We Will Be Wherever The Fires Are Lit

The short video that accompanies the title track of We Will Be Wherever the Fires are Litdepicts crowds of protestors clashing with riot police and blossoming balls of burning fire juxtaposed against calmly swaying fields of grain and delicate flowers. It’s the perfect allegory for Bhutanese guitarist Tashi Dorji’s musical output. He’s always used his music as an instrument of revolution, but he also threads a kernel of beauty through his improvisations to elicit a sense of hope in himself and his listeners. Even his most abstract, buzzy, textured songs display a sense of melody and grace beneath the chaos. Dorji’s string emanations are the encouragement for those of us rallying for a righteous cause, and they’re also the salve soothing those in need of healing.

Dorji employs a chameleonic sense of tone and timbre in his playing, ranging from a percussive, buzzing thrum to a clean and shimmering radiance. He kicks off We Will Be Wherever the Fires are Lit in the former category with “Begin from Here.” A mechanical clatter evokes the innards of a factory churning out a series of gadgets until the machine breaks down, spewing cogs, gears, and springs every which way. Dorji oils the assembly with a subtle trickle of melody that peeks through the gritty metal implements. He concludes the album on a more eloquent note, taking a final bow with the gorgeous “Meet Me Under the Ruins.” The track is a reflective and delicate landscape carved from sound, with meditative clusters of string resonance that dance and frolic with an almost gleeful energy.

In between those two vastly divergent works, Dorji offers eight guitar improvisations that range from constructions assembled with bricks of repetition to constantly shifting pathways that seem to morph as they unfurl. He deploys each piece with a sense of urgency, such that even those songs that appear to meander do so with a heightened emotional state. Yet at times, such as on the latter half of “Flowers for the Unsung,” he allows a sense of beauty to cut through the perceived anxiety. It’s as if Dorji is conveying the entirety of the human condition on this album, unleashing the whole emotional spectrum with the music. He has succeeded, and it’s truly a gift that he is able to do so with such eloquence.