Tashi Dorji may seem an unlikely voice of American unrest. Born in the peak-bound Kingdom of Bhutan, touted in the West for its Edenic emphasis on Gross National Happiness, Dorji left in 2000 to attend a tiny liberal arts college in the ancient mountains of North Carolina. He has mostly remained there, living in a remote Appalachian holler far removed from his adopted country’s crucibles of media or mass protest. What’s more, Dorji is an improvising solo guitarist, wrenching real-time compositions that ride divides between chaos and control, terror and beauty from steel strings that seem to find entirely novel tongues and tones beneath his fingers. Dorji, then, invokes an enduring canard of arts criticism: Can abstract art—and instrumental music, precisely—be political, or say anything explicitly, without so much as a word?
Dorji’s affirmative answer—and the urgent questions his music raises about the ways we live, fight, and die—has never been more emphatic or resolute than on we will be wherever the fires are lit. Dorji has recorded and released a massive amount of material during the last two decades, a scattershot blast of cassettes, compact discs, collaborations, splits, and LPs divided among more than a dozen labels. But he has the ability to focus his fire, too, to save his clearest and most cohesive work for the biggest megaphone he can muster. In his case, that is Drag City, the Chicago bastion behind his most powerful new works, as well as select reissues from his enormous archive. Arriving amid long-overdue civil-rights reckonings embedded within an international pandemic, 2020’s Stateless, his Drag City debut, was a permission slip to reject every inherited American myth. He nodded at the ways one might expect solo guitar music to sound, then split them into pieces—“Statues Crumble, Heroes Fall,” as he aptly put it in the title of its gnarled standout.
Released amid another descent into the unknown, its follow-up, we will be wherever the fires are lit, often feels like fight music for battles that may have no end. There is a recognizable violence to many of these songs, with Dorji slashing, bending, pounding, and scraping his strings as if they are a safe sink for terminal anxiety and aggression. Dorji also finds time here to express joy and love, to at least imagine the things we will still covet after the devastation is done, if it ever is. Dorji is an exceptional instrumental technician, his playing bundling a lifetime of heavy metal, post-punk, blues, and noise into five-minute bursts. But more importantly, no other instrumentalist is offering critiques of the United States—or reminders of why they matter—as trenchant and riveting as Dorji, the new friend who walks into your house for the first time and confidently tells you to remodel everything.
A common complaint about improvised instrumental music like Dorji’s is that it’s an orderless mess, the equivalent of paint hurled against canvas with no apparent logic or talent, rhyme or reason. (His revolutionary forebear Derek Bailey heard it his entire career.) The first two pieces here, though, are pointed rejoinders. Opener “begin from here,” like the title track that follows, revolves around a sort of central broken chord, repeated until it pulses like the heart of ambient techno.
As with the radical paroxysms of free-jazz outfit [Ahmed], this suggestion of structure is an accessible entryway into the more demanding sounds that soon come. Strings buzz and howl between the ceaseless pulses of “begin from here,” a reminder of the way our actions ripple far beyond our intentions. During “fires,” Dorji squeezes quick acoustic licks between the chords that frame the rhythm, like a bluegrass picker who has found an inchoate and exciting language for his region’s working-class blues. Indeed, that tension between the rhythm and the licks suggest assembly-line torture; every time you find a little space for yourself to rest or play, there’s suddenly more work to do—and a newfound will, it seems, to push back.
Throughout, Dorji deploys and oftentimes dismantles recognizable forms to frame these pieces about struggle. “…and the state sank into abyss” churns like Southern sludge metal, Dorji repeating a simple riff as the battle hymn for some visionary republic. It is heavy and mean and ceaseless, a weapon wielded with vengeful intent. “impossible friendship” suggests an entire hardcore quartet transposed to just six strings, the rhythm and riff condensed into a relentless march. But Dorji slowly pries them apart, interrupting the momentum for wild flurries of notes that snarl and yowl. He always finds his way back to the meter, back to the mission of pressing ahead. Dorji’s music is rapturously motivational, bolts of pure feeling that at least make me want to be a better citizen of the world. It is perennially honest about the long odds of the struggles that inspire it, too, how the work of fixing this place is never done. Dorji’s magnetic repetition, then, is a narrative device, borne of history but suggestive of a future we might shape.
The cover features a grid of 12 photos by Godspeed You! Black Emperor founder Efrim Manuel Menuck, a longtime champion of Dorji. There’s a gloved hand on asphalt, the hot Mojave glimpsed from behind a windshield, a seashore stretching toward oblivion. Menuck’s contribution is fitting here, as his own collective has long backlit its instrumental calls for revolution with flickers of love and the hope it must render. Perhaps for the first time, Dorji does the same. You can hear his heart in the tender sway of “requiem for jonas,” a blues in which he is unafraid to wallow in his tears or hold them back in order to see more clearly. It’s audible, too, in “flowers for the unsung,” an unruly spree of discordant notes and clipped phrases that slowly funnels into one of the most beautiful guitar melodies I’ve ever heard. Dorji taps his foot along in heavy-bottomed boots, a horse galloping in pursuit of joy.
No moment radiates as much wonder and possibility as closer “meet me under the ruins,” a grim command that doubles as a post-apocalyptic love song. Dorji wrestles with so much worry during the album’s first 40 minutes, outlining and exploring our turmoil at almost every turn. Here, though, he lets it all tumble down through a cataract of near-continuous notes. At the end, gorgeous harmonics suddenly sparkle above a string of tinny, brittle pops and snaps. They are the flowers blooming inside the wasteland, the invitation to stick around and see what can still be saved. With we will be wherever the fires are lit, Dorji navigates the dread of the day in order to see what might be on the other side; in that last minute, he promises we may still get there after all.
