NotYuTing Turned Vietnam's Reunification Into a Trance Record, From a Saigon Hip-Hop Club

Old apartment blocks slide past a train window, the kind with laundry strung across every balcony and moss climbing the stairwells. Street vendors fold noodles into paper cones on a corner that has looked the same for sixty years. Then the frame cuts to Ho Chi Minh City's new metro, gliding under streets those apartment blocks have watched the whole time, and a synth line comes in that would not sound out of place on a 1990s trance record. Underneath it: a Vietnamese folk instrument that nobody at a Berlin afterhours would recognise, and that most grandmothers in District 5 would name in a second.

That is the music video for "Mo Troi" (Mơ Trời, roughly "sky dream"), the single NotYuTing put up as a free download on SoundCloud on February 5. It landed about ten months after Ho Chi Minh City shut down Le Duan Street for the 50th anniversary of Reunification Day, the parade marking the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Most anniversary tributes are speeches and marching bands. Hers is a trance record with a folk instrument buried in it, uploaded quietly, and picked up so far by exactly the size of audience you would expect for underground electronic music in Vietnam: a few hundred plays, four dozen likes, a handful of comments. Nobody outside the scene has really noticed. That does not make it a small achievement.

A Hip-Hop Club That Became a Record Label

NotYuTing, real name Stephanie Han, is Vietnamese-Taiwanese, born and raised in Saigon, and genre-fluid in a way that reads like a chaotic playlist until you actually hear her play: trance, techno, ghettotech, house, Miami bass, baile funk, breakbeat, whatever the room needs. She also runs her own tattoo label, Moth Juiice, on the side, because apparently one creative practice was not enough.

Her music lives on Piu Piu Records, which is the label arm of Piu Piu, a three-floor club at 97 Hai Ba Trung in District 1 that has billed itself as the home of hip-hop in Saigon since 2016. Lee Lam, a French-Moroccan-Vietnamese entrepreneur who spent a decade in Shanghai's music and advertising scene before relocating, opened the club with partners Thibault, Binh, Bobby and Adam, then launched the label about two months later. The pitch was blunt: "labels don't make money anymore," so Piu Piu pairs artists with brand sponsorships through a marketing partner instead of chasing streaming royalties. It has helped push rapper Suboi, SoundCloud artist Kimmese, collective 95G and producers Nodey and Killason past the club's own walls. NotYuTing is the newest name to run through that pipeline, and the first to take it toward trance.

Vina House, Vina Tech, and Now Trance

The clearest snapshot of where NotYuTing sits in Vietnam's electronic scene right now is a DJ set she recorded for Let Him Cook, a Vietnamese mix series built around cooking puns and genuinely strong selections. Her episode is billed as "Vina House, Vina Tech, Trance," and it is as much a flex as a genre list: vinahouse, the pitched-up, kick-heavy sound that soundtracks half of Vietnam's street-side bars, sitting next to trance and tech house without either side sounding like a compromise. Vinahouse has had a big year on this site already; it is the same sound mess. carried onto the main stage at Tomorrowland this summer, a genre that outsiders used to write off as tacky karaoke-bar filler and that Vietnamese producers are now exporting on their own terms.

What "Mo Troi" adds to that mix is the folk layer, and the timing. NotYuTing is not the first Vietnamese producer to turn a piece of family or national history into a dance record this year; Maggie Tra did something similar in Hanoi, building a house record around her mother's death with the city still audible in it. Where Tra's record is private grief turned into rhythm, NotYuTing's is public memory: a national anniversary nobody asked a trance producer to comment on, filtered through a genre most of the parade's organisers have probably never heard.

Small Scene, Real Stakes

Here is the part that is easy to skip over: Saigon's underground dance scene is still small enough that a genuinely good, genuinely original record can sit on SoundCloud for months with barely any plays. Piu Piu itself started as a hip-hop room, not a house or techno one, and the club still spends most weeknights on open mics, pool tables and a Ladies Night rather than anything resembling a proper Berlin-style dancefloor. Hanoi's own club scene has grown a reputation as the country's more reliable house and techno hub in the years since, which makes what is happening in Saigon, on a much smaller stage, more interesting rather than less: a hip-hop club's label putting out a trance record about national memory is not the obvious move, and nobody at Piu Piu seems to have made it because it was safe.

There is no tour announced, no festival slot lined up, nothing to sell a ticket for. What there is: a producer who learned to DJ everything from ghettotech to gabber inside one club, a label built to get Asian underground artists paid rather than just streamed, and a three-and-a-half-minute record that treats fifty years of Vietnamese history as material worth dancing to. That is worth more attention than a few hundred SoundCloud plays.

Cover photo: NotYuTing, via a promotional flyer for her show at SAGA, Da Nang.