Multidisciplinary poet, musician, and multimedia artist Dao Strom’s Creative Capital project, Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs, premiering at the Time-Based Art Festival presented by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, is a hybrid project comprised of writings, music, and visual ephemera that tend to “yellow subjectivities” and enact small spaces of connectivity across boundaries of diaspora and identity. 

The project’s initiating structure is a series of four chapbooks, Yellow Songs 1-4, paralleled by four song sequences, Nhạc Vàng 1-4, composed and designed by Strom, with some components made in collaboration with others. Tender Revolutions is an LP-length album culling songs from the four-part song-cycle. For its premiere at TBA:25, Strom presents an installation of multimodal poetry works in PICA’s Annex, activated by two performances featuring a unique blend of poetry and music in collaboration with She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of Vietnamese women writers and artists of whom Dao is a founding member, and a special set of “diaspora songs” with accompaniment by Fear No Music. 

Drawing upon her experience as a Vietnamese refugee-immigrant growing up in the 1980s, Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs examines the artist’s own relationships to music, media, image, voice, and silence to create a multifaceted, mytho-poetic experience that embodies the un-containability, mutability, deep mystery and fractures of the hybrid self. 

Album (on vinyl, digital) and books will be available at TBA:25 and via the publisher and label websites. The project as a whole is a joint release by Pacific Northwest-based indie record labels, Beacon Sound and Antiquated Future Records, and experimental small press, The 3rd Thing.