Drawing on the sensibilities of ambient, folk, post-rock, spoken word and sound collage, Dao Strom’s latest full-length Tender Revolutions is the embodiment of this style. A joint release between Antiquated Future Records and Beacon Sound, the album comes complete with an accompanying book, released via The 3rd Thing press, to support and expand upon its themes. “These songs are, for me, inward and outward (ex)tendings across boundaries of self, diaspora, modalities of voice, across fractures and refractions,” as Strom explains. “They are attempts at honoring small points and lines of connectivity I’ve been entangling in, for over a decade now, namely through creative collaborations and friendships with other Vietnamese women writers and artists.” A mission set out in the title itself. “The word tender is born of a gesture, an image, of something being stretched (the root ten- meaning “to stretch”),” Strom continues:

A thinning, an invocation of vulnerability, thus occurs with this action of stretching—to become tender, to tend toward in order to make contact with (an)other, requires stretching oneself; a thinning of the fabric or barrier between, occurs. What is a revolution that leads with this pretext of thinning—of allowing a softening, even a porousness, of that which holds us apart? And what does it mean to re-volve? To turn back (re-) again and again, to roll (volvere), in the cyclical way of celestial bodies or seasons, following a larger logic of changes as recurrent, trusting that this movement of a continual turning and turning (rolling back) will eventually arrive us also at a turning over: a (r)evolving of the old into a possible new. [R]evolution as ongoing, inevitable, as both instigating and returning.

But/and: a tender is also a boat—a smaller vessel that can access waters the larger boat is too big for; a tender is needed, for instance, to carry passengers from the larger boat to shore, to ferry objects between two larger vessels. Smallness is needed to access the spaces in-between, those shallower waters and narrower channels, to navigate aspects not visible until one gets closer in. Tender is, too, a form of currency—exchange: value of one good validated by another. Does this mean to tender is to navigate certain transactions from the level of the water?

Tender is our form of currency
The hands of the tenders also tender
(and sometimes raw)
We could follow the river

Unfurling with a slow pace that could be read as either calmness or solemnity, latest single ‘take’ taps into the larger rhythms Dao Strom alludes to in the above artist statement. Its lush ambient patience is not so much glacial as seasonal or celestial. What results is the sense of a new plane opening up within the ordinary arrangement of space and time. One created free from the strictures of normal human order, or else in defiance of such self-imposed limitation. That is, a place where history, memory, physical experience and dreams can coexist, coalesce, combine to form a radical new sense of possibility. “I’m taking something back / I’ll let you know where I find it,” as Strom sings in the opening lines. “The world might slip off track / when your pain moves away from the centre.”

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Stretching over 600 pages, the novel includes a semi-mythic colonel, his psy-op serving nephew, Vietnamese double agents, humanitarian nurses, too-young-soliders-turned-crazed-lurps and disgraced navy sailors struggling to readjust to life back in Arizona (the latter being Bill Houston, who will eventually grow/descend into the antihero of Johnson’s debut novel, Angels). By the closing stages, the various narrative strands have twisted and tangled to the degree that confusion arises, the reader in effect joining the characters in the bush and hacking through a literary jungle of their own. How do we piece together these small scraps of experience into something coherent and important? And is it enough to explain and justify the war, or human nature itself?

“It’s got to be about something bigger than dying, or we’d all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that.”

Johnson passed away in May, though not before being made aware that he was to receive the Library of Congress’ Prize for American Fiction. Tree of Smoke is out now on Picador and Farrar, Straus and Giroux and is available at all good book shops. Those unfamiliar with his work would be well advised to check out his novels (Angels), novellas (Train Dreams) and short story collections (Jesus’ Son), as well as his essay collection, Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond.

P.S. If you like strange, sprawling books about Vietnam and conspiracies, then you’ll be into David Means’ Hystopia.

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