In order to find a new musical language and new forms for songs, I had to deny the official environment of the Vietnamese Government.
My goals are:
Break the prejudices about musical aesthetic;
Mock the taboo in the language of music;
My attitude is not to compromise in any way.
– Composer Ngọc Đại, Artist Statement, December 2019
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As a mythical giant in both Vietnamese pop and experimental music, Ngọc Đại has built a prolific yet deeply controversial career, earning him the nickname Đại điên [mad Đại]. His madness manifests partly through the eclectic aesthetics he pursues, most notably the collaborative album Đại Lâm Linh (2009), which layers guttural screams, Vietnamese folk inflections, Buddhist chants, and theatrical excess into a dissonant sonic landscape that is at once painfully haunting and perversely arousing. When some of its songs were performed on national television during the competition Bài Hát Việt [Songs of Vietnam], the music’s rawness and intensity unleashed a sonic violence and a cultural shockwave that tore open the limits of mainstream Vietnamese musical imagination, to the point where the most-viewed YouTube video of their performance, uploaded by user AndyTao7, comes with the subtitle “Ecstasy with Acoustic, or Musical Rape.” But the legend of his madness is not only musical. Within artistic circles, the reputation is carried by his larger-than-life persona: explosive, combative, unpredictable, profane, and notoriously difficult to work with. Here, madness is less a clinical diagnosis than a cultural marker, a badge of uncompromising individuality that is both endearing and alienating.
The madness of an individual, no matter how idiosyncratic, cannot be disentangled from the suffocating weight of social order and the enclosure of its inescapable totality. In this sense, Ngọc Đại’s figuration of madness becomes inseparable from the conditions that enclose him: the dense, confusing web of censorship and regulation, the rigid educational system of the music conservatory, the formulaic career ladder of the governmental artist that limits expression and enforces obedience. Though well-positioned to ascend those ranks—first as a soldier in the Resistance War against America, later as a composition student at the prestigious Hanoi Music Conservatoire, and eventually as music director of the Youth Theater in 1983—he quit his stable job after a year and became a successful freelance promoter. Later in the early 2000s, when he first achieved recognition as a composer, his free-spiritedness placed him in repeated conflict with cultural officials. The release of his first studio album, Solar Eclipse (2001), sung by the pop diva Trần Thu Hà, was mired in controversies. Many of its lyrics, based on the poetry of Vi Thùy Linh, were deemed sexually perverse and had to be cut out or rewritten. Most spectacularly, Ngọc Đại self-released his solo album, Thằng Mõ 1 (2013), without seeking state approval, provoking direct intervention from the cultural police and incurring a hefty fine of 30 million VND. Emerging here is not the image of a careerist compliant state artist, but an avant-garde composer unafraid to test and transgress the limits imposed upon him, guided by a relentless pursuit of freedom and artistic expression.
This fearless avant-garde spirit echoes what Susan Sontag’s writes in “The Pornographic Imagination”:
[…] one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there. Being a freelance explorer of spiritual dangers, the artist gains a certain license to behave differently from other people; matching the singularity of his vocation, he may be decked out with a suitably eccentric lifestyle, or he may not. His job is inventing trophies of his experiences—objects and gestures that fascinate and enthrall, not merely (as prescribed by older notions of the artist) edify or entertain. His principal means of fascinating is to advance one step further in the dialectic of outrage. He seeks to make his work repulsive, obscure, inaccessible; in short, to give what is, or seems to be, not wanted […] The exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness.
In this passage, Sontag is not simply defining the artist’s eccentricity, but defending the seriousness of a pornographic literary genre often dismissed as obscene by reframing its provocations as part of a larger avant-garde mandate. What matters is not the pornographic content per se, but the willingness of the artist to trespass into disavowed territories and return with forms that unsettle, repel, or offend the reader’s sensory experience—an experience always bound up their larger sense of self. The figure of the artist as a “broker in madness” suggests less a personal pathology than a structural position: one who gives form to what society refuses to name, committed to speaking unspeakable truths even at the cost of transgression. That is to say, the madness of the modernist artist lies not in the idiosyncrasy of the individual but in the courage of the artist to break away from social order, to embrace danger, and to bear its inevitable price.
Ngọc Đại and his điên reputation could be read as a musical enactment of the pornographic imagination. He has a taste for sexually explicit expression through poetry, evident in song titles such as “Khuyến mại tình dục” (Sex promotion) and “Cái nường 8x” (The vagina 8x – paradise) as part of Thằng Mõ 1. In his music, sex does not simply settle into the role of subject matter so much as it becomes an instrument, a way of sounding the limits of propriety and provoking fissures in the social and aesthetic fabric. Sex, thus, becomes a channel for an uncompromising spirit of freedom and a willingness to go against authority head-on. Evident in his artist statement, Ngọc Đại is well aware of his oppositional position in relation to the larger society, of the avant-garde imperative for the artist to press at the outer edges of experience in search of new musical language.
However, his orientation towards newness feels markedly different from its Western avant-garde counterpart. The Western pursuit of aesthetic newness is often a more fashionable reframing of colonial logic and its compulsion for progress, its obsession with individual exceptionalism. Even Sontag’s formulation of the artist being “a freelance explorer of spiritual dangers” who ventures into unexplored frontiers of consciousness to report back what is there uncannily mirrors the rhetoric of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas. The metaphor of artistic exploration thus carries with it the residue of colonial expansion, conquest, and appropriation. If the Western avant-garde often elevates the individual genius who dares to venture into and claim new territory for art, Ngọc Đại enacts a different paradigm: newness as resistance rather than discovery, unruliness as endurance rather than conquest. His defiance, shaped by suffocation, reveals how the avant-garde in Vietnam is not the promise of expansion but the necessity of surviving constraint, with punishment and regulation not as accidents but as the very conditions of its possibility.
Another reason I do not take his words and his uncompromising attitude at face value is that Ngọc Đại is fundamentally rooted in Vietnamese traditional music, which follows a different logic of social transformation that does not fetishize the spectacular rupture of change or the heroic courage of the genius individual. Growing up with Chèo folk theater and Ca Trù chamber music, Ngọc Đại was immersed in the oral transmission of these forms as his father was a keen amateur musician. Unlike formal conservatory training, oral traditions do not rely on written scores or codified curricula but on the slow, embodied apprenticeship between master and student. One is rarely given explicit instructions—one is told not what to do, but simply to do it.
The struggle, in fact, often begins with finding a master who is willing to teach at all, for the relationship depends as much on trust as on skill. Đàn đáy lute player Phạm Đình Hoằng of Ca Trù Phú Thị, a group active since 2014, recounts in a personal conversation with me how he had to work on his master Nguyễn Phú Đẹ’s farm for six months before his master seriously took him in as a student. When Hoằng was finally admitted, he was not given formal instruction but simply told to imitate. And, of course, perfect imitation was impossible. Each attempt required him to translate the gesture into his own hands, his own instrument, producing subtle deviations in touch and resonance that, over time, organically grew into variations. Within this framework, the impossibility of exact mimicry is not a deficiency to be corrected but a constitutive feature of the practice. The distance between master and student is never fully closed; it is in this distance that new textures, variations, and agencies take root. There is not much of a structural need to rebel against authority and break off from the larger social fabric. The act of transmission thus already encodes a negotiation with what comes before, where access to knowledge is conditional, mediated, and prolonged.
Following the folk logic of improvisation, the new is not invented ex nihilo but forged through embodied friction with the old. Take Ngoc Dai’s collaborative album Đại Lâm Linh as an example: at first encounter, its screams, moans, and guttural cries seem like a violent tearing-away from tradition, a sonic assault that earned the group epithets such as “the three monsters” [tam quái] and left the audience describing their sound as a “direct punch to the face and ears.” Yet, this force is sustained by the very traditions it stretches, bends, and deforms. Beneath the harsh electronic motifs, the visceral vocal intensity of the two main singers Thanh Lâm and Linh Dung, and the theatrics of their live performances lie the persistent traces of folk forms—in folk instrumentation, folk vocal inflections, and even explicit incorporation of folk songs from Ca Trù and Hò Huế. These elements do not appear as stable quotations but as pliable materials, folded into improvisatory textures that destabilize their familiarity. In the drawn-out glissandi of Hò Huế animated by the gut-wrenching cries of Lâm and Linh, or in the spectral echoes of Ca Trù melodies woven into unfamiliar poetic soundscapes, tradition becomes the very ground against which contemporary excess settles.
What emerges, then, is a doubleness at the heart of Ngọc Đại’s practice: a madness that unravels the reality of repression through scandal and refusal, and an improvisational tug that works more quietly through repetition and variation. He is at once the polemic figure who openly mocks taboos, and the diligent composer whose language remains saturated with the textures of the traditions that shape him. His avant-garde position is less a break from Vietnamese cultural life than a restless negotiation within it, where excess registers not only as defiance but also as a means of enduring constraint. To take up his madness is to attend to this instability. Invention here is never sheer rupture nor seamless continuity, but the fraught labor of navigating between limitation and possibility. What resonates in his work is not in transcendence of society, but in stubbornly edging against its limits, again and again, until something gives.
Madness, in this sense, is less an identity than a method—an insistence on pressing where it hurts, on lingering at the fracture until the crack begins to widen. Đại điên, not for himself alone, but for a world that wants more than it can contain.
Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. They are a Contributing Editor of Movement Research Performance Journal Issue #62, dedicated to Vietnamese experimental performance. (Photo by Evelyn Freja)
