Dorji, Tashi

***For his third new album release for Drag City, Tashi Dorji turns to the electric guitar. After the furious acoustic improvisations that drove the previous two—Stateless and we will be wherever the fires are lit—it’s easy to imagine an album of his electric guitar improvisations as an encompassingly incendiary essay. Especially when titled low clouds hang, this land is on fire. After all, this is a man capable of tearing up the place with the tactile musical violence of Bill Orcutt and Derek Bailey! And yet, this knowledge serves to set up a greater shock: the album’s disarmingly gentle musical drift.

When asked why he turned the knob down from 11 for this album, Tashi says simply, “To find the silence.” As ever with Tashi, this is a political statement. Even the search for silence takes intention and happens for a reason. In this time of such institutional inhumanity, what is there to feel but exhaustion? When seeing the faces of the deprived, what is there to feel other than hopelessness? In the face of such grief, what words are there to say?

So, Tashi got a couple amps, moved from the shed where he’d done his first two DC titles, set up in a room in the family home with high ceilings and dialed in the reverb. Once the sound was in the space, reflecting in a manner that he felt congenial with his mood, he taped it. It’s a striking signal, meditative and melancholy, with a delicacy comparable to the lineage of Loren Connors or Bill Frisell, the songs at times developed with the deliberate exposition of themes in raga’s alap form. It’s a sound that lives within silence.

Once he’d laid down the sound, Tashi went back and listened to the composition of each piece. Then the words came easily. They’re the titles of these songs, they provide the narrative—or a prism, to allow us to gaze unblinking upon the awesome rot of empire. These are Tashi’s punk anthems for the year 2026… for all the years, really—to be thrown to the people outside the walls, to aid them in their quest to be allowed in.