Stargazing Records Turned a Vietnamese Pilgrimage Poem Into a House Hit. Damian Lazarus Played It in Ibiza.

On August 28, a two-track EP called Silk & Oscillators appeared on Bandcamp with no press release and no launch party. A month later it had eight plays combined on SoundCloud. Nothing about that says news, except for who put it out: Stargazing Records, a Ho Chi Minh City label whose entire back catalog is built on the strangest, most specific idea in Southeast Asian dance music right now, take a Vietnamese folk song or poem nobody under thirty has necessarily read, and turn it into a house track. One of those tracks already made it further than almost anything else this scene has produced this year: into a Damian Lazarus set, live from Ibiza.

The Track That Got Out

The song is Em Đi Chùa Hương, Vietnamese for "going to Huong Pagoda," after a 1930s poem by Nguyễn Nhược Pháp about a young woman's pilgrimage to the Perfume Pagoda north of Hanoi. Lorence V and Determind built a progressive house track around it, released on Stargazing in April 2025, and it did something small Vietnamese labels almost never manage: it left the country. According to 1001Tracklists, Lazarus dropped a remix of it, by German producer Steffen Sonnenschein, at position 23 of his Sunrise Sunset 018 broadcast on 14 September 2025. The label counts three Buddha-Bar Paris compilation credits total, including a Nora B remix of a Lynk Lee track that landed on Buddha-Bar XXVIII, and says its music has also been played by Eelke Kleijn, Lars Moston and Solarstone.

What the Label Actually Is

Stargazing was founded in Ho Chi Minh City by Florian Ferruzza, who also produces as Determind, on a stated premise: the most interesting music happens when cultures collide. Twenty-five releases in, the roster runs to 25 artists across eight countries, and the catalog reads like a menu of Vietnamese daily life turned into dancefloor material. It belongs on the same shortlist as the region's other independents that Loopliner has profiled before, even though nobody outside Ho Chi Minh City had reason to know its name until Lazarus played it. W&P's Bánh Rán and Bắp Xào are named after fried sesame balls and roasted corn, street snacks rebuilt as deep house cuts. Thanh Hà's Sài Gòn Đẹp Lắm, a Saigon standard, got a Providence remix. None of it is a huge operation: most tracks on the label's SoundCloud sit between two and sixty plays, which is the honest, unglamorous size of most of Southeast Asia's house scene, Buddha-Bar credit or not.

The New One Skips the Folk Angle

Silk & Oscillators is where the newest signing goes a different way. It's credited to Jay Lambert, and unlike the label's Vietnamese-language catalog, both tracks, the title cut and Dream Weaver, are straight, unadorned house records with no folk sample or Vietnamese lyric in sight. That's arguably the more interesting story than the record itself: a label that built its reputation on a very specific fusion is also willing to release music that has nothing to do with it, which suggests Stargazing sees itself as a house label first and a Vietnamese-folk-fusion project second.

Whether that pays off the way the pagoda song did is impossible to know yet; a house EP with single-digit play counts a month after release could go nowhere, or it could be next year's Ibiza pull. Ho Chi Minh City's dance scene has already shown it can travel from the city's own venues, as Loopliner has covered with Bung L0n's Vinahouse parties, to international festival bookings. A small label putting a century-old pilgrimage poem in front of Ibiza's biggest sunset DJ is the same instinct: take something specifically Vietnamese and bet that the rest of the world will dance to it too. So far, it has.

Cover art and Em Đi Chùa Hương artwork: Stargazing Records, from their official Bandcamp release pages.