Late last year, political theorist Asad Haider passed away at the age of 38. Haider, perhaps best known for his 2018 critique of seat-at-the-table identity politics, turned toward the problem of depoliticization in the wake of spectacular periods of mobilization like the Occupy and Black Lives Matter uprisings. Haider tried to understand the exhaustion that many feel right now, alienated from politics and having lost faith in the progress promised by the 20th century’s political revolutions.
Tashi Dorji turns to that same multifarious sense of exhaustion on his latest record. For over a decade and a half, the Bhutan-born, Asheville-based guitarist has made impulse and physicality his lodestars, often conjuring dense clouds of acoustic twang or fiery bursts of tremolo picking that channeled his anarchic energy into brain-wrinkling vibrations. Yet low clouds hang, this land is on fire marks a shift from skittish explorations of timbre and minute variations of attack to patient expositions of tone, feedback, and reverberation. If, as Joshua Clover suggested, it is easier to write a song about an unjust killing than about the declining rate of industrial profit, Dorji’s third album for Drag City tackles a different challenge: how to nurture emancipatory optimism under the weight of history’s unrealized promises.
Unlike the tritones that draw first blood on Stateless, the record opens gently with a series of volume swells that seem to invert Dorji’s typical approach to his instrument. On early tracks like 2012’s “Iron Cloud,” he appeared interested in the infinite ways one could strike a string rather than the tones that came after; the same was true of solo electric improvisations like 2014’s “Attain.” Throughout this new record, however, Dorji cuts out the initial pluck of the string with a volume pedal, easing in the notes as if driving with fragile cargo. This is guitar as salve, not weapon. Moments when feedback pokes into the mix feel tightly controlled, and you can almost picture him moving the guitar in imperceptible angles to keep the resonant frequencies in check.
While Dorji initially maintains a pellucid tone, flecks of distortion rear their head on later tracks that recall his heavier collaborations with drummers like Tyler Damon and Thom Nguyen. He somehow squeezes a pan flute out of his guitar in the initial spurts of “black flag anthems” before introducing more sizzled textures that seem to grasp at a groove that never arrives. “But go not back…” has a similar dirge-like quality arising from a gnarled drone that heaves like a funeral pyre, sound disintegrating into air. Letting residual tones and overtones swirl against each other, Dorji uses his pointillistic picking style to create seemingly endless horizons of sound. The way Dorji continues to envision new ways of playing and listening to the guitar lends credence to the idea that constraint breeds creativity. If the way out of political exhaustion, for Haider, is by breaking out of existing molds to imagine a “vantage point of emancipation,” then Dorji’s latest helps us hear the stirrings of a freer world with the tools we’ve been given.
