Tender Revolutions by Dao Strom
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 1-4) and accompanying a series of hybrid-genre literary chapbooks (Yellow Songs 1-4). Released in collaboration with The 3rd Thing, an interdisciplinary publisher in Olympia.
Tracklist
Videos
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
ARTIST STATEMENT
The word tender is born of a gesture, an image, of something being stretched (the root ten- meaning “to stretch”). A thinning, an invocation of vulnerability, thus occurs with this action of stretching—to become tender, to tend toward in order to make contact with (an)other, requires stretching oneself; a thinning of the fabric or barrier between, occurs. What is a revolution that leads with this pretext of thinning—of allowing a softening, even a porousness, of that which holds us apart? And what does it mean to re-volve? To turn back (re-) again and again, to roll (volvere), in the cyclical way of celestial bodies or seasons, following a larger logic of changes as recurrent, trusting that this movement of a continual turning and turning (rolling back) will eventually arrive us also at a turning over: a (r)evolving of the old into a possible new. [R]evolution as ongoing, inevitable, as both instigating and returning.
But/and: a tender is also a boat—a smaller vessel that can access waters the larger boat is too big for; a tender is needed, for instance, to carry passengers from the larger boat to shore, to ferry objects between two larger vessels. Smallness is needed to access the spaces in-between, those shallower waters and narrower channels, to navigate aspects not visible until one gets closer in. Tender is, too, a form of currency—exchange: value of one good validated by another. Does this mean to tender is to navigate certain transactions from the level of the water?
Tender is our form of currency
The hands of the tenders also tender
(and sometimes raw)
We could follow the river
. . .
These songs are, for me, inward and outward (ex)tendings across boundaries of self, diaspora, modalities of voice, across fractures and refractions. They are attempts at honoring small points and lines of connectivity I’ve been entangling in, for over a decade now, namely through creative collaborations and friendships with other
Vietnamese women writers and artists. The initial piano notes for the “tender variations” song-poems came to me in a dream during a collective residency with She Who Has No Master(s) in the coastal mountains of California; fragments from a poem exchange with the writer lê thị diễm thúy had attached to a melody I sang to myself for years, before the fragments found their way into the coda verse of “owe/own,” one of the songs on this album. It began to occur to me somewhere amid these relationships that the tangles of tendernesses in our encounters—tender as negotiation as well as softnesses—was a kind of revolution that could be, truly, most revolutionary. That, in enacting poetry and art as social, emotional, interpersonal, we are constructing a new kind of resource and space, one connecting us to us and to ourselves, vitally, ineffably, in small ways that might serve to counter some of our larger, geopolitically-ingrained isolations and divisions. These are also “diaspora songs” and “yellow songs,” or “nhạc vàng,” in which I seek to form homes, however formless, for our emotional atmospheres of displacement, exilic longing, inherited sorrows, memory, post-memory, and other echoes we carry.
—Dao Strom
Released in collaboration with Beacon Sound and The 3rd Thing.
the3rdthing.press/product/tender-revolutions-yellow-songs/
beaconsound.bandcamp.com/album/tender-revolutions
LPs distributed by The Business (US), Forced Exposure (US/World), Morr (EU), Cargo (UK), The Orchard (Digital)
Books distributed by Asterism (US/World)
License
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