by Troy Sherman
Tashi Dorji released three records in August, and they’re all noise — harsh, plodding sets of bristling screech and feedback. Each has a brusque mononym (Refusal, Forward, and Wildfires), and their tracks are called things like “Fall” and “Light the Fuse and Run.” All three, of course, have their eyes set on some type of revolution, but it’s desultory or almost synthetic, not quite Banksy but sort of Muslimgauze. The records make for a brash political triptych, sure, but they’re stilted, rushed. They’ve got that impersonal churn of so much okay experimentalism, though for an artist as prolific as Dorji that’s less criticism than observation. They all boast militant album art, too, that’s as anonymous as it is obvious: cropped, grainy shots of action and tirefires, of guerillas taking to ragged streets — even if what guerillas and whose streets is, I think deliberately, unclear.
So it seems telling that the cover of Stateless (Dorji’s new record, released at almost two months’ remove from these last three) is a simple thighs-up portrait shot of the artist, blurry still but also singular and kinda, well, stately. He’s standing stiff-armed and totally frontal, staring still before a hanging patterned rug but slightly uncentered, with a stance that’s tough to read as anything but knowing. Directed, too. Before you even hear its music it’s clear that this record is an address, but whereas those three August missives were calls to arms this one postures more as a plea for contemplation: more than do, Stateless wants you to think — even to hope. It has stakes subtler than Dorji’s other political records, and this makes the guitarist seem more present and nakedly invested in it.
It’s not just in this shift in tone, nor even in Dorji’s unpretentious return to the acoustic guitar, that Stateless is a more — maybe even the improviser’s most — personal record. It’s also in his craft, which at the record’s best moments (and despite what’s still its unambiguous bellicosity, or at least its precipitousness) is coaxing and intimate. There can be an openness to Dorji’s playing which to me is less about generosity than relentingness, and it speaks to some kind of innate capacity of his to carve, even into a record so uncompromising in its lack of direction or unity, short soft hollows from the sheer side of soundscapes that sometimes start feeling tough to scale. For a work that styles itself as at once so tough and so urgent, these small sonic breathers aren’t just kindnesses but actual structural necessities: they make what’s hard land harder and what’s not more precious.
The first few minutes of the second track, “Refusal — Pt. II,” are packed with notes sputtered and rushed in sharp skidding clusters to the edges of cliffs a Fahey would soar off of or a Bailey would bend over. It’s a weird precipice Dorji’s built and he toes it, strum by strum threatening a fall his fingers refuse, but barely. Slowly, toward a big pneumatic build, sharp breaths of consonance eke out from the tumid swirl of sounds at odds with sounds; there’s febrile swelling and a quickening and then a burst, briefly, into silent sky. What follows is different, almost pastoral, a new build towards the song’s quietly spastic end from this unlikely resolution in its middle. This is an odd telos but there’s a sensibility to it, like how struggle’s uneven and awkward and synthesis sometimes is found first in frustration. This is when Stateless, despite itself even, can be comforting.
It works differently in “Statues Crumble, Heroes Fall,” where Dorji stays with one theme like a pillar and pushes it over. Its first half has silence interspersed with sound almost evenly, like pauses in a conversation, until these cede gradually to the ceaseless, toppling force of Dorji’s haltless strumming. Come after the piece’s opening movement of exchange, the track’s conclusion, in all its unsparingness, is an imploration, and its rushed march into the song’s ambivalent end feels — almost literally feels, if you listen closely enough — conjuring and urgent. Its conclusion comes of a stilted sudden like the unfilled pauses at its beginning. What’s to fill this silence is, I think, the question that Stateless tries fervently to pose in each of its tracks, but of course is unequipped to answer.
Untempered, though, and misdirected, Dorji’s ideas suffer sometimes from the condition the music is striving for. Mostly, celerity is what makes this record not just about statelessness but actually itself often stateless. Dorji’s playing is never not frenetic, a symptom probably of all the political fervor that’s been driving his recent work. When he forgets to give us listeners these little recuperative outlets — when the massive exigency of his playing gets felt so deeply that it starts maddeningly to self-consume — all his dazzlingly uncomposed horizons get muddled and unformed, as on “End of State,” the record’s three-part central suite. Its best passages — a percussive repartee at the end of its first part, a rarely melodic theme cutting through its third — give way ultimately to quick undifferentiable expanse, a jagged wash of steel so fast and nonmodal it’s practically a wall, and smooth. This smoothness isn’t the intent, I don’t think — overthrow’s gotta have edges, gotta bristle — but it’s the result of an impatience (whether for action or effect) that curbs not just this suite but too much of the record as a whole, denuding it at times of all the radical potential for newness it tries (and, despite even this, sometimes succeeds) to convey. When Dorji shuffles all his frantic desire for a world transformed into so much brash aleatoric performance, something that was there to’ve been gained is lost. Maybe, though, that’s just the problem with improvisation.