Tashi Dorji: Low Clouds Hang, This Land is on Fire

From the first note of low clouds hang, this country is on fire, the eponymous opening track from Tashi Dorji’s new album, the experimental guitarist wastes no time in delivering what will be one of the year’s sharpest creative pivots.

While the frenetic virtuoso of Dorji’s previous two Drag City releases, we will be wherever the fires are lit (2024) and Guitar Improvisations (2023), matched the lightning-fingered dexterity of Bill Orcutt and Ben Chasny, on low clouds hang, this country is on fire, the Bhutan-born North Carolina-based guitarist moves swiftly to the ends of the earth.

A series of protracted ambient mediations, Dorji’s metallic dreamscapes float and arc with grace. It’s a new milieu where Dorji searches for silence, and when found, he revels in it, covering ground that few others have.

With an arsenal of one guitar, two amps, reverb pedals and a space with high ceilings, the ideas mapped out on low clouds hang, this country is on fire find Dorji generating a variety of emotions. On Still, he bottles up loneliness through the lens of cinema where you can almost see Dorji nomadically flitting from one town to the next, playing these compositions in small rooms which become drenched in reverb.

Of course, these old-world freedoms are quickly overshadowed by current events. The wandering, contemplative burn the throne, black flag anthems and they fall because they must fall, mutating into a clarion call to dismantle systems designed for the few and not the many. With knotty, atmospheric tonality that mirrors the darkness of these times, here Dorji covers further ground initially made by BIG BRAVE’s Mat Ball on his two Amplified Guitar releases. (Dorji also featured on the Canadian band’s 2024 release, A Chaos of Flowers.)

While just as malevolent as Dorji’s previous work, the difference on low clouds hang, this country is on fire is that he finds brief moments of peace. On gathering and we overflow the streets and squares like the sea in a spring tide… and that very instant the tyrants of the earth shall bite the dust (take that, Godspeed), the intonations of Bill Frisell and even Rafael Toral’s latest play on jazz standards via last year’s Traveling Light surface in beautifully hypnotic ways.

The same could be said of the album’s darker moments. Each song title, telling its own story, and from the artwork to Dorji’s tonal explorations, uncertainty emerges from iron-grey skies, which grow darker as the storm clouds draw near (as aptly conveyed on penultimate track, storm the heavens). It’s politics through sound, reaching a crescendo on the turbulent hellscape, but go not “back to the sediment” in the slime of the moaning sea, for a better world belongs to you, and a better friend to me.

It’s Dorji shaping chaos in more reflective ways, primarily harnessed by silence; the lonely guitar ring on closing track, a new morning breaks, like an echo across desolate land, and alongside fellow experimental acolytes, Daniel Bachman, droneroom and William Tyler, on low clouds hang, this country is on fire, Dorji breaks the mould, revealing another crucial layer in what feels like one of the quintessential ambient guitar releases of the year.

Low clouds hang, this land is on fire is out now via Drag City. Purchase from Bandcamp.