Hanoi’s Tran Uy Duc makes noisy assemblages that involve both the far reaches of experimental sound art and the instinctive drive of pop songwriting. Tran, founder of local event series hanoi bedroom shows, is at the forefront of a scene in Vietnam where thoughtful interdisciplinary chaos is the norm, associated with eclectic acts like the collective Rắn Cạp Đuôi and singer-songwriter Vĩ. In his unpredictable music, which often soundtracks open-ended multimedia projects involving poetry, film, and live performance, Tran stacks layers of dry, tawdry sounds—samples of smoggy Auto-Tuned vocal fry, guitar fuzz, or basic drum presets—then riles them up with effects and shifts them in and out of quantized structure, creating mish-mashes that track his unruly emotions. ByyShh is both Tran’s most expansive project and his most focused; it’s a busted-up, corrugated gem that’s as fun as it is provocative.
Releasing ByyShh through opaque avant-pop queen Lolina’s Relaxin Records marks a torch-passing moment for Tran. You can hear signatures from her music in Tran’s. He makes his beats from a few Casios’ worth of unrefined samples and loops that knock against one another with clashing fidelities; his blithe, cryptic, half-spoken vocals convey sly femininity alongside the lump-in-your-throat reticence that creeps up when you’re sharing something difficult. Artists from Tran’s generation have canonized Hype Williams’ era of “hypnagogic” music, which investigated the alienation at the heart of post-everything online culture. The best acts raised in this vacant sprawl (Tran and his friends in Vietnam, or other kids from SoundCloud and RateYourMusic like the Sidepeices and quinn) collate their hundreds of browser tabs to pursue relatively immediate songwriting with a definite sense of place. Tran, who’s hung around Vietnam’s sound-art scene since his teens, uses his fluency in different musical modes to get raw and direct, avoiding the air of detachment some cut-and-paste music can lapse into.
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ByyShh is efficient and expressive. There’s no cagey conceptual ethos swirling around Tran’s grab-bag of tracks, and he doesn’t glower at you to make a point. Often, he’s downright jubilant, wringing barely-contained glee out of every sound source. Trebly, Elephant 6-ish MIDI strings and keys get theatrically beaten to a pulp on “Deserver,” whose dexterous arrangement allows for two simultaneous visions of musical bliss (flowery nostalgia; red-lining DAW abuse). Tran embraces the limitations of stock sounds and analog tech, only to blow past them whenever he’s excited by his next idea. “R3” begins as an uncanny attempt at the more elaborate side of rigid ’80s electro, then gives way to glossy, frantic dancehall, as if being hijacked by its digital schmaltz. It’s a joy to watch Tran find ways to contort cheap textures into variegated colors and sticky motifs, and the levity of his process grounds his uneasy emotional landscape. “Emmie (Madonna Stabbed Me and I Turned Into a Flower)” sounds like a manic spew of voice notes (“I’m a crazy bitch,” “I want you to kill me if you understand me”) forced into melody by spontaneous filters. A few of the campy, “look what I can do” turns on ByyShh remind me of Toby Fox’s winkingly-retro Undertale soundtrack—note “Do It,” which sequences a beat from dog barks.
