For the second music video of our series, Hanoi-based, self-taught musician Trần Uy Đức paired up with multidisciplinary artist Rosanna Graf to make a video clip from four tracks off “s / t compilation”, a cassette Trần Uy Đức made on the label and platform dispari, which is founded by music curator and DJ Nguyễn Phương-Đan.

Đức describes his process and the meaning behind the tracks: “During the beginning of my time at university, my old computer broke, and I bought a personal laptop for the first time. With some first songs written down in this laptop, I was imagining an album with a vision covered in the yellowness of sunlight. Yellow symbolizes newness and nostalgia for me. This color sits between home and dream. At the time, I wanted to make lots of pop songs. With that desire in mind, all my music outputs were oriented to this kind of color.

And this compilation came about at a time when I felt a great closure towards my boyhood, as well as a sorry feeling to have left it behind. And Phương-Đan with all his relatability of a person who has the same Viet blood, and his special artistic mission, has brought all my laptop-made demos (about 30) into a path of 19 songs with 2 chapters which I’m totally satisfied with from the first try. He rerouted my scattered electronic storytellings into an analogue expression of tapes which also brought a timewarp to this already well described self-concept.”

Rosanna Graf’s artistic practice includes videos, performances, and installations often structured around experimental texts. In extensive research, she examines various materials — historical, mythological, ethnological, or pop-cultural — for iconographic impulses and cross-connections and then lets them intertwine mutually. In that process, collective societal projections emerge, which Graf translates into her own words and images, materializing them in her eccentric protagonists. The seductive, the beautiful, and the charming in these characters transport the viewer into a magical, abysmal fantasy world that creates tension between humor and discomfort.

“My artistic approach was strongly orientated towards the musical material. The thread, the logic follows the music. Duc's music is intimate, playful, and experimental, almost naïve. I let myself be guided entirely by Đức music without knowing the outcome. It made me think back to when I had just started making art. I was challenged to 'untrain' my gaze and eliminate conventions and image hierarchies. I wanted to embrace the bold, fresh, curious, unbiased attitude I could sense in the sound. The concept was to apply this openness and playfulness that I felt in the music to the way I collected and worked with the footage. I quickly realized that a mobile phone camera, with its ability to capture intimate aspects, best transferred the music's essence. The diversity and volatility in Duc's music set out for me a variety of intimate encounters and observations, moments captured by a subjective camera that should leave the viewer guessing about the person behind the camera. Duc's music doesn't 'follow the rules.' It opens the door to his wondrous world. In the video, surreal moments break through the authenticity and open up the subjective space. With Phương-Đan I carefully selected four tracks from Duc's release: Tribalica 11, First, And More, and Clean... With their unique blend of intimacy, playfulness, and experimentation, these tracks were the foundation for the visual narrative I aimed to create.

The video begins with footage I shot while traveling in Vietnam in 2018. The atmospheric track by Duc initially suggests the authenticity of the film footage and the combination of music and image, but this is soon broken. The material after that consists of private recordings recorded in Berlin, Tenerife, Prague, Bavaria, and Cologne over the last few months. In addition to the existing 'personal found footage,' I recorded new footage, some of which I staged. For the roller dance scenes, I worked with Bartholomäus Zientek, a member of the illustrious Berlin roller skate scene. For the final part of the video, I commissioned my long-term collaborator, Paulina Nolte, to shoot additional footage traveling from New York City to Brighton Beach according to my specifications. I intentionally wanted the audience to lose orientation during the video, as I lost my orientation when listening to Duc's music. I wanted them to feel the thrill of getting lost, like entering the rabbit hole, not knowing where you will get out next, but constantly feeling intrigued by the journey. Elements reappear here and there: the spoon and fork as human-made objects, stand-ins for our basic human needs, the aspect of nature, and animals as mirrors for our human behaviors.”

The label Trần Uy Đức released on is Hamburg-based dispari. Founder Nguyễn Phương-Đan says that “in addition to its activity as a classic record label, dispari serves as a framework for very different formats, ideas and fantasies. I enjoy working closely with the artists and am often involved in the conceptual development, the musical production process itself and also in the design of the releases. A central concern is to initiate collaboration between artists not only from the same but also different disciplines as well as to bring people together in various places. Among other things, this has resulted in group exhibitions or events dealing with sound and music at the interface with the visual arts at institutions such as Kunsthalle Münster, Kunstverein München or Manzi Exhibition Space in Hanoi. At this year's Meakusma Festival dispari will present a very first collaborative work of artists Angela Anzi and Tintin Patrone, which oscillates somewhere between improvisation, performance and sound installation. I really enjoy working like that!”

Credits
dispari is a Hamburg-based label and platform for all kinds of auditive publications, collaborations and performances at various places, which was founded by music curator and DJ Nguyễn Phương-Đan in 2021.
Directed, filmed and edited by Rosanna Graf.
Filmed in Vietnam, Berlin, NYC, Tenerife, Prague, Bavaria and Cologne.
Additional video footage and performance by Paulina Nolte.
Roller skate dancer: Bartholomäus Zientek.

All tracks composed, arranged and produced by Trần Uy Đức.
Taken from dispari004.
Compiled by Nguyễn Phương-Đan. Mastered by Kris Jakob.
©&℗2023 dispari. All rights reserved.