Onra on Vinyl: A Guide to the Chinoiseries Trilogy and the Albums That Followed

Onra is Arnaud Bernard, a producer born in Trier, Germany in 1981 to French parents and long based in Paris. His father is of Vietnamese descent, and that detail is not trivia: it is the reason the records below exist at all.

In August 2006 Onra came back from a trip to Vietnam with a stack of roughly thirty records he had bought from a shop he found while riding a motorbike around Saigon. Most of them were in poor condition and almost none of it was music he already knew. He chopped the lot on an MPC and the result, Chinoiseries, became one of the quietly influential beat records of its era: short instrumental sketches, no choruses, no guests, built entirely from sounds nobody else was sampling.

What makes him worth shelf space rather than one lucky record is that he kept pulling the thread. The Chinoiseries idea ran across a decade and three volumes, each from a different set of digging trips, under rules he set himself and refused to break. Then he moved on: Nosthaigia came out of years spent living in Thailand, and his 2026 album After Dark leaves the sampler behind for late-night R&B built from synths and live playing. GOOD TASTE Records carries all five of those albums, which is the entire arc in one place.

Onra - Chinoiseries (2007)

The one that started it. Chinoiseries arrived in 2007 on Favorite Recordings and was out of print for years before All City put it back on wax in a 2023 double LP edition, which is the pressing we stock. Twenty-odd tracks of Vietnamese records flipped into blunt, warm, deliberately unfinished-sounding beats, most of them under two minutes, with titles like Welcome To Viet Nam and Smoking Buddha that tell you exactly how literally he meant it.

Why it's worth purchasing

• The origin point of a trilogy that shaped a whole lane of instrumental hip-hop, so it is the record the other two answer to.
• A sample palette almost nobody else was working with, which is why it still does not sound dated next to its 2007 peers.
• Reissued by All City as a 2xLP after a long spell out of print, so the music gets room to breathe across four sides.

Onra - Chinoiseries Pt. 2 (2011)

Four years later he went back out, this time to Thailand and China, and returned with enough material for a thirty-two track album. Chinoiseries Pt. 2 landed on All City in November 2011 as a double LP, and it is the most expansive entry in the series: the drums hit harder, the loops are more confident, and the sequencing moves like a mixtape rather than a sketchbook.

Why it's worth purchasing

• Thirty-two tracks across two LPs, the longest and most varied volume of the three.
• The sound of a producer who has stopped experimenting and started composing, with noticeably tougher drum programming.
• A different set of source records entirely, so it adds to Pt. 1 instead of repeating it.

Onra - Chinoiseries Pt. 3 (2017)

Onra has called Chinoiseries Pt. 3 the last installment, made because he wanted to have fun with that material one final time. Released on All City in 2017, it was built from records he collected across Asia, in Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines, China and Vietnam, while holding to the same self-imposed rules he used throughout: Chinese music only, samples from records only, MPC only, thirty-two beats, one interlude every eight tracks.

Why it's worth purchasing

• The closing statement of the series, which makes the trilogy complete on your shelf rather than open-ended.
• The widest range of rhythms of the three, drawing on bossa, Indian music, psych rock and soul alongside the hip-hop.
• Strict constraints applied by a producer with a decade more practice, which is a very different record from Pt. 1 made the same way.

Onra - Nosthaigia (2024)

Nosthaigia is the Thailand record, and the title is the joke and the thesis at once. Onra spent years living there, buying Thai music on 7 inch singles from local shops, and he made the album on an MPC1000 in 2017 before coming back to finish it in 2020. Seventeen tracks, most of them very short, which he describes as time capsules written during a difficult stretch. It came out on All City in 2024.

Why it's worth purchasing

• The Chinoiseries method pointed at a new country, so it scratches the same itch with none of the same samples.
• Seventeen tracks of short instrumentals, the format Onra has always been best at.
• A later record made with a decade of restraint, warmer and sadder than the trilogy that precedes it.

Onra - After Dark (2026)

The newest one, and the biggest turn in his catalog. After Dark is self-produced and conceived as the soundtrack to an imagined late-night film, nine tracks including an intro and an outro, running from dusk to dawn. The sampler steps back in favor of analog synths, tight drum programming, understated bass and a little live saxophone, and the mood is modern R&B and soul with late-80s and early-90s bones. There is an After Dark cassette too if you want the pocket version.

Why it's worth purchasing

• The clearest proof he is a producer and not just a digger, with the beats built rather than found.
• A short, sequenced, single-sitting album, which makes it the easiest Onra record to hand to someone new.
• Available on LP and on cassette, so it suits either a turntable or a tape deck.

If You Like Onra

• Nujabes: the other great sample-based romantic of the 2000s, working from jazz instead of Asian 45s. Start with our Nujabes guide.
• Madlib: the deepest crate in the game and the model for the loop-as-song approach, covered in our Madlib guide.
• J Dilla: Donuts is the north star for every short, unresolved, two-minute beat on a record like Chinoiseries. See our J Dilla guide.
• Knxwledge: short, blown-out, hand-made loops stacked into full albums, the American cousin of what Onra does with a sampler.
• NxWorries: Knxwledge with Anderson .Paak singing over the top, which is the closest thing on the shelf to After Dark's late-night soul.

Where to Start

If you want the record that matters most, take Chinoiseries. If you want the best single listen, take After Dark. If you came for the beats and want the fullest version of them, Pt. 2 is the one. Carrying the complete album run is the point here: you can work through the whole catalog in order without hunting elsewhere, and the trilogy in particular rewards hearing it in sequence.

For the wider context, our Essential 2000s Hip-Hop starter's guide covers the decade Chinoiseries came out of, and our Fat Jon guide follows another producer who built a catalog out of soft-focus instrumentals. From there, dig into the full hip-hop collection for more producer records, or the R&B collection if After Dark is the direction you want to follow. And to browse everything by this artist in one place, here is the full Onra collection at GOOD TASTE Records.