DORJI, TASHI - Dead Cities Lie Buried / Lift Comrades, Lift Comrades

"This new tape by Asheville NC's Tashi Dorji is a hard-edged suite for solo acoustic guitar recorded in the depths of the Plague. Because I've been listening to Remko Scha a lot lately, it's impossible for me to not-imagine the music here (especially the title track) as an extension of the marvelous Machine Guitar works by that great Dutch artist. Tashi is known for creating harsher acoustic tones then many of his contemporaries, but that often seems more based on his decisions to constantly disrupt melodic expectations inside his work. On dead cities lie buried... his approach has a massive circular logic, in which small sonic events take place behind a revolving, repetitive waterfall of cascading notes. The other pieces on the tape offer variations on this technique, although even through repeated listening, there is something about the first piece that really gives a heightened sense of otherness. Of course, all of Tashi's work, whether solo or not, rarely takes any easy or well-trammeled pathways. This is true on the three LPs we have done with him -- Manas (FTR 208LP, 2015), Manas III (FTR 330LP, 2017), and Mette Rasmussen/Tashi Dorji (FTR 403LP, 2018) -- but you knew that. Tashi is always worth hearing in any performance format, and dead cities lie buried... is another triumph for the meat wheel of eternity, and a damn fine listen. --Byron Coley, 2021.