On his shape-shifting second album, the 18-year-old Vietnamese artist wrings beauty out of chaos with fractured, vignette-like compositions.
The artists at the forefront of Vietnam’s experimental music scene are guided by boundless exploration. With Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế, the Rắn Cạp Đuôi collective conjured fantasias via deconstructed club. On Anna Agenda, the duo Pilgrim Raid mutated dance music to construct an apocalyptic song cycle. Another artist from this cohort, the 18-year-old Tran Uy Duc, has a similar penchant for fractured sound collages, but he doubles down on texture and shapelessness to emphasize atmosphere. Came, his beguiling sophomore album, can be described as a collection of contradictions: greyscale and prismatic, deadening and exuberant, baleful and inviting.
Based in Hanoi, Tran began making music in 2018. While not musically trained, he notes the importance of his father’s metal sculpture art, as it led him to “make friends with raw metallic noise every day.” You can hear his embrace of raucous sounds right out the gate: Came’s title track, which lasts 30-something seconds, erupts with abrasive howling. Tran incorporates rhythmic pulses and processed vocals in the following track, “Three,” and if you tilt your head just right, it’s essentially a pop song. Underneath the murky production, Tran relays scattered thoughts in a robotic voice, describing a craving for sexual pleasure and the fear of coming out as queer as two competing, compounding sources of loneliness.
Sequencing his songs like vignettes, Tran bolsters the wide range of emotions on Came. Much like his debut album, 100 BROKEN DREAMS, these 19 songs—interludes included—are loose, dynamic, and often short. As disparate as these tracks are, they’re shrouded in a cloud of anxiety and elation, capturing life as both a series of granular events and a monolithic fog. The cycloning assault of “got” feels far from the emotive guitar meanderings of “Louche,” but placed side by side, it’s clear that these differing expressions of despair and frustration are both pathways for catharsis. Sometimes, individual tracks are self-contained shape-shifters. Album highlight “Banal” launches with the retro-psychedelia of Yves Tumor before tumbling through riotous clanging, spoken-word hypnagogic pop, hyperpop’s embrace of AutoTune as brattish shrapnel, and a guitar melody lifted from jazz guitarist George Barnes’ “Ana.”
While it’s easy to trace the influences on Tran’s music—he cites Arca, Mica Levi, and Björk’s “Declare Independence” as having informed the album—Came consistently manages to surprise. “Catwalk” could soundtrack runways, sure, but its gloomy and acerbic production freely moves into more nebulous territories. When it concludes with 10 seconds of a straightforward dance beat, it’s both a sly wink and a reminder of how much he’s toyed with the titular conceit in the preceding three minutes. “Interlude A - Laura” is a sparse, diaristic reflection on a breakup, although the name in the title refers not to an ex but to the nail polish he wears, personifying the object as a source of comfort. And “Coop,” which features Phạm Thế Vũ of Rắn Cạp Đuôi, unleashes the album’s most exhilarating wall of noise before ending with quiet, intimate singing. Whatever sound or mood he’s exploring, Tran keeps things visceral; he wrings beauty and strangeness out of chaos, sometimes both at the same time.
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