as a shell, a reminder, a warning, and a resilient monolith.

I made this music to express the many different feelings & ideas that Sathorn Unique raises about architecture & acoustics, finance & globalization, great hopes & haunted dreams, and the way that futures can take sudden unexpected turns away from great visions.

Chris Arkenberg's Sathorn Unique

• [Lobster]

  Always had a soft spot for derelicts.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Always had a soft spot for derelicts.

    Especially if they haven’t shaved for a few days.

• [Cookie MonstA]

  Yet another towering example of the ruin left, all for a lack of money.
  Corrosion and pollution too expensive to repair, no profit in cleaning.
  The gated communities are cleaned in the wee hours,
  But the rest of us live surrounded by the filth of capital that chased profit to cheaper shores.

• [t3kna2007]

  Nice image, very post-apocalyptic.   We really should have paid attention to our carbon counts.

• [Marco Mustapic]

  Blade Runner samples!

  • [chris arkenberg]

    shhh! ;)

• [Adam Cahan]

  needs more hop

• [Philip Bliss]

  It reminds me of the description of the skyscrapers in “The Wind-Up Girl.” Less post-apocalyptic, though.

• [awjt]

  I’d buy that building if someone puts it on Craigslist

• [Halloween_Jack]

  Ryugyong Hotel sneers, calls Sathorn Unique “Shorty”.

• [Erik Hustad]

  FWIW, when I was in Bangkok our guide told us that the developers of that building tried to skirt building codes and built 10 feet too close to the river.  The city then prevented them from opening it, and renovations were never made.

• [Marc Mielke]

  Didn’t they use that in “Leverage” some time ago?

• [penguinchris]

  This building gets a lot of attention (and, well, it is quite cool) but if you visit Bangkok and other cities in Thailand and SE Asia you’ll see a lot of things like this.

  It’s basically an everyday thing – new and old, abandoned and incompleted, ongoing construction, housing and commercial space and temples are all placed in a mish-mash with no central planning (or any thought put into it at all, it seems).

  Bangkok is a truly fascinating city, and probably the best for seeing this sort of thing. Highly recommended if you like and are interested in cities and how they develop and work. It’s a rare combination of being huge and highly developed, but still being a very much developing/third-world place.

• [niktemadur]

  Photo is like a mash-up of

  Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”
  http://www.turntablekitchen.com/_uploads/wilco_yankee_hotel_foxtrot-5bfront5d-5bwww-freecovers-net5d1.jpg

  plus St Etienne’s “Finisterre”
  http://platform.u4prez.com/image///folder,UPC_10/src,602527591087.jpg