Monsoon Is Now
Music of the Mona Evie Collective
What is "experimental music" to you?
‘My World 2.0’ - Justin Bieber.
Jk, we think experimental music is crossing boundaries in terms of genres, sounds, song structures,. etc and not bound to any certain limit of what music should sound like. Having fun in the process too ofc.
- Mona Evie Collective, interviewed by James Gui for Experimental Sound Studio, 2021
It was probably, and, if so, appropriately, on May Day 1975 that my family was watching the TVNZ news when North Vietnamese T-54s rolled up to the presidential palace in Saigon. I was 17, and the long overseas war that had been the background to my childhood was over, its outcome inevitable but too long delayed. Opposition to the US and ANZAC intervention In Vietnam had been a core platform of the youth revolt I felt part of – we also stood for the right to wear long hair, end apartheid, take recreational drugs, wear non-uniform clothing, and we had a vague idea that our generation might liberate its women from the limitations imposed by previous generations’ expectations, simply by treating them as people in their own right rather than as brides-to-be.
But the US military had largely vacated South Vietnam before its fall, preferring to support its divided and demoralized military at a distance, so the sense that “our side” had triumphed fell flat – they had, in the end, triumphed over their own people.
And those Vietnamese who had been on the wrong side of history suffered the consequences; not, indeed, the mass executions feared after the Hue massacres of 1969, but grueling reeducation, and often torture, starvation, and overwork. Hundreds of thousands of people, including the Hoa ethnic Chinese minority suspected of disloyalty after relations with China soured, took to boats and crossed pirate-infested seas to become refugees in the West. Prominent Western leftists loyal to Hanoi blamed these “boat people” for their own misfortunes. Meanwhile, worse things had happened in Cambodia, where a cadre of communists trained in French theory deposed a monarchy destabilized by illegal US bombing and began the mass-murder of the Cambodian middle class (including every single rock and pop musician in a unique and vibrant Western-influenced scene) alongside anyone else who might have known about anything more than subsistence farming and the lethal party line. Prominent Western leftists, including Noam Chomsky, then just making a name for himself, disputed news reports of the massacres, which took the lives of a quarter of the country’s population, and defended Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. But hubris hit those fanatics hard when they decided, firstly, to massacre Vietnamese villagers, then to shell and seize Vietnamese territory. The battle hardened, Soviet-and-US equipped army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam finally tired of border defense and diplomacy in 1978 and invaded Kampuchea in force, deposing Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and installing a non-genocidal puppet government which allowed a flow of foreign aid, ending the famine that had accompanied the genocide. A few years later I started reading Soldier of Fortune magazine, the first popular mouthpiece of the American far-right available in New Zealand, and it was notable that in their own way the US fascists were now on the same side as Noam Chomsky, gloating over the occasional Vietnamese tank destroyed from hiding by the dwindling Khmer Rouge and offering their support to Pol Pot. Politics is a sickness. Anyway, the Cambodian action won the new Vietnamese government respect, as did their war with Pol Pot’s patron China, which invaded Vietnam in 1979, capturing a few cities, but was unable to make Vietnam back down in Cambodia and wisely withdrew.
For the next forty years very little of significance was heard from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Then, in 2022, Pitchfork writer Joshua Minsoo Kim shared Mona Evie’s track ‘Madhatter’ on Twitter. The rabbithole thus opened up to me has deepened – so far, providing a triptych of wonderful albums from the members of this Hanoi-and-the Internet based collective in various configurations, as well as singles and further long-form experiments.
The important thing about the Mona Evie experiment to my ears, its richness as a gift to the Western music lover, is that it has the deconstruction and reconstruction of today’s R&B and rap at its heart, within an ethos inspired by the old psychedelic texts within a rich local culture of extreme experimental music. Thus, Mona Evie’s first album Chó Ngồi Đáy Giếng (2022) opens with ‘Spencer’s Psychedelic Breakfast’, a title that’s an homage to both early Pink Floyd and collaborator Spencer Nguyễn (also a member of the Saigon-based Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective). It’s a collection of glitched samples standing in for a song, a warning shot of weirdness, but in the next track, ‘Lên Đồn’, all the Mona Evie vocalists rap, one after another, over a slinky, insinuating trap beat, and the result is super cool.
Their music rarely lets you settle in one groove for long, it’s likely to accelerate or slow, or throw a new beat or an unexpected sample into the mix, or shatter itself violently before resuming or disappearing like the Cheshire Cat, a disruptive set-up which stokes the appetite for moments of repose, creating a perfect framework for a simple and gentle pop song like ‘Truyện Kiều II’ when it arrives.
You with her
Hand in hand, head to head
On that bench we used to sit
I’ve seen worse
Still you know, when you go
My heart and soul just die a little bit
It’s a bitter-sweet autotuned candy hit, but the ghost of Syd Barrett seems to be complicit in both its childlike simplicity and the darkness at its edges as the maximalist production intensifies.
The contrast between brash or jokily emotive masculine rapping and sensitive feminine singing throughout this album is mostly left untamed, like the jostling of boys and girls in a playground, reminding me more of the dynamic between Bjork and Einar on the Sugarcubes’ debut LP Life’s Too Good (1988) than sophisticated adult interplay of the ‘Some Velvet Morning’ or ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ type. Not that there aren’t moments of male tenderness, especially Jaduk’s song ‘Launch’, which has a peak Flaming Lips quality, and Hồng Phước Văn’s vocal on ‘D6/9: Tha Room’, in which he raps
I'm working, get physical
Into this shit, diabolical
This breaks into particles
I'm working for Dominos
I'm working for Dominos
Note how the rap, when it returns, brings with it a Mitteleuropean “oompah” 60’s folk-pop bassline, meshed perfectly with the R&B beats. Possibly a first. Văn’s emo flow on breakup rap ‘Vietnamese Sweetheart’ also stands out, over a groovy electric sitar sample that – like so many beats across all three projects - wouldn’t be out of place on the wonderful new Homebrew album, at least before the glitch-and-blown subwoofer rhythm section kicks in.
It's still hard to put the right names to these voices, and sincere apologies if I’m getting this wrong, but much of the distinctive female singing on Chó Ngồi Đáy Giếng is by aprxel (pronounced April). Her signature sound, which is far from her only tone, is a soft R&B influenced moan, like the essence of a hundred US soul divas bottled and left in the moonlight for a year. On ‘Omen 300’ aprxel affects a sing-speak goth deadpan - shades of i.e. crazy - to tell the story of abandonment by a parent, over guitar chords reminiscent of 70’s Pink Floyd or Amon Duul II.
I tried to forgive you
Ever since fourteen, but
But it’s, it’s harder than it may seems
Cause you never change
Cause you’re unaware
Of the pain that you caused
And your kids ain’t dolls
And my eyes are dull
When you close the door
What you left me for?
A life you can’t afford
What an unfortunate!
The final cut ‘Bí và Ngô’ is a sprawling 13 minute experimentalist landscape with pop songs as its bookends and its heart, the gorgeous dream pop central song ending with an incandescent guitar solo1, before it opens into a drone soundscape from a spaghetti western, its incurably lonesome wailing harmonica part played by traditional Vietnamese double reed instrument kèn bầu.
The next album from Mona Evie artists was Hài Độc Thoại (phần II) (2023) by Hài Độc Thoại (which translates as Stand-up Comedy), a project based around three male rapper/producers, including Mona Evie’s founder Pilgrim Raid, which I included in my Best of 2023 post.
Aprexel is a brand of camera, and aprxel makes a guest appearance on Hài Độc Thoại (phần II), which also features her cover art, in a track called ‘robert glass golf camera’, a vocal collage over drones which might well have been inspired by the Velvet Underground’s ‘Murder Mystery’ but also has a very dada feel. Vietnam is a former French colony and while there’s little or no French language here, we’re swimming, as often as not out of our depth, in dadaism and surrealism, musique concrete and collage, post-modernism and deconstruction, and a vive la difference attitude to collaboration, all of which might count for something.
If, after listening to Chó Ngồi Đáy Giếng, you feel that an aprxel solo album would be a treat, you needn’t wait. tapetumlucidum<3 (2023), produced by Pilgrim Raid, ought to be exactly what you’re looking for. If I’d known about this when it came out in November it’d have been on my Best of 2023. aprxel’s voice is the modern equivalent of Dusty Springfield’s, blending intensity of feeling with artistic distance and control, to put the meaning of life and love into each note.
Opener ‘<3’, following the example of ‘Spencer’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ on Chó Ngồi Đáy Giếng, features tapetumlucidum<3’s most disrupted production; it’s as if the artists are warning off outsiders. This reminds me of both P.H.F.’s Purest Hell and the notes I made on modern production methods when I reviewed that early last year.
Track 2, ‘vàng9999’, samples Little River Band’s ‘Reminiscing’, one of John Lennon’s favourite songs (and a song that’s surely been played millions of times at the RSA) followed by a lovely major key guitar solo played straight by Lưu Thanh Duy of shoegaze band Nam Thế Giới (who have their own song called Vang) followed by a loop of his chiming, distorted guitar chord leading into the fade, tapetumlucidum<3’s only rock moment.
Pilgrim Raid and aprxel like to create, instead of the 2 minute song favoured by other internet musicians today, a longer track with a mid-song drop or fermata and a change of mood, like the unexpected witchhouse synth drop in the middle of ‘where's my money 4 therapy tdb?????’ , a eureka moment of exposition followed by a piling up of distorted noises like a mind succumbing to madness.
‘terrorizers’ has the most relentlessly dissonant arrangement and distorted production, abrasive shards of sound within which aprxel cowers in a babydoll voice singing
Could never let them know it
Could never let them see it
In a man’s world
They won’t save a place for me
‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ opens as the gentlest of slow songs, not unlike the tune that ends Chó Ngồi Đáy Giếng, yet halfway through its stately progression is overlaid with punchy hyperpop bass riffing at quadruple the speed, and this also makes sense.
‘escape 2 farewell’ is an 8 minute suite over samples from Japanese sora composer Tadeshi Kurosawa, and begins in a manner obviously influenced by Bjork. It’s nice when connections I work out by ear alone are validated.2
Damn I thought I knew the real you
Such a shame I really thought it was you
As cruelsome as you been
And as foolish as I been
I think it’s time you need to let it Go! Go! Go!
When I played Mona Evie’s ‘Justin Bieber’ single to an art friend they asked whether the reference and the song’s R&B styling was intended ironically. Which I took at the time as their implying that insincerity might be its only saving grace. But irony has a wider meaning, as Iris Murdoch explains in The Black Prince – “Language laughs in its sleep.” To express anything at all is to expose it to misunderstanding, ridicule, cancellation – irony is a kind of tact in expression that protects what is sincere in it, and all Mona Evie’s kidding around is ultimately serving this purpose.
The discovery of Mona Evie has been a bitter-sweet experience for me, because I recognize in them something of the ethos of the collectives I was part of at their age – The Spies, The And Band and The Perfect Strangers (1979-1981). The mix of pure pop song and extreme recording experimentation, the juxtaposition of masculine and feminine aesthetics, the protective confusion of parody and sincerity, the specific chaos of ‘Comfy Nausea’, remind me of those recordings that have survived as The Battle of Bosworth Terrace, Outhern and Noli Me Tangere. And though it’s wonderful to learn about Mona Evie, it awakens a sadness in me, that more could have been made of the potential of my early collaborations before the temptations and responsibilities of adulthood intervened.
Look, just buy the Mona albums to make more like them happen.
Algorithmic Apocalypse - Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế by Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective
“excessive, chintzy, but ultimately endearing” – Joshua Minsoo Kim, who writes more beautifully than I can about Chó Ngồi Đáy Giếng on the Tone Glow substack
Similarly, the Velvets connection is confirmed when I see aprxel has covered ‘Candy Says’ off the 3rd album in a lo-fi production with a distant reverby voice that makes it the best Velvets cover in a while. The Velvet Underground being the original example of R&B influenced pop songs sung with varying intensities of masculine and feminine expression and overlaid with non-pop experimentation.