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Rating: The Kingdom of Bhutan is a small Himalayan state inhabited by less than a million people. Historically it is known as "Lho Pho Mon" ("southern land of darkness") or as "Lhomen Khazhi" ("southern land of the four approaches"). Its inhabitants call themselves "Drupka" and their homeland "Druk Yul," which means "land of the dragon." The country was first explored by Europeans (Portuguese Jesuits) in 1600; from the end of the 1800s it came under British influence, which dominated the country according to the principle of "divide et impera," and whose consequences are still painfully felt throughout the region today. It is here that the musician Tashi Dorji was born and raised, a "discovery" by Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), and who recently featured him in the third chapter of "Hexadic" publications on Drag City alongside artists such as Moon Duo, Jenks Miller, Richard Youngs, and Stephen O’Malley...
Since 2000, Tashi has been residing in the USA in Asheville, North Carolina, and is one of the most interesting guitarists on the American alternative scene. After entering the orbit of Ben Chasny, the next step was the fortunate encounter with a talented and flamboyant drummer like Tyler Damon, born in 1987 and residing in Bloomington, Indiana. Although the two live in different parts of the USA, this distance seems somehow annulled by the great empathy, almost a kind of telepathy, that keeps the duo together: a special bond whose strength is evident both in studio recordings and during live performances.
The latest release is this live recording in St. Louis, Missouri, recorded on November 2, 2016. The album is titled "Leave No Trace" and was released in February on Family Vineyard: two long, completely improvised tracks with a total duration of half an hour, in which the duo brings to life an absolutely unforgettable performance. References such as Sun City Girls and 75 Dollar Bill are certainly not out of place, but the music of Dorji and Tyler Damon has a strong noise and avant-garde component that spills into an aesthetic that can be related to musicians like Colin Stetson and avant-jazz experiences, as well as a certain spiritualist and at the same time abstract component: as if this music were a manifesto of the avant-garde and a form of "oral" transmission language intended in the broadest sense of the definition and a propagation of that "spirit of the thunder dragon," myth and legend but also "spiritual" emanation of ancestral natural forces which here flare up in all their power, ideally transporting you to the remote regions at the edges of the Himalayas as far as Alexander the Great ventured, and where Rudyard Kipling set that magnificent work, "The Man Who Would Be King."
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