Instrument - Dao Strom
Dao Strom’s Instrument continues the author’s virtuosic exploration of identity, selfhood and refusal–of stasis, of forgetting, of falsity. The book furthers creative and historical material Strom first explored in her books You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else and We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People while simultaneously exploring new directions, modes and fragments.
The companion album to Instrument, Traveler’s Ode is an interwoven series of textured, ethereal song-poems. Atmospheric yet weighted, minimalist yet lush, the album combines voice, electronics, piano, guitars, and field recordings to create a deeply emotive song-cycle that explores haunting themes of displacement and diaspora. Echoing the work of artists like Tara Jane O’Neil, Grouper, Black Belt Eagle Scout, and Tiny Vipers, Traveler’s Ode is at the same time entirely itself. As a cassette tape, the album is available for purchase below.
Traveler’s Ode can also be found on Bandcamp, Spotify and other online streaming platforms.
Publication of this project was made possible by a Fred W. Fields Fund grant from the Oregon Community Foundation (OCF). Fonograf Ed. gratefully acknowledges OCF for their help and support.
About Dao Strom
Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, 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.
Strom is the author of a bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, (Hanoi: AJAR, 2018), a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song-cycle, East/West, 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.