Đại Lâm Linh

Some Vietnamese locals call the artists on this collaborative album "the three monsters", supposedly because they bring a kind of music no one expected, a music full of moaning, screaming, crying, music from the gutter of the soul. Music in the avant-garde not because the artists are looking to expand the boundaries of music or discover new forms of artistic expression but rather as an act of resistance against the strictures of a society that says, at the governmental level, music should sound only a certain way and be only about certain topics. Ngọc Đại, however, is not merely all talk and no trousers. He had to pay a substantial fine when he published music that was not pre-approved by the state. And performances of music on this album caused an earthquake of questions and dialogue (some curiosity, some condemnation) throughout Vietnam.