Patra Urairat performed her single ‘Aftercare’ live for the first time after its release in Univ Bar earlier this month. For the first time in her life, she had an audience screaming her lyrics back to her and dancing to the beats she and her partners had taken so long producing. I met her for coffee only two days later, Patra still reeling from such a heartfelt moment. Selfishly, I was disappointed as soon as I realized my missed opportunity. “Don’t worry,” Patra reassures me, “I have a performance every week until the end of term.” 

 

Her busy schedule is not a surprise. Patra is a lead singer in two bands, the self-started We Should Sleep More and the Oxford-staple Dots Funk Odyssey. She also DJs and produces on a regular basis, works on the roll-out of her single, and, oh yeah, does a degree as well. When I proposed an interview over coffee, she very politely referred me to a friend in charge of her communications to sort out scheduling. 

 

Her life has been a whirlwind since last Michaelmas. After seeing her perform in October, a friend invited her for dinner and asked her how serious she was about music. Would she want to pursue this more actively, with him as a manager? Students with different interests would help in the way they could, turning it all into a group project. Sounds a bit intense for a dinner. But Patra was all in. The lyrics for ‘Aftercare’ were ready that very same week.

 

The song is at times slow and tender, at times quick and unflinching. “It’s supposed to echo the push and pull of a situationship” she says. I try to get more details out of her, as a budding journalist or as a lover of gossip—who’s to say—but she chooses to keep it vague. When I ask about her influences for the track, though, she lights up. She was mostly inspired by the DnB scene she encountered in London during her gap year. “Because I use this influence that was new to me, the song ends up encapsulating the story of my move from Kuala Lumpur to the UK,” she says. “It’s crazy to think that I’m making DnB now.” 

 

She uses interesting language to describe the song’s production too. For her, the beats are crunchy, some vocals are plastic. The vivid way of characterising sounds indicates a deep relationship with her song, genre, and music as a whole—in a way that might not even register to most listeners. ‘Aftercare’ is clearly the work of somebody who loves and thinks constantly about music and has listened to it attentively since childhood. “It’s kind of like when you are writing an essay. Even if you are not quoting somebody directly, people can tell whether you did the reading.” With music, the reading seems to come naturally to Patra. 

 

For someone with such a clear passion for performing, though, I often find Patra dismissing the whole pursuing-it-professionally thing, even affecting her voice when the topic comes up. A singer? No, no, no—too ridiculous to even consider. “My parents know I have a single out, but they don’t know how much of a project it actually is,” she confesses. “I just feel like pursuing singing would be such a privilege… It is a very big privilege to dream like that.” In the end, the fun for her is not putting pressure on it and letting the project show her the way. And there is nothing to worry about, her interests are diverse. She even has a consultancy internship lined up for the summer. “That one my parents do know about,” she laughs. 

 

What’s next, then? Patra herself doesn’t seem to know. She has a lot of songs on the back burner. “I just feel like ideas are just coming out now, in a way they didn’t before. Maybe I am just growing up and actually have more things to say.” Is she working on a more structured project, then? Maybe an album? “No, not yet. I’ll just see where Aftercare takes me.”

 

It’s a funny contradiction, talking to Patra. She is at the same time all regimented structure but also go-with-the-flow spontaneity. This is a girl that shows me a spreadsheet with details on where each of her next performances are, but promises ‘intense CHAOS’ in her artist bio on Spotify. Maybe the dichotomy is the marker of a great singer in the making.∎

 

Words by Luisa Blacker. Image by Isaac Tan Jer Young.