Tashi Dorji may seem an unlikely voice of American unrest. Born in the premier 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 hovel far from the media crucibles or mass protests of his adopted country. Additionally, Dorji is an improvisational solo guitarist, drawing real-time compositions that lead to separations between chaos and control, terror and beauty from steel strings that seem to find entirely original tongues and tones under his fingers. Dorji, then, invokes an enduring critique of the arts: Can abstract art—and precisely instrumental music—be political, or say anything explicitly, without a single 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 decisive than we will be where the fires are lit. Dorji has recorded and released an enormous amount of material over the past two decades, a scattered explosion of cassettes, CDs, collaborations, splits and LPs across more than a dozen labels. But he has a knack for focusing his fire, too, saving his clearest and most coherent work for the biggest speaker he can muster. In his case, that's Drag City, the Chicago bastion behind his strongest new work, as well as select reissues from his vast archive. Arriving Amid Long-Term Civil Rights Bills Embedded in an International Pandemic, 2020 Statelesshis Drag City debut, was a license to reject every inherited American myth. He nodded at the ways one might expect solo guitar music to sound, then broke them into pieces – 'Statues Crumble, Heroes Fall', as he aptly put it in the title of his rambunctious set.
Released amid another descent into the unknown, its sequel, we will be where the fires are litit often sounds like battle music for battles that may never end. There's a recognizable violence to many of these songs, with Dorji cutting, bending, pounding and scraping his strings as if they were a safe sink for terminal angst and aggression. Dorji also finds time here to express joy and love, to at least imagine the things we will still crave after the disaster, if it ever comes. Dorji is an instrumentalist extraordinaire as his playing combines a lifetime of heavy metal, post-punk, blues and noise into five-minute bursts. But more importantly, no other instrumentalist offers critiques of the United States—or reminders of why they matter—as charming and riveting as Dorji, the new friend who walks into your house for the first time and confidently tells you to remodel everything.
