Lý Trang has been played on NTS in shows including East Never Loses w/ Angie QQ , featured first on 14 June 2024. Songs played include Mau, sau.

Like the way its title brings to mind processes of mineral crystallisation and rock formulation, Lý Trang’s second full-length release ‘Syenite’ accumulates elements from all of her times past. Born in a North-Eastern mountainous province of Vietnam, Trang spent the formative college years in Hanoi, where friendships in underground circles brought new influences and perspectives. By then an emerging multimedia artist, Trang moved to Moscow 11 months before a war broke out in Europe – the restlessness and disillusion of the times seeping their way into the album’s sonic identity, alongside a sense of loss and yearning for home.

Rooted in alienation and conceived as an attempt to make sense of all that’s happening around her, the album may or may not have offered the answers, yet it signifies the artistic coming-of-age of a hugely promising talent. Lý Trang’s first for Subtext Recordings and mixed/mastered by the label’s James Ginzburg, this categorisation-defying collection follows the self-released ‘Snail Skeleton’ (2018) – something of a cult-status outlier in the Vietnamese alternative music scene – as well as various live-scoring commissions, soundtracks and inter-disciplinary installation works. Conceptually-complementary to ‘Syenite’ and making prominent use of found footage, Trang’s debut short film ‘Sisyphus’s Cat’ came out last year, taking as starting point the search for a lost pet across parallel universes.