Argy and Adam Beyer Turned Vietnam's Independence Palace Into a Dancefloor

On October 2nd, the gates a North Vietnamese army tank bulldozed through at 10:45am on April 30, 1975, ending the Vietnam War, opened for a very different kind of crowd. Independence Palace, renamed Reunification Hall after 1975 and run since as a state museum, held roughly 4,000 people on its front lawn to watch its entire facade turn into a laser show that ran until fireworks closed the night at 9:30pm.

The headliner was Argy, the Greek producer behind Afterlife's 2024 album New World, who brought his NEWORLD live concept to the city as the tour's only Southeast Asian date. Adam Beyer, the Swedish techno veteran who founded Drumcode in 1996, played alongside him, with vocalist-DJ Alex Mills and local opener Heepsy filling out the bill.

A Monument Becomes a Dancefloor

Independence Palace is a public museum, not a nightclub, built around the gates a tank drove through to end the war, and it still shows visitors the old underground war room. In recent months it has hosted a dinner-theatre dance show and a smaller 3D mapping display for tourists, but nothing on this scale.

For the Ho Chi Minh City date, the palace's entire front elevation became the stage. A 3D mapping team that has previously lit up the Eiffel Tower in Paris washed the building in green and red while lasers fanned out over the crowd, organizers said, with more than 1,000 of the roughly 4,000 attendees flown in from outside Vietnam.

The Album Behind the Lights

NEWORLD has music underneath the lights. It grew out of New World, Argy's 2024 album for Tale Of Us's Afterlife label: 14 tracks made with collaborators including ARTBAT and Anyma that hang together more like a through-composed record than a set of club tools, and the one the live show's visuals are staged around.

Beyer's name on the bill is the less obvious pairing on paper. Drumcode has built three decades on harder, more functional techno than Argy's cinematic house, but the two have crossed paths on festival bills from Tomorrowland to EDC before, and an outdoor stage built for 4,000 gives both sounds room to breathe without crowding each other out.

A City in Transition

The timing says something about where Ho Chi Minh City's scene actually stands. Observatory, the city's longest-running techno club, shuts down this same month after years as the anchor of the city's underground. A government landmark hosting a 4,000-person international rave the same month the scene's most established club shuts its doors is a coincidence of timing, not a trade-off anyone planned. It captures where Ho Chi Minh City's nightlife stands this October, one era ending a few kilometers from a monument staging an entirely new kind of show.

Tickets through Megatix started at 965,853 VND for an 18-and-over crowd that organizer Dance with ELAN clearly built with international visitors in mind. Argy has already announced a follow-up album, NEWORLD II.