Tashi Dorji is back with his first album of new material since Stateless, We Will Be Wherever The Fires Are Lit is an album of guitar improvisations with weird odd tunings and broken guitars etc, that Asheville North Carolina based Bhutanese Guitarist Tashi Dorj fashions into intriguing music. I hope all of Tashi's family and friends survived the recent floods and destruction.
The album opens with Begin From Here that special place where clattering almost Gamelan repetition is your special place, tonal shifts among the repetition adds an odd sense, of we may be going somewhere strange. About three minutes or so the central riff breaks down and we are in a mire, dark low-slung place, odd cadences adding rumination.
We Will Be Wherever The Fires Are Lit sitting down by that fireside strumming away, the food is cooked and we all commune together, improvising old folk patterns with new directions for old bones.
Requiem For Jonas has flourishes of notes decaying and emerging
through tuning and re-tuning the guitar while it's being played, trying to find the right spatial awareness, Indian classical influences get mutated.
Center Can't Hold! is an obvious truth played out over mellifluous acoustic finger picking, demonstrating that normality ended a few years ago, the only way forward is in nonstandard tunings and non-derivative ideas.
Flowers For The Unsung may well be left on your doorstep in a desperate Measures style, but this time not as an apology, more as thanks for all you do, without seeking credit for it, this has an almost flamenco edge to the repeating central motif.
Impossible Friendship your mate thinks that Trump always tells the truth and you think otherwise, the despair comes through, in off timed, out of sync fusillades of notes, treading a fine line between sounding like they are having a fight or being a tune.
...And The State Sank Into Abyss is a statement not many of us would argue with, if we live in the UK or the USA or many other countries currently, this sounds like a strum of anger and bile for the stupidity of those that claim to know how to run things, but never really do.
New Signals//// new tunings, new distressed notes, new ways of confounding listeners, new bass like descensions.
Rhythm/Refrain is just that played about with in quite interesting ways.
The Album closes with Meet Me Under The Ruins there is nothing left but the ruins of the world we hoped to create, the notes are fractured, like they have been taken from collapsing songs, with shards you can't quite glue back into a coherent song, so they are this blend of ideas and strains trying to coalesce.
Find out more at https://lnk.to/whereverthefires https://www.dragcity.com/products/we-will-be-wherever-the-fires-are-lit https://tashidorji.bandcamp.com/album/we-will-be-wherever-the-fires-are-lit
