
Strom, Dao: Instrument / Traveler's Ode
Fonograf Editions / Antiquated Future, paperback with cassette Publication Date: November 3, 2020 Publisher Marketing: 175 pages long, Dao Strom's INSTRUMENT 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, of ambient and folk-tinged songs featuring ethereal assemblages of sung-poetry, vocal layering, spare guitar and piano, and field sounds from sources such as rivers, sea, jungle, birds. Traveler's Ode is a collaborative release between Fonograf Ed. and