No Future

• Soundtrack for gallery exhibition of artwork by Vietnamese “Boat People”, painted during their time in refugee resettlement camps in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, and elsewhere.
• Shown in conjunction with live performance: The Odyssey – From Vietnam to America, by Van-Anh Vo, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, September, 2015.
• Commissioned by Van-Anh Vo with funds from the James Irvine Foundation and composed in Italy on a 2015 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship.


I spent 1993-94 in Vietnam on a reconnaissance trip to initiate US-Vietnamese dialog between arts organizations. As musical ambassador I met with composers and musicians across the country to establish connections for future collaborations. While there, with unprecedented access across the country, I made many field recordings wherever I went (subject to censorship upon exit). One was the distinctive soundscape of Old Hanoi streets. When published, this particular track from the album Stilling Time caught the attention of artists such as Meredith Monk and Kronos Quartet, and eventually would lead to my connection with award-winning musician, Van-Anh Vo.

In 2015, she commissioned me to create a soundscape composition that would accompany paintings by Vietnamese refugees to be displayed at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The exhibition was held in conjunction with her stage performance of The Odyssey – From Vietnam to America. This grueling story of escape had never been told in musical terms before. I went back to my original archive of field recordings and mined them for this important project, mindful of maintaining their musical/cultural integrity but also seeking to convey a larger metaphor; the journey of hope. I structured the sound collage not only for visitors passing by briefly but also as an entire 40-minute arc: Bombardment, Escape to the Jungle, Life at Night, Reaching Water, Open Water, Joyful Arrival. Familiar sounds took on new meaning in this context: terrifying F-111 and Mig fighter jet sounds at the beginning return at the end as the hopeful noise of jets lifting survivors from an aircraft carrier to resettlement camps in the Philippines and elsewhere; the 2-stroke boat engine of small fishing vessels was a sound essential to safety (stop and it meant certain death); a child’s lullaby in combination with the late night chimes of Voice of Vietnam Radio are calm but disturbing…

The paintings created by people in the resettlement camps show these feelings clearly and powerfully. Not only are they technically adept but their imagery is often overwhelming and heartbreaking. This edited video shows them as a slideshow and represents just a portion of the collection at the Orange County and Southeast Asian Archive at UCLA.

The term “Boat People” was coined when waves of Vietnamese fled their country by boat after the Vietnam War. Over a ten-year period starting in 1975, between one and two million Vietnamese took to the sea, in makeshift and inadequate crafts, in search of survival and freedom. Hundreds of thousands died at sea. Some floated without food or water for days on end; some resorted to cannibalism in order to survive; a man pushed his near-death brother into the ocean to avoid having him eaten by others. Those who could swim watched as hundreds of hopeless people sank with the boat. The rest endured untold miseries facing storms, starvations, rapes, tortures, and murders by heinous piracy attacks.

This mass exodus and catastrophe became an international crisis. The United Nations convened a special “Meeting on Refugees and Displaced Persons in Southeast Asia” in July 1979. Led by the U.S. Vice President (and Minnesota native), Walter F. Mondale, America and other nations stepped up to address the crisis by accepting more refugees for resettlement and urging asylum countries to accept rather than turning away refugees.

“All journeys—whether by boat, through jungles, across mountains, or by helicopter—have their soundscapes: both external and internal. I see my role in Van-Anh Vo’s Odyssey as one of helping paint an aural and mental landscape that supports and frames so many desperate journeys; a fever dream of memories, nostalgic, terrifying, yet hopeful. One that brings cathartic relief to the life-or-death travels of those forced to seek a new home. And one that resonates with the ever-greater number of displaced populations the world over.” – P.B.