Nhạc Gãy Named Itself "Broken." Its Saigon Raves Now Fund Vietnam's Mental Health Awareness.

Saigon ravers used to get their directions in verse. Not a street address, a poem: a coded stanza passed around a group chat, the only way to find out where Nhạc Gãy was throwing its next party, because a plain address was a straight line for the police. The collective's name means "broken" in Vietnamese, and for close to a decade it has treated that word less like a warning and more like a job description: take what's broken, in the music and in the people making it, and build something from the pieces.

Five People, No Salary

Nhạc Gãy started small, throwing intimate parties in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. By the time DJ Mag profiled the group in 2021, it described a non-profit platform that had, in its own words, "started five years ago" and grown into throwing "huge gatherings with international DJs." Nobody on the crew takes a salary. The core is five people: co-founder and filmmaker Anh Phi Tran, art director and DJ Abi Linh (who performs as Abi Wasabi), producer and DJ Celina Huynh (who records as km95), plus Thao and Mike Pham. "It's like a different world," Anh Phi told DJ Mag, "just you, the music and dance." Abi Wasabi was blunter about why the poems on the flyers mattered: "The Vietnamese government is very unpredictable. They can just come in and shut you down in minutes."

A Compilation That Paid For Something Real

The clearest statement of what Nhạc Gãy is trying to do arrived as a record. Nhạc Gãy Tổng Hợp Số 1, the crew's debut compilation, stacked 14 tracks from Vietnamese and diasporic artists against each other: gabber next to Vinahouse, techno pulling in cải lương folk opera and kèn đám ma, the reed instrument traditionally played at funerals. Contributors included Puppy Riot, Nodey, Demonslayer, Anh Phi himself and Kim Durbeck, who told DJ Mag the scene had been "freed, liberated and born." Every dollar the release made went toward a Vietnamese mental health awareness fund, not toward the crew. That's also where InPsychOut came from, a podcast Nhạc Gãy runs with health professionals to talk through stigma and taboo, aimed in large part at Vietnam's LGBTQ+ creative community, where access to mental healthcare is thin and the subject itself is still whispered about.

The Rave Grew a Record Label

What's easy to miss, if you only read the 2021 writeups, is that Nhạc Gãy didn't stop at one compilation. Its Bandcamp page has quietly become a working label roster: mess. has released Summer Daisy and Fearless, ANNAM has put out Body & Soul, RED FLAG and 3260, Dustin Ngo dropped Kinh Kỳ, and somethingmaker followed with Mangroves: Wet Meadow. In 2023 the crew also put out a run of tracks from Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective, a Ho Chi Minh City act that's also on the label's roster, through the Nhạc Gãy SoundCloud. It's the kind of catalog that doesn't make headlines the way a Boiler Room booking does, but it's the actual infrastructure a scene needs: somewhere for the next Vietnamese producer to put out a record that isn't a self-released SoundCloud link nobody finds.

Why It Still Matters

Saigon's dance floors have gotten a lot more visible since 2021. Vinahouse has its own explainer now, Bung L0n has turned the city's most mocked music into a queer safe space, and there's a full nightlife guide for visitors who just want to know where to dance. Nhạc Gãy is the less photogenic part of that story: the crew that decided a scene needed a mental health fund and a record label before it needed a bigger room. Whether Saigon's clubs would exist in their current, louder form without a decade of unpaid work by five people writing directions in verse is impossible to prove. It's not a bad bet, though.

Cover art: Nhạc Gãy Tổng Hợp Số 1, courtesy of Nhạc Gãy.