Chầu văn is a type of Vietnamese music that one can hear during spirit séances, when mediums contact spirits.
The ethnomusicologist, Barley Norton, has written a wonderful book about this type of music.
It’s a very “traditional” type of music, but after sampling a section of a chầu văn song and playing with the samples in a Korg Padkontrol, it quickly became apparent to me that “modern” ways of composing music can easily fit well with the world of chầu văn music.
The video below is by no means a “masterpiece,” but it hopefully at least gives a sense of the ways in which the “traditional” and the “contemporary” can potentially intersect.
This is the song that the above piece plays with.
I’m liking this new burst of multimedia activity. Let’s get some turntablism in there from Vong Co 45’s, spraypaint calligraphy, some b-boys doing flag dances, and emcees laying down Song That Luc Bat rhymes*, and we’ll have ourselves an awesomely weird Viet hop movement.
* I incidentally just heard an example of Vietnamese hiphop where the flow and intonation were eerily identical to American hiphop, but the phonemes were almost toneless Vietnamese … so discombobulating.
I think you have definitely identified the direction to go!!
It might end up looking something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh1VMrXMJO0