Tashi Dorji could seem an unlikely voice of American unrest. Born within the peak-bound Kingdom of Bhutan, touted within the West for its Edenic emphasis on Gross Nationwide Happiness, Dorji left in 2000 to attend a tiny liberal arts faculty within the historical mountains of North Carolina. He has principally remained there, dwelling in a distant Appalachian holler far faraway from his adopted nation’s crucibles of media or mass protest. What’s extra, Dorji is an improvising solo guitarist, wrenching real-time compositions that trip divides between chaos and management, terror and wonder from metal strings that appear to search out solely novel tongues and tones beneath his fingers. Dorji, then, invokes a permanent canard of arts criticism: Can summary artwork—and instrumental music, exactly—be political, or say something explicitly, with out a lot as a phrase?
Dorji’s affirmative reply—and the pressing questions his music raises in regards to the methods we reside, struggle, and die—has by no means been extra emphatic or resolute than on we shall be wherever the fires are lit. Dorji has recorded and launched an enormous quantity of fabric over the past twenty years, a scattershot blast of cassettes, compact discs, collaborations, splits, and LPs divided amongst greater than a dozen labels. However he has the power to focus his fireplace, too, to save lots of his clearest and most cohesive work for the most important megaphone he can muster. In his case, that’s Drag Metropolis, the Chicago bastion behind his strongest new works, in addition to choose reissues from his huge archive. Arriving amid long-overdue civil-rights reckonings embedded inside a world pandemic, 2020’s Stateless, his Drag Metropolis debut, was a permission slip to reject each inherited American fantasy. He nodded on the methods one may count on solo guitar music to sound, then break up them into items—“Statues Crumble, Heroes Fall,” as he aptly put it within the title of its gnarled standout.
Launched amid one other descent into the unknown, its follow-up, we shall be wherever the fires are lit, typically seems like struggle music for battles that will don’t have any finish. There’s a recognizable violence to many of those songs, with Dorji slashing, bending, pounding, and scraping his strings as if they’re a secure sink for terminal anxiousness and aggression. Dorji additionally finds time right here to specific pleasure and love, to at the very least think about the issues we’ll nonetheless covet after the devastation is completed, if it ever is. Dorji is an distinctive instrumental technician, his enjoying bundling a lifetime of heavy metallic, post-punk, blues, and noise into five-minute bursts. However extra importantly, no different instrumentalist is providing critiques of america—or reminders of why they matter—as trenchant and riveting as Dorji, the brand new buddy who walks into your home for the primary time and confidently tells you to rework all the pieces.
