Description
About the Project
Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Dao Strom’s Tender Revolutions / Yellow Songs vibrates with the ramifications and ripples of Empire. A hybrid project comprised of writings, music, and visual ephemera, the Tender Revolutions album and each of the four Yellow Songs books reckon with the intimate consequences of the colonial project, reconfiguring them into complex and lucid, literal and figurative songs of selfhood. Embodied, critical, wholehearted, collective, personal, genre-defying—Tender Revolutions / Yellow Songs renders the brute force of history with tender precision.
Expansive and ambitious, Tender Revolutions is the latest from Vietnam-born, Portland-based multimedia artist Dao Strom. A fluid album, existing between genres—part ambient folk, part sound collage, part spoken word, part post rock—it blurs the line between the work of an experimental composer and the work of an accomplished singer-songwriter. Instruments slip in and out (guitar, piano, synthesizer, strings, drums, percussion) amid field recordings and samples, all anchored by Strom’s singular voice. The songs of Tender Revolutions reflect on and embody themes of “yellow subjectivities”—the Asian body as perceived; the Asian feminine body as reflection/catalyst/consort—offering their own forms of response to troubling representations of Asian women in popular media in the West. A “re-voicing” of the problematic hit song “China Girl” by David Bowie re-inhabits this song from a discomfiting silence at its center, and serves as a fulcrum point in the album’s sequencing. Other songs utilize voice as both texture and lyric-driven telling to deepen angles of interiority and thematics of voice/silence.
While Tender Revolutions stands alone as its own whole, it also exists as part of a larger multifaceted project, drawing from a four-part song-cycle (Nhạc Vàng I-IV) and accompanying a series of hybrid-genre literary books, Yellow Songs 1-4 (see below). This project is a joint release of The 3rd Thing Press, Antiquated Future Records, and Beacon Sound. Tender Revolutions is available here only on vinyl. For a digital version, visit either of our publishing partners’ Bandcamp sites: Antiquated Future Records, and Beacon Sound.
Track listing:
- 01. tender variation i: [what is tender?]
- 02. tender variation ii: [when was the first time u felt loved?]
- 03. tender variation iii: [associations of yellow]
- 04. tender variation iv: [love|object|treason]
- 05. China Girl
- 06. take
- 07. owe/own
- 08. how many wars
- 09. [hailing tender]
Album Credits: Vocals, guitars, piano/keys, synths, samples: Dao Strom “tender variations” poetry voices: She Who Has No Master(s) On ‘tender variation ii’ & ‘tender variation iv’: Vietnamese voiced by Vi Khi Nao; French voiced by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud; English voiced by Dao Strom Additional violin on ‘tender variation iv’: Lily Hoang Drums & percussion on ‘owe/own’ & ‘how many wars’: Daniel Hunt Recording of drums: Barry Brusseau Mixing & mastering: Jason Powers Songs written, recorded, produced by Dao Strom Except “China Girl” written by David Bowie & Iggy Pop Coda verse in ‘owe/own’ (“those places in those fields”) from a poem by lê thị diễm thúy Cover art initial photography: Kyle Macdonald Cover art photographic design: Dao Strom Cover design: Studio Bernhardt
About the Books
The four books of Yellow Songs are available individually or as a 4-book set with limited edition dust jacket.
- Yellow Songs 1: Voiced-Voiceless unearths, unwinds, un-bodies the violence of stigma, reclaiming the ventriloquized voice of David Bowie’s “China Girl” through a lyric-critical essaying (assaying) of cultural tropes, racialized and gendered power plays, and memory.
- Yellow Songs 2: We [/] Breathe is a polyvocal, poetic collaboration with the She Who Has No Master(s) collective. Exploring embodiments of harmony, dissonance, resonance, light, shadow, and yellow, this collection reclaims the Asian feminine figure from Western representations and narratives, giving shape and color to utterance and song, giving voice to lived experiences of the Vietnamese diaspora.
- Yellow Songs 3: Postwar Tablefruit folds words, metaphor, memory and the body into a kaleidoscopic meditation on moments of unresolvable dissonance. “Microaggressions” are synthesized into darkly suggestive mandala-like images and layered poems that confound resolution or any singular reading.
- Yellow Songs 4: Motherwound is a book-length poem that turns personal and national myths over and over like stones at the edge of the sea, tumbling I, you, and she together in the ebb and flood of generations and family relationships.
- Nhạc Vàng I-IV Each of the four Yellow Songs books was conceived in parallel with one of four Nhạc Vàng EPs, from which songs were culled to create the Tender Revolutions LP and which are represented in the “Nhạc Vàng” (translated as “yellow song”) section of each book. Here is “tender variation ii: [when was the first time u felt loved]” from Nhạc Vàng II. Access to the Nhạc Vàng EPs is made available with the books.
Praise for Yellow Songs
Dao Strom’s multitudes defy the fixed self just as they defy categorical forms of expression. This beautifully expansive work happens in and out of song, image, word, and language. Trans-oceanic echoes, aching melodies, uncanny recognitions, hybrid materialities: Strom makes embodied, radiant life move in uncapturable waves of being. ~ John Melillo, author of The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk
The four books of Dao Strom’s Yellow Songs and the album Tender Revolutions achieve a remarkable feat: each poem, essay, collage, and song is artfully made and performed, and at the same time they add up to far more. They contain exceptional beauty and rigorous critique, held together. At the heart of the project is Strom’s reframing of the song “China Girl” in both music and text. Here, she places the song’s historical contexts front and center, and then transforms them into something altogether different: eloquent, poetic, and deeply personal. Together, these books and recordings are a model for a new kind of interdisciplinary work that explores difficult and important subjects in multifaceted and complementary ways. ~ Brian Harnetty, author of Noisy Memory
Yellow Songs is more than a book: it’s a reclamation. It’s a gold mine of poetry, essay, collage, photography, and music. Featuring solo work and collaborations with the diasporic Vietnamese collective She Who Has No Master(s), this project interlaces personal and collective memory. It rebukes racist pop culture and recenters Asian femme voice/s. Here voice is aural, visual, cinematic, historical, tactile, and indelible. By here, I mean her. Dao Strom is a genius! This work is fierce, vulnerable, candid, and surprising. Read, regard, listen, and marvel! ~ Gabrielle Civil, author of the déjà vu and In & Out of Place
Yellow Songs is a breathtakingly layered, hybrid offering by Dao Strom—four neatly contained volumes and an LP that defy their containers, echoing and folding into one another across genres. It’s a rich, overflowing experience—rippling, atmospheric, and alive with sonic and textual interplay. Voice(s) move through individual and collective embodiment, body unfolding through song, song through memory, memory opening into & out of landscapes of yearning and rupture. Photographs, fragments, and sonic threads weave a kaleidoscopic & ever-shifting collage of self/selves, grappling with the questions that bloom endlessly from the ache of exile, origin, identity, desire, and the vast, quiet centers of the interior world: realms of high imagination and the deep shores of history, language, and belonging. A work of postwar inheritance, Yellow Songs is as fierce in its refusals as it is in its tenderness—an “abyssal, untethered, untethering” masterpiece unlike anything else I’ve experienced. ~ Stephanie Adams-Santos, author of Dream of Xibalba
About the Author
Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of the poetry collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), winner of the 2022 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion piece, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press, 2018); a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West (2015); and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (Counterpoint Press, 2019, 2006) and Grass Roof, Tin Roof (Mariner Books, 2003). Her works also include interdisciplinary music/poetry performance and visual-poetry installations. She received a 2020 Oregon Literary Arts Career Fellowship and a 2016 Creative Capital Artist Award. Her work has received support also from the Oregon Community Foundation/Creative Heights Grant, Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC), Precipice Fund/Warhol Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, and others. Strom is a founding member of two collaborative art projects: She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of women writers of the Vietnamese diaspora; and De-Canon, a literary + social art + publishing project highlighting books and works by writers of color. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches with Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing.
