Tapes Of Vietnam w/ Jordan Obarzanek

This mix is an amalgamation of tapes collected from small antique stores, markets and music shops in Vietnam - focussing mostly on the genre of Vọng cổ, a style invented in the early 20th Century by Cao Văn Lầu which was used primarily in Cải Lương (or “Reformed Opera) theatre. When you hear the kind of melodic dialogue with fast plucked guitar-like instruments (traditionally a Đàn Nguyệt or “Moon Lute”), semi-improvising around specific scale structures - that’s Vọng Cổ. I had the idea to make this mix after a conversation I had with a Vietnamese lady running the bungalow I was staying in by the mountains just south of Hanoi last year. She’d overheard me listening to some of these tapes in the courtyard by the pool on my portable cassette player and came over to speak to me through Google translate. She regarded the music with familiarity and fondness and what ensued was an hour long speech-to-text conversation about music, the past, identity, belonging, and the TikTok-guided Vietnamese youth of today who don’t listen to this kind of music anymore. She often spoke with a hint of sadness or melancholy but was incredibly witty and clever and could identity many of the artists and songs I was listening to by ear (I wish I had her with me when I was writing the tracklist). I thought it was such a fitting conversation for the music we were listening to as Vọng Cổ’s direct translation is “Longing For The Past”.