Julian Saporiti: Since we’re having this conversation under the umbrella of “Viet / Diasporic / Artists” maybe we can plant our respective family history flags early if only to lower and burn them as we move on? My name is Julian. I’m from Tennessee. I live in Portland, now. My mom is from Saigon. She came from a wealthy family with French citizenship since WWI. Educated. Very French colonial South Vietnamese. In ’68 she left for the US on a student visa not long after my great grandfather, a politician with the S. Viet government was assassinated in front of the whole family in our family house in Vinh Long. She went to college in Pennsylvania and lived in Boston and San Francisco, where she met my Dad, an Italian American Bostonian, and then they wound up in Nashville because of my Dad’s work. My mom, her name is Jacqueline, didn’t see her family for a decade, because the rest of them stayed in Vietnam til ’76 and then moved to France which is where most of that side remains.
Dao Strom: Yes, there are many different pathways into becoming “diasporic”… I was born in Saigon, my parents were writers and publishers/journalists; my mother was purportedly famous as one of five pioneering female writers in the pre-1975 literary scene; to this day, I run into other Vietnamese of her generation who still know her name and reputation. My father spent 10 years in the Communist reeducation camps; my brother and I fled as refugees in 1975 with my mother—we ended up in California. My mother remarried a Danish American immigrant, and I grew up in essentially a Vietnamese-Danish family in a small town in northern California, the exact place where a gold nugget was first discovered in the American River by a miner, in 1848, and sparked the California Gold Rush. I grew up at the end of a dirt road, among pine trees, riding ponies, running around with dogs and chickens, certainly the only Vietnamese refugee family at that time in our county. I met my birth father eventually in my early 20’s, on my first return to Vietnam; I still have a relationship with him now. All of these tensions and divides are a big part of my work, no doubt.
Julian: Going over your work, space —abstractly, metaphorically—is also a big part of it. I’m curious about the places you have occupied, physically, leading up to now?
Dao: Well, I’ve lived in Portland for the last ten years. I lived in Alaska before then and I lived in Austin, Texas for a long time, eight years. I went to graduate school in Iowa. I went to college in San Francisco, spent a little time in New York. But, spaces engaged specifically for these projects… I guess I think about the return trips to Vietnam being significant times where I’ve generated something or had an experience. One song was also recorded at a residency in Iceland, and some pieces gathered in other interactions. One song recorded in the cooling tower of a now-defunct nuclear power plant, a space I was drawn to for its very large echoes.
Traveler’s Ode (music performance) from Dao Strom on Vimeo.
But I feel like you’ve done this way more comprehensively, as far as having a geographic-historic scope and in line with what we were talking about regarding Brandon Shimoda’s notion of pilgrimage being part of “post-memory poetics.” It seems you’ve made very intentional, and numerous, pilgrimages to places where certain historic events occurred.
Julian: I have, my work is rooted in place. I think of this project as a travelogue. But I don’t know that I’ve done this more comprehensively than you. Maybe you mean that it’s rooted in my academic/ethnographic training, but that’s just one way of being comprehensive. I feel like the work you do, which is much less restricted than the forms I use in the No-No Boy project ( pop and folk music forms), allows for a lot more exploration through performance and text.
Reading your stuff over the last few weeks and thinking about poets I’ve gotten to know over the last few years, Brandon Shimoda or Shin Yu Pai, who you probably know too, I really love the care for language poets take, like on the granular, deconstructed level. You’re unbound by meter and melody, which I really envy. And you articulate things I think about much better than I do. For instance:
“Memory, like delay, relies on repetition and distortion
sometimes I’m more seduced by the artifacts of repercussions in the sound field than by the initial sound itself
sometimes I’m more seduced by the artifacts”
That should have been the epigraph for my latest album. It’s all about the artifacts, even in my video work too, I’m more seduced by the artifacts. The grain, the film burn, the dirt and dust…Sonically, I love the concepts of delay, reverb, fuzz, echo as historical metaphors, all these effects that guitar players know so well from our pedalboards. As a second-gen Viet kid, your awareness of the war you were born out of is only accessible through echoes, delays, reverberations, distortion and fuzz. You know you’re not getting a clean signal and you can’t go back to the source.
Dao: I’ll just say, for the record, I find it really hard to articulate, too. It’s sort of the reason I turned to sound in the first place, because of the limit of words and feeling the trap of them. I think also about how it’s a fact, when you’re using reverb or delay, you’re taking the source sound and you’re amplifying it and distorting it; the source sound event itself has ended. And we’re doing that with memory and history. In a way, we’re all being affected more by the memory—the artifacts—of whatever happened in the past. I guess it’s just an apt metaphor.
I feel like you’re doing it so beautifully with your project, the idea of taking sounds, field sounds you’ve recorded in places, and then turning those into instruments, imbuing the songs with energies from those sites. It makes me wonder, does a place actually hold history, does it hold the energy that we talk about, for instance, as ghosts? Obviously, people in Vietnamese culture are very attuned to ghosts. Is that energy of whatever past sorrow or violence happened there, still in that place? And then, when you go and try to document that place, I’m assuming you want to do more than just report the history. You’re taking sounds from those sites and resampling them and making new musical sounds, which is a beautiful process and potentially also one where you’re reimagining, or re-forming, that event or its effect on you. Do you think about it in those ways, too?
Julian: History is a mess. That’s the most honest way to deal with it. I look for moments of complication and contradiction and try to do my historical work around those moments, those instances. I’m not an argument driven academic, nor am I looking for any narrative whatsoever—much smarter people than myself work like that and I read all their books and appreciate them. The reason I do all this stuff with sound, I think the reason why you get into this stuff too, like you said, is because words fail us at a certain point.
But, when we talk about visiting these physical spaces, I don’t know if there are ghosts there, but I think there are activation points where the ghosts we carry get activated, or rather certain spaces activate your mind, which in turn bring up the ghosts. The process of sitting down in that space and just listening, deep listening, whether it’s to the wind or the trees, or having a friend clap so I can capture the reverb of some kind of structure to then use on top of my records—it’s sort of, I think, a way of conversing with those ghosts in a positive way, or dancing with them, and not just being haunted. A decade of being around ethnic studies literature has made me really tired of words like “trauma.” It’s part of this hashtag, level-one, cheap buzzword activism thing we’re going through. “Trauma,” “Marginalized,” etc, these terms are underexplored and overused and we need to do better than that. Like, what does ‘to heal’ mean?
Dao: I guess I relate to that. I think there is a limit to to which talking and recreating events or histories or trauma can reach. In therapy they also talk about trauma being lodged in the body. Which makes me think the logical response would be like, well, doing something with your body in a place. Like, the words and talking about it might not really be enough. So, music for me is a way that excavates something…
Julian: Speech. You can’t toss around these really loaded terms like hand grenades. You have to do the work. Take care of them. Excavation is a key word. If you have to use words, that’s a good one to use.
Dao: And it’s sort of something that can’t really be articulated. Like, once you start trying to name it, then you’re back, you know, in this place in the head. There’s a line in your dissertation in the opening where you say “at some point I started singing my dissertation”, which I really love. You write like a storyteller. Your songs are very much like storytelling; and that is more accessible, a much more emotional and evocative way to encounter these histories, and for them to feel humanized, giving names to certain people whose stories you are singing. There’s so much in your songs, so much history and research that you go through. And I feel like there’s a generosity in the way that you approach that research, which makes it moving.
Julian: Thank you so much, that’s very nice of you to say. I really like proper academic writing. I wouldn’t have been in grad school for a decade if I didn’t. But for me personally, that’s a very dishonest writing style. I don’t think it’s dishonest of other people. But I found my mode of expression—writing songs—long ago and why would I not want to use the ease of expression which that form gives me if I really care about translating my scholarship to people.
But songs have their own limitations, any medium does. I was saying earlier, the way that you and other skilled poets and writers almost work on a granular level, you know, the spacing, the punctuation. There’s a weirdness and a bravery in that style. Part of me wants to get there.
The pop/folk song thing is almost like a crutch sometimes. Even when I take those sounds and we’re activating ghosts in the field or whatever you want to call it—I’m banging on the barbed wire of a detention center, using my mom’s voice in a song. It’s still in service of pop music forms. Ultimately, that’s the music I really like. But I want to find the time to have the boldness to become slower. I have ambitions to sit and watch clouds and run tape loops of noise for three hours then type five characters on a typewriter and call that a day, you know.
I have an internal battle in my musical self between a Protestant and a Buddhist.
