Tashi Dorji’s Guitar Eradicates Western Notions of Authenticity

Search experimental, improvisational guitarist Tashi Dorji‘s vast Bandcamp page, and you’ll discover sinewy-yet-jagged nylon string excursions, electric smoke circles of noise and drone, duos and trios bashing it out, and even a digital album’s worth of yawps, grunts, and other sounds of near-viciousness coaxed from a banjo. Yet none of it, including his last release for Drag City, Stateless, sounds much like what’s on offer on We Will Be Wherever the Fires are Lit, his second release of new music for the long-running Chicago-based imprint.

It’s not so much the ingredients – acoustic guitar, often prepared with tape for muting or metal for the whizz of distortion – that have changed, but the focus on relentless repetition, as if the left hand is stuck on the same note or chord while the right can’t stop itself. The results are often hypnotic. The comparisons to Bill Orcutt aren’t without merit, either. “Requiem to Jonas”, contains an Orcutt-like strangled flurry of notes with an occasional bent-string whine rising above the maelstrom before the tune becomes a dirge, Dorji slapping at low strings and letting them hum.

However, many of this record’s ten songs wallow in persistent attention to a single, subtly morphing theme. The title track’s riff chugs and hiccups, with chords shifting only slightly as the main lick never gives way entirely, even as it fades and softens toward the end of the piece. “Flowers for the Unsung” splits the difference between the maddening attention to pulse and explosions of arrhythmic splatters of notes.

Tashi Dorji’s various approaches to improvisation, sometimes spaciously abstract and other times verging on violence, seem to come from growing up in Bhutan in the 1990s, where any music from the West arrived via bootlegs, late-night radio signals, or cassette dubs. Though he’s lived in Ashville, North Carolina, for nearly a quarter century, there’s something about the imperfections of home recordings, blended with de-tuned guitars, technically incorrect chords, and mistakes turned into intentionality that likely dates back to the ways imported sounds influenced him based on the murky methods in which they were obtained.

In an interview, he once claimed he “had to figure out chords and finger positions on [his] own … maybe in some ways…this was laying the foundation towards improvisation, learning broken tunes and incorrect chords.” Yet, on We Will Be Wherever the Fires Are Lit, those “incorrect” chords, buzzing and hammered repeatedly, eradicate hegemonic Western notions of authenticity while insisting on music’s equity. For example, “…and the State Sank into the Abyss” is three and half minutes of barely-shifting acoustic churn, something banged out the front porch of a shack soon to be washed away in a flood. It’s a deconstruction of the “familiar” or the “acceptable”.

The music on this album is mainly devoid of the type of introspection he conjures on his nylon-string guitar collections. Nor is it as ferocious as his electric duo work with drummer Tyler Damon. Instead, Tashi Dorji finds something more akin to groove, sometimes sounding like a kid discovering their first couple of chords on a guitar ultimately headed for the fire pit and other times like some bastard cousin of a Kenyan Nyatiti master. We Will Be Wherever the Fires Are Lit is a particularly potent chapter in Tashi Dorji’s ongoing re-writing of possibilities for the six-string.