TBA:20
Dao Strom
Instrument/Traveler’s Ode
Instrument is published by Fonograf Editions in collaboration with Antiquated Future Records who is releasing Traveler’s Ode.
DATES
September 26 | 6:30PM PDT Instrument/Traveler’s Ode | TICKETS/WATCH
September 27 | 1:00–4:00 PM Installation and Book/Record Release at PICA Annex
For the safety of attendees and staff, the event will be drop-in/open house style, with staggered entrance, and limited capacity at any one time. Masks/face coverings will be required.
DESCRIPTION
Dao Strom’s Instrument/Traveler’s Ode is an experiment in multimodal poetics—inhabiting a synergistic blend of poetry, music, and visual art: the artist’s three forms of “voice.” Born in Vietnam and leaving the country at the age of two for Northern California, Strom’s life and work speaks to fragmentation—of/within selves, histories, cultures, groups of people, and places—yet within this configuring lies her art’s fluid mastery. Combining color photography, personal biography, and gripping, restless poetry, Instrument represents a unique melding of literature and art. The poems are augmented by an album, Traveler’s Ode, an interwoven series of textured, ethereal song-poems. Atmospheric yet weighted, minimalist yet lush, the album combines voice, electronics, piano, guitars, and field recordings from sources such as rivers, sea, jungle, and birds to create a deeply emotive song-cycle that explores themes of displacement, diaspora, and hauntings. Instrument/Traveler’s Ode is a collaborative book publication/music release from Fonograf Editions and Antiquated Future Records.
For TBA: 20, Dao Strom will give an intimate performance of songs and visuals from Instrument/Traveler’s Ode, to be live-streamed on the 26th of September. The release will also be celebrated in the unique format of an installation of visual poetry and audio fragments (played on cassette decks) in PICA’s Annex, on the 27th of September from 1:00-4:00 PM PDT, where books and cassettes will be available for purchase to mark the project’s Portland release.
More information about Instrument/Traveler’s Ode available from Fonograf Editions and Antiquated Future Records.
ARTIST BIO
Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, and visual—to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song, and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. Although separate, these elements are unified by a shared (under)current that transposes itself through or despite its conduits, and endeavors toward “re-membering” and attempting to synchronize the divided "languages" within the self and concerning the self as placed in the world.
Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (Hanoi: AJAR Press, 2018); a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song-cycle, “East/West” (2015); and two books of fiction. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship. She has received support from RACC, Precipice Fund, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others. Her latest project, Instrument/Traveler’s Ode, is forthcoming from Fonograf Editions and Antiquated Future Records this fall.