REDUX
ABOUT THE ALBUM:
Redux, an ambient-folk album from Portland, Oregon musician, poet, and multimedia artist Dao Strom, is a collection of nine resurrected pieces. Reimagining songs she initially composed as a member of the Austin, Texas alt-country and singer-songwriter scenes of the early 2000s, Strom reworks these lost songs into ambient-folk mini-epics—part grounded and earthly, part ethereal and otherworldly. Drawing on an intimate yet spacious palette of folk, ambient, and experimental textures, woven through with a poetics of vulnerability and quiet emotion, Redux explores song as gently reverberant fields of layered vocals over finger-picked guitars with touches of electronics and sampling. Strom’s musical journey initially began in a roots and acoustic vein, simultaneously with her career as a fiction writer. In the years since, she has moved from Austin, Texas to Juneau, Alaska to Portland, Oregon; her work too has expanded across genres into more experimental formats of poetry, music, and multidisciplinary art. In returning to these earlier songs, Strom reclaims and revives them, exploring her relationships to time, voice, and the continuances of emotion and memory. The word redux means “brought back; revived”; a sense of something restored—earlier renditions of some of the Redux songs were recorded with Austin-based collaborators and producers; some songs were written in that time period but never recorded. Produced, performed, recorded by Strom alone in her home studio, Redux is a return and reemergence of the artist to her own most personal, intuitive structures and atmospheres of voice, sound, and song. Released on cassette by Antiquated Future Records in 2022, and reissued on vinyl in 2026 by Disasters By Choice.
. . .
“...a record that is as simple as it is impeccable: songs of such beguiling beauty that they might make one blush. While maintaining a roots-oriented, acoustic sensibility, Dao Strom’s fingerpicking frequently takes on ambient hues; yet, one immediately senses that beneath the ethereal, emotional veil of her songs lies a poetic narrative... indeed, every track is a little gem—a handful of psych-ambient-folk ballads..." —Blow Up Magazine (Apr, 2026)
"Hauntingly beautiful." —Bandcamp New and Notable
“Dao Strom is a Vietnamese-American polymath… The sounds are in an avant dream pop vein, with gentle vocals, acoustic guitar and electronics all burbling along like a Laurel Canyon brook filled with water of the universal subconscious.” —The Wire
"So many artists try to create what Dao Strom has here, but few have captured the heart like this... As far as sparse folk music in 2022…there will have to be something truly special to transcend the grace of Dao Strom’s Redux." —Sun 13
REDUx - notes:
§ This is an album of old songs revisited. And so they contain emotional seeds, ebbs and flows, images, memories, questions, and wrestlings, wending through the past 10-18 years of my life. They are love songs and not-love songs, nods to memory, ancestry, the land, ghosts, nature, to the warble-mysteries of my own spirit and heart. They are songs that arose out of certain moments in time but, like smoke from a fire, do not retain the shape of what initially sparked them. They are longings and connections that could not be held except as transmuted into song; songs to be sung, songs I have sung, might always sing.
§ Some of these songs were recorded on earlier albums, with players who were both my friends and collaborators during a time when I played music in another state, another way of being, years ago. While I still cherish the music made in that period with those friends, the transition away from that milieu held, also, its bittersweetnesses, as well as, for me, its necessity. I wrote my songs from a place of honesty in those times, yet in re-recording discovered in them even truer timbres. As if the songs had been waiting for me all this time, to come back to them, to reclaim something left undone; still hidden; left othered. The word redux means “brought back; revived”; a sense of something restored. It has taken me this many years to truly hear—to allow—my own music. Why it took this long, what it is that was so hard to shake, what needed to erode or clarify or evolve within myself, to lighten the obstacle, will be, I hope, communicated through the songs themselves now. These songs have been my teachers. They have also been places of my own making and discoveries and recoveries. Maps to territories esoteric and amorphous; containers of weathers and waters.
§ These re-recordings were made in my home from 2020-2021. They are made mostly of voice and guitar. The album opens and closes with acknowledgments of water. The opening song is one seeded almost 20 years ago, one summer in a house facing the sea on the southern coast of Oregon, my first alighting to the Pacific Northwest. The water sounds near the end of the album are drawn from the meeting point of two rivers that mark a confluence in the city where I now live. Like much of my writing, these songs are of a water-nature. They are moon-songs, interior reflections, Piscean-moon articulations of things difficult to articulate. —ds, 12/2021
. . .
§ An album of old songs revisited, visited, and re-released, again. By now, I am learning that these songs abide by their own scale of time, by their own slow measure, or their own arrhythmia of recurrence and repetition and variations. These songs are echoes of themselves, or of past and possible selves. In truth, I don’t fully know what these songs are about anymore or why they linger and repeat, but am still following where they may lead. Sometimes I crawl back inside of the song to re-member. /// —ds, 4/20/2026
TRACKs LIST:
1. Day That We Met
2. Only Angel
3. Caller of Spirit
4. Jesus/Darkness
5. Everything That Blooms Wrecks Me
6. Inside
7. Ancestors
8. Motherbear
9. Waking
10. Innocent (bonus track, digital)
credits
§ all songs written, performed, recorded, produced, initial mixing by Dao Strom
§ mixed and mastered by Jason Powers
vinyl release 20 April 2026: https://disastersbychoice.com/dao-strom-redux/
cassette release 2 March 2022: https://antiquatedfuture.bandcamp.com/album/redux
digital available at: daostrom.bandcamp.com
