Running underneath “Prayer for Isara”, the song Salin wrote for the Thai horror film Tame (เลี้ยงไม่เชื่อง), is a sample of “Kao Thap”, a funeral piece from the pi phat mon repertoire. Pi phat is Thailand’s classical ensemble of reed oboe, gongs, xylophones and drums. Its Mon form, handed down from the Mon people who lived in the region long before the Thai, is the music that plays at Thai funerals today. Salin turned to it because the spirit at the centre of the film dates from Dvaravati, the Mon civilisation of the central plains that came before the Sukhothai kingdom, when Mon, Khmer, Lao, Malay and Thai peoples shared the land. Directed by Thamuya Thasananukulkij for BrandThink Cinema and in Thai cinemas since 29 October, Tame follows a girl in a bull-fighting village in Sukhothai, kept under the thumb of her grandmother and uncle, who goes to a sacred shrine for the power to tame them as the village tames its bulls. Isara means freedom in Thai: the one thing she prays for.
Over the funeral piece, Salin laid recordings of Nyah Kur folk singers, used with their permission. The Nyah Kur are a small community in north-east Thailand whose language is the closest living relative of Mon. The Mon taphon drum and the pengmang, a ring of tuned drums, set the pace, with Salin on kit and Thai gong. Around them she places the khene and the pin, the bamboo mouth organ and lute of Isan in north-east Thailand, whose sound runs through her album Rammana. Rachael McMillan sings the girl’s side of the story: she wants to be rid of her pain, to get far away, to say what she thinks.
Salin is a Thai-born drummer and producer who lives in Montreal. She says the song came to her complete after her first meeting with the film-makers: “I heard the whole song, I heard the lyrics”. She has released it herself, as she did Rammana, which earned her a nomination for Global Music Album of the Year at Canada’s 2026 Juno Awards. “Prayer for Isara” is the first single from an EP due in 2027.
Listen to “Prayer for Isara” HERE and get her latest album Rammana through THIS LINK