Dao Strom

EAST/WEST

a 2-EP song-cycle

(companion piece to We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, a hybrid-form memoir)

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These songs cross countries and cultures. They are sung from one shore to the other, messages sent east to west and back west to east. The narrator of these songs is a lone woman traveler, a traveler who has been traveling a long while now. She travels through memory as well as through history. On the road behind her unwind ribbons of forgetting: a lost country, forgotten fathers, forgotten poetry, reverberations of past wars. She has been a child of circumstance, a witness. The woman sees history and she questions it, sometimes laments it, asks why we do not sing of it. She sings to break the silence - and in hopes the messages she has harbored out of distant places might now be heard in the new places she passes through.

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"Crossing mediums, genres and historical mythology, The Sea and The Mother is an incarnation of Dao Strom’s perpetual creative impulse. In her latest EP, We Were Meant to Be a Gentle People, emotive vocal melodies and ambient frequencies are balanced with a folk sensibility that carries a melancholic undertone in its subtleties. Accompanied by a compilation of poetry, artwork and writings on Vietnam, the release flows evenly through six songs that feel dynamic, meditative and honest in their presentation. Listening to the EP is a unique experience and, above all, is representative of an artistic drive that defies traditional categorization." --- The Deli Magazine

“The spacious, haunting quality of the music and Dao’s vocals blend in a seamless artistic work. Music doesn’t have to bear a hook, a trick or slap you in the face with irony and wit; it simply has to move you. And Dao Strom will move you from East to West and back again with this lovely and powerful work.” --- Indie-Music.com

ABOUT THE MAKING

I was living in a little house surrounded by trees, on the side of a hill above the Gastineau Channel in Juneau, Alaska, when I first began writing songs, in 2008, about Vietnam. Maybe it was the long winter nights, or maybe it was the three-decades or so worth of incubation time my own thoughts and emotions had already had about my origins, that made the first song, “Origin Tale,” emerge as a 9-minute lyric-heavy experience, with no repeated choruses, challenging all sensible concepts of song structure I’d thus far known. Up until that point, I’d been writing fairly traditional “folk” songs (I thought), but these new songs seemed to be asking for more space, more atmosphere. It would take the next 5-7 years of exploring, experimenting, recording, collaborating, learning and growing, releasing some songs and putting others aside, before the whole project finally cohered: two sets of songs, roaming two “geographies” both mythic and real: East, West. Within that time, I moved from Alaska to Oregon, with detours back to Texas where I’d lived before Alaska. In Portland, Oregon, I found my way to Dylan Magierek at Type Foundry Studio, who played an integral part in helping me get these songs into the light. One of the most valuable things any music collaborator has ever done for me: he lent me a good quality microphone and encouraged me to explore recording vocals on my own at home. I found a new voice—the voice these songs needed—in that part of the process, and a little more confidence in my own musical vision. The last song I wrote for the album was “On an Open Field,” an instrumental guitar piece I added vocal sound bites to (snatched from a 1966 broadcast of Pete Seeger on Rainbow Quest talking with a legendary Vietnamese folk singer of that era, Pham Duy). For me, the time spent wrestling with these songs, and with the material in the memoir that accompanies the album, is testament to the untellability—ultimately—of whatever it means to try to write about “Vietnam”— which is on one hand just the name of a place, but also carries many other connotations and repercussions. I am just one more voice in the mix, struggling to express something about a history I know only via memory, absence, and aftermath. 

Tracks List:

EAST EP

1. Cataclysm

2. Au Co’s Tears (for the Rain)

3. Ode to Mother(land)

4. Lullaby of the Artillery Fire

5. Origin Tale

6. <Break the Silence>

WEST EP

1. On an Open Field

2. Hell’s Gate

3. Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child

4. Motherbear

5. Two Rivers

Album Credits:

Dao Strom - vocals, harmonies, acoustic and electric guitars, piano, keys, bells
Nial Nutter - electric guitar on tracks 1, 3, 5 (East) and tracks 9, 10 (West); vocals on track 9 (West)
Amanda Lawrence - viola, violin on tracks 4, 5 (East)
Zane Carter Cook - drums on track 3 (East), track 10 (West)
William Joersz - bass on tracks 10, 11 (West)
Lincoln Meeker - drums on track 11 (West)
Dylan Magierek - cymbals on track 11 (West)
Hershel Yatovitz - electric guitar, synth strings, ambience, initial recording on track 11 (West)
Darwin Smith - percussion, bass, initial recording on track 8 (West)
Celia Straub, Cassandra Winney - choral voices on track 5 (East)

Songs recorded at Type Foundry Studio by Dylan Magierek & some tracks at home by Dao Strom

Mixing: Dylan Magierek / Mix Foundry Studio
Mastering: Timothy Stollenwerk / Stereophonic Mastering

All songs written by Dao Strom except 'Hell's Gate' written by Dao Strom and Darwin Smith
& 'Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child' (traditional)

East EP cover artwork by Christine Nguyen
West EP cover photography by Kyle Macdonald

This project received funding from a Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) Project Grant in 2014 & an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 2013.