Maggie Tra Turned Her Mother's Death Into a House Record, With Hanoi Still in Its Bones
Maggie Tra's new single 'Holding On' is a house track about losing her Cambodian mother, made by an artist who learned to DJ in Hanoi and now runs her own label, Pho The Girls Records.
Official link
There's a beatboxer in Hanoi named Tuansss whose duo LIMEBÓCX Maggie Tra discovered while living in the city a few years back. She says she wants to put him on her next album. That plan is still unwritten, but the record she just finished says plenty about where her sound comes from anyway.
A House Track Built From Grief
'Holding On' dropped on August 19 through Pho The Girls Records, the label Tra runs herself, and Electronic Groove gave it the premiere. It's a soulful house track, built, in her own words, around the suffering that arrives in waves when someone you love is taken from you. Her mother was Cambodian, and Tra has talked openly about growing up mostly in a single-parent household in Australia after her parents separated, raised partly on the Khmer music her mother played at home so she'd feel less alone far from Cambodia. Tra didn't always want to hear it as a kid. She leans into it now: her earlier track 'Pretty Srey' and the EP U.L A (You Look Asian) both draw on Mahori, the centuries-old Cambodian orchestral style she went looking for once she started digging past the vocal recordings her mother owned.
Hanoi Taught Her How to Build a Scene, Not Just a Set
Tra is Sydney-based and Australian-born, but Vietnam is where a chunk of her formation as a DJ actually happened. Back in 2020, under the banner Pho The Girls, she and the promoter collective SYS Sister Sounds ran an intro-to-DJing workshop in Hanoi, built specifically for women, non-binary people and women of colour, teaching CDJ basics to a handful of participants at a time so everyone actually got hands-on with the decks. Tra hosted it in English with a translator on standby, alongside a run of Vietnam gigs and a stint as a radio host on SYS Radio. That workshop's name didn't stay a one-off: Pho The Girls is now also the name of her own label, the same instinct for building something herself instead of waiting for someone else to hand her a slot.
A Small Label, Built to Keep the Weird Stuff In
Pho The Girls Records isn't a big operation, and 'Holding On' is one of its first proper releases. That's the point of running your own imprint when your reference points are Khmer Mahori strings, a Hanoi beatboxer and Sydney house all at once: nobody has to sign off on the mix. It won't chart. It doesn't need to. What it does is put Southeast Asian diasporic sound inside a genre that too often flattens everything into the same filtered loop, on the artist's own terms.
Cover art: official artwork for 'Holding On', courtesy Pho The Girls Records, via Electronic Groove.
