Hanoi's Mixtape 54 Blends Traditional Vietnamese Music With Electronic Production

A collective spends months building a 12-track compilation that sets Vietnam's đàn tranh zither and sáo trúc bamboo flute against four-on-the-floor rhythm. It gets a release, a writeup, some decent playlist traction. Then the three people behind it say the real goal was never the club at all.

That's Mixtape 54, a Hanoi outfit formed in January 2025 by Klound V, Mmoriez and Marrk Martinez. Their debut, Hoa Đầu Mùa, pulls traditional Vietnamese singing styles from provinces across the country into electronic production, and its own creators describe the project as a bridge to somewhere else entirely. "We want music and DJ sets to be heard and played in everyday spaces besides just clubs," the collective said at release. Coffee shops. Restaurants. Parks. The kind of neighborhood corner where the music just happens to be on.

A mastering engineer's side project

Klound V's day job is mixing and mastering, including work for Miss Universe Vietnam, which is an unglamorous way to end up falling for your own country's traditional music: you spend enough hours inside other people's recordings and you start hearing what's underneath them. That's reportedly how Hoa Đầu Mùa began: Klound V joined forces with Mmoriez and Marrk Martinez to form the collective, starting with smaller projects before building something full-length.

The title translates loosely to the season's first bloom, drawn, per the collective, from the cultural weight the lotus carries in Vietnam. Twelve tracks is a real commitment for a debut. It's also built around an instrument most club rigs have never had to EQ for. The zither doesn't sit in a mix the way a synth pad does. It has a woody decay, string noise, room sound. Getting it to sit next to a kick drum without sounding like a novelty is the actual craft here, and it's also the part a short new-release writeup can't fully show you. You have to hear it.

Hanoi's not the first to try this

The collective is joining a conversation Vietnamese producers have been having with their own back catalogue for a while now. Stargazing Records turned a Vietnamese pilgrimage poem into a house hit that Damian Lazarus played in Ibiza. Hien's debut album took her ten years to finish, built around a guitar line she dug out of her grandfather's old cải lương tapes. Its opening track's first voice isn't hers at all: it's her grandfather, recorded decades ago. None of these are novelty flourishes or a sample pack raid. They're producers who grew up with this music in the house and are old enough now to decide it belongs on a dancefloor too.

What makes this collective a little different is the explicit refusal of the club as the endpoint. Most Vietnamese producers working this territory are angling for a festival stage or a European label's attention. Its stated plan runs the other way: shrink the room, not expand it. Get the record played somewhere a grandmother might actually hear it next to her grandson's playlist, not just somewhere with a sound system built for 3am.

What's not confirmed yet

To be straight about it: there's no public list yet of which coffee shops or neighborhoods are actually booking Mixtape 54's sets, and the collective hasn't said how far along that side of the plan is. What exists right now, concretely, is the record. It has twelve tracks. The mission statement reads more like a dare than a press line.

Hoa Đầu Mùa is out now. Whether it ends up soundtracking a late-night club set or a Tuesday afternoon in a West Lake café is, by the collective's own account, still an open question, and apparently the whole point.

Cover and collective photos: Mixtape 54, via Mixmag Asia.