Dao Strom discusses her new multi-disciplinary project Instrument/Traveler’s Ode with fellow poet, musician, teacher, composer, and filmmaker Alicia Jo Rabins.
Learn more at: https://literary-arts.org/event/pbf-strom-rabins/
ADVANCE PORTLAND BOOK FESTIVAL PASSES AVAILABLE NOW. THIS EVENT IS LIVE, IN PERSON. TO PARTICIPATE, YOU MUST ATTEND IN PERSON; IN-PERSON EVENTS WILL NOT BE BROADCAST VIRTUALLY.
Please note: All attendees to the in-person Festival must show proof of vaccination, or a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours of the event date to attend. Mask must be worn in accordance with local mandates. Read more here.
ABOUT INSTRUMENT
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 to create a deeply emotive song-cycle that explores themes of displacement, diaspora, and hauntings.
“Both expansive and nano, Dao Strom’s Instrument is a type of reverse-engineered instrument in itself, capable of spotifying the reader’s and listener’s soul with the kind of tender, compassionate voyage that a sightseeing body with one foot in one country and the other dipped in the postmodern penmanship of memory could possibly roam.” —Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish in Exile
ORDER INSTRUMENT: ANNIE BLOOM’S | BROADWAY | POWELL’S
ORDER INSTRUMENT + TRAVELER’S ODE: FONOGRAF EDITIONS | ANTIQUATED FUTURE RECORDS