Limebócx Keeps Turning Classical Vietnamese Poetry Into Electronic Singles From Hanoi

Nguyễn Khuyến spent the second half of the 19th century writing some of the sharpest classical poetry in the Vietnamese language, the kind still assigned to Hanoi schoolkids a hundred and some years later. He was not writing it for a drum machine. On October 2, the Hanoi duo Limebócx put one of his poems through one anyway.

The track is called "Mục Hạ Vô Nhân," which Limebócx translate in their own Bandcamp notes as "Looking Down On Everyone." It came out through Thang Long Records, a Hanoi label named for the old imperial-era name of the city itself ("Ascending Dragon"), built as a collective of native and non-native producers working toward what the label calls, a little grandly, "future-fusion." Bandcamp tags the single electronic, ethnic, folktronica and trip-hop all at once, which is really just a way of admitting none of those words covers it alone. The poem is about contempt, the quiet, specific kind you can aim at someone without raising your voice, and Limebócx built a track around that mood rather than around a hook.

Limebócx is built around Trang Lê, who sings and moves between đàn tranh, guitar and bass depending on the song, working alongside Đờ Tùng. The group has spent years mining Vietnamese literary and folk material for source text: ca trù, the centuries-old ceremonial singing tradition, sits next to beatboxing and synths in their catalog without either side apologizing for the other. It is not a gimmick they roll out once a year for a festival slot. Their Bandcamp catalog reads like a running project: "Mục Hạ Vô Nhân" in October, a reworked take on a traditional Northern Quan Họ folk song called "Yêu nhau 2.0" in September, and further back, "Hồ Tây 2.0," whose artwork sketches a railing over Hanoi's West Lake, tagged with the kind of graffiti locals actually leave there.

None of this is the kind of release that will show up on a festival poster. It is also a working method, not a one-off: a project aimed at a specific national literary canon instead of a generic world-music gesture. Nguyễn Khuyến's poem has survived this long because it is precise about a feeling most people recognize. Limebócx's version is three and a half minutes long and loads straight from Bandcamp, no app, no account, no excuse not to hear what a 19th-century scholar-poet sounds like run through a Hanoi studio in 2026.

For more on what else is coming out of Hanoi and Saigon right now, see Loopliner's guide to Vietnam's house and techno scene.