The Sea and The Mother is an experimental folk vehicle based in Portland, OR that blurs geographies and genres. Launched in 2013, it is the musical vessel of Dao Strom, an acclaimed writer of both books and songs, and an artist of the Vietnamese diaspora.
Born in Vietnam, raised in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, Dao Strom is the daughter of writers who were persecuted during and after the Vietnam War. She has lived in NYC, SF, Iowa City, Austin TX, Juneau, Alaska, and now calls Portland, OR home.
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The Sea and The Mother is an experimental folk vehicle based in Portland, OR that blurs geographies and genres. Launched in 2013, it is the musical vessel of Dao Strom, an acclaimed writer of both books and songs, and an artist of the Vietnamese diaspora.
Born in Vietnam, raised in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, Dao Strom is the daughter of writers who were persecuted during and after the Vietnam War. She has lived in NYC, SF, Iowa City, Austin TX, Juneau, Alaska, and now calls Portland, OR home.
After releasing two solo albums that paid homage to her love of American old-roots music and garnered her "mountain music" authenticity praise and comparison to Gillian Welch and other neo-traditional artists, Dao's new music project The Sea and The Mother has her channeling other "folk" entities, from even further shores, and merging her two mediums - prose and song writing.
Dao's body of work includes: two critically acclaimed books of fiction, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003) and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006); and two solo albums, Send Me Home (2004) and everything that blooms wrecks me (2008).
The New Yorker praised Dao's last book,The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, as being "quietly beautiful...hip without being ironic."
About her music, Grant Alden of NO DEPRESSION writes, "Her voice...is a sharp but carefully modulated brush placed amid various acoustic layers, and surprisingly pretty (though her words can be wonderfully disconcerting)...lyrics [which] seem so private as to invite solitary exploration within the comfort of headphones and winter tea... It is not clear to me what Strom wants from her music, whether it’s a hobby that serves as a tonic to her fiction, or an adjunct to it. Or both. Or neither. In both cases, I tend to suspect she is only at the beginning of a long creative road, and that her work in ten or twenty years will be extraordinary.”
WE WERE MEANT TO BE A GENTLE PEOPLE, released in 2013, is a hybrid music-literary project, combining both written and sung voices - to revive some of the old tradition of "ca dao" (a tradition of sung-poetry in Vietnamese culture ) utilizing the tools, language, and stylings of our modern era. Music and poetry-storytelling have for many centuries been a crucial part of the Vietnamese people's mode of expression.
This thematically linked 6-song EP album is accompanied by a small, finely made book of prose, lyrics, images, and fragments on Viet Nam, as a late-century mythology, a war, a word, an exodus, an inheritance/disinheritance.
With her solo project The Sea and The Mother, Dao Strom creates and explores a new form of "voicing" perceptions and experiences that lie "in between" - places, cultures, past and present, ancient and modern, written and oral, East and West.
The whole project can be viewed/heard/experienced at: www.theseaandthemother.com
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…shrink me down again
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