One fascinating paradox about art is that limits can prove freeing. Narrow your parameters and you might find solutions you wouldn’t have if your choices were infinite. It’s why entire movements have been based on self-imposed restrictions: take the Oulipo group, whose Georges Perec wrote an entire novel without the letter e, or Dogme95, in which directors such as Lars Von Trier and Harmony Korine adhered to rules about hand-held cameras and on-set sound.
It might seem odd to compare those contrivances to the simple act of making solo instrumental guitar music. After all, the form is not exactly unusual, having been around longer than jazz ensembles or rock bands. Still, to play guitar alone is to submit to restrictions—not only in the finite number of sounds you can make, but in what little innovation is still available. So much has been done and so many legends loom large—especially, for anyone picking strings now, the two-headed monster of John Fahey and Derek Bailey—that playing something new seems nearly impossible.
I’m not sure Tashi Dorji has made anything completely new yet, but the range of creative solutions he’s found while trying to avoid the well-worn paths of instrumental guitar music is thrilling. Raised in Bhutan and based in Asheville, N.C. since 2000, Dorji has made a handful of diverse releases in the past decade, mostly on cassette. He and Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny chose tracks from those (and some unreleased tapes) for his first, self-titled LP. There are only six pieces here, but each feels like its own planet. They occupy the same sonic universe but are different enough to suggest Dorji has traversed light years between each.
Dorji covers a lot of ground inside each piece. Often he’ll counter a dizzying cluster of high-speed plucks with subdued phrases and full stops, in the process echoing blues, classical, new age, and idiom-less free improv. As a result, “Improvisation II” feels like a baroque exercise and a spaced-out head rush, while “Still III” is both meditative and hyperactively impulsive. Dorji seems to cram everything he can think of into closer “Sunder”, whose ringing cycles have a hypnotic persistence, like an image you can’t get out of your head no matter how long you close your eyes.
It might sound like Dorji’s playing is so all over the place that it’s jarring—and it can be—but that’s also what makes it unified, because everything on *Tashi Dorji *sounds like the tugging and jostling of a single brain. Each piece is a reactive internal monologue wherein previous pushes echo in later pulls. Follow all the darting notes and you can practically see Dorji’s neurons firing at each other, every one a point or counterpoint in an ongoing argument he’s having with himself.
Of course, not everyone likes to watch a fight, and Dorji’s string-wrangling will likely appeal most to those already inclined to wordless note-battles. From a distance, it might even look like his style is not that much of deviation from the patterns honed by the many storied players who preceded him. But sometimes when you zoom in close enough, you can find infinity inside the infinitesimal, and Dorji has managed to turn what could have merely been small variations into some pretty grand spaces.
