Anchoring in the Present Moment

When I first speak with guitarist Tashi Dorji over Zoom, it is an unseasonably warm October day. Our different locations—Dorji’s, a small valley town on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina, and mine, New York City—both display leaves in peak fall colors: carotenoids and anthocyanins painting deep yellows, crimsons, and neon electric shades of orange across our disparate landscapes. Dorji flips his computer around to show me how peaceful his setting is—with birdsong and beech trees—and yet, his serene surroundings belie the apocalyptic events that recently ravaged the region. At the tail end of September, North Carolina was rocked by Hurricane Helene, which dumped historic levels of rain and heavy winds along the Blue Ridge Mountain area, which includes Asheville. 

Images and notes about the destruction reached Dorji while he was rounding out a tour supporting postrock mainstays Godspeed You! Black Emperor on several dates across Europe. While his home, nestled in an Appalachian holler, was left relatively unscathed, it was surrounded on all sides by the destruction. “I’ve seen massive trees, just uprooted. It’s the biggest storm they’ve ever had here, and people are like, ‘I hope it’s the last one,’ ” Dorji says. “The last one? No. This is probably the beginning of the first one.” 

While Dorji’s life has been focused on music, promoting the release of his latest album, we will be wherever the fires are lit—released last month—his partner has been doing mutual aid work on the ground in Asheville, volunteering with ROAR (Rural Organizing and Resilience) in the aftermath of Helene. “My partner was like, ‘I didn’t pay for anything for the past two weeks because I was doing mutual aid: free gas, free food, free clothing, free everything.’ She told me that nobody felt like they owned anything. People were giving away their cars,” Dorji says. 

“It shows glimpses of a possibility.”

In the conversation that follows, the Bhutanese-born guitar prodigy discusses all sorts of possibilities. The possibility of a young child in Bhutan becoming inspired by American rock music. The possibilities of traveling the world and the ways we touch people without words. And the possibility of a Buddhist worldview that is anchored in anarchist and antiauthoritarian values. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

I know you recently came back from an EU tour supporting Godspeed You! Black Emperor. How was that trip? Touring is very much liminal—it is constantly moving and always has an unsettling feeling in many ways. You are passing music, you are navigating through different stages, through different communities of folks, folks who are listening … traversing through these [stages] without saying a word. There is a sense of peace and a meditative aspect to touring—you spend a lot of time [by yourself] waiting on tour, you know. Whether it’s before sound check, after sound check, or after playing … there is a lot of time for yourself. 

While you don’t have vocals in your music, your compositions can be quite emotionally evocative—whether they are more serene and contemplative or more chaotic and urgent-sounding. I am glad this music evokes emotion and feelings. I don’t really prepare structurally for how it should sound. For me, improvisation is about immediacy and not knowing. I am not even sure how to talk about it—it is a moving and changing.

It’s nonconceptual. I guess so, but these terms mean nothing to me —it’s Western logic to name and categorize. For me, improvisation is something that has to be deeply a part of your everyday life, it has to exist incessantly here and [be] alive. 

You grew up in Bhutan and immigrated to the United States as a foreign student outside of Asheville, North Carolina. What was the reason you came to Asheville? In Bhutan, I found a brochure for this small college in North Carolina. I was bored and wanted to leave home and see the world. We didn’t have the internet, so I wrote a letter to the school, and they wrote me back. It took like a year to process the applications and other things. They gave me a really good scholarship, and next thing I knew I was in the US.

Were you around a lot of Buddhism when you were growing up? Yes, very much so. 

The spiritual music of Bhutan and the surrounding regions is so powerful. Did monastic music resonate much for you growing up? Monastic music is always a resonating soundtrack to life there, but I think I saw it as the music of the elders—I think [that] was due to its formalities and the traditions associated with it.

We have these festivals in Bhutan called tshechu. I think [those were] my first introduction to live performance. The festival is basically a dance ceremony, with lots of colorful masks and dresses. These mask dances were deep connective tissue for me to my family’s cultural heritage. The traditional music and dances are deeply hypnotic and heavy. The chants and the drums and the massive horns—those are powerful things for a little mind to grasp.

Think of the idea of the Buddha—he came from royalty and turned away from all that. There’s this anarchistic nature where he was like, “OK, fine, this is not good. I want to be with the people, within the grounds.” He saw the futility in material and capital and opted to live in the commons.

You also come from a very musical family. I do. My mom is a traditional flute player. Her father, my grandfather, was a player of the traditional lute, called the dramyin. My cousin Namgay, from my mom’s village, is also a great dramyin player and a dancer. And [I have] another cousin who is a folk musician in Bhutan. 

So, fortunately for me, music was very accepted in my family. There was always this openness to it. I got a guitar pretty early on, and my mom was very accepting of that. Which is unusual, especially coming from Bhutan, where people are more practical about things, like having a job or working at a farm. My family was always very encouraging. 

I’ve often seen your music described as meditative. Does playing guitar feel like a spiritual practice for you? It is meditative if you want to see it that way, but also ungrounding and volatile if you look at it from that angle. I think it’s all very subjective with sound. Playing guitar is simply living and breathing for me. 

Perhaps it is my equivalent to dharmic practice. It seems like the most impermanent, most nondualistic thing I know. 

Do you think that Mahayana Buddhism is compatible with anarcho-socialism? [Laughs] Maybe a real Buddhist guru can answer that. Do you think it is?

I am begging the question a bit. Do you know Uchiyama Gudo? He was a Soto Zen Buddhist priest and anarcho-socialist activist. Quoting passages from the Lotus Sutra and the Diamond Sutra, Gudo wrote:

As a propagator of Buddhism, I teach that “all sentient beings have the buddhanature” and that “within the dharma there is equality, with neither superior nor inferior.” Furthermore, I teach that “all sentient beings are my children.” Having taken these golden words as the basis of my faith, I discovered that they are in complete agreement with the principles of socialism. It was thus that I became a believer in socialism.

Do you think Buddhism is inherently anarchistic? I’m not a Buddhist scholar, so I can’t speak for the dharmic tradition, but I think it’s safe to say that there is symbolism that supports that. Think of the idea of the Buddha—he came from royalty and turned away from all that. There’s this anarchistic nature where he was like, “OK, fine, this is not good. I want to be with the people, within the grounds.” He saw the futility in material and capital and opted to live in the commons. The idea of the dharma and the dissemination of knowledge in the Buddhist tradition feels anarchistic in that it teaches you to let go of the material and embrace the potential of wisdom, mutuality, and compassion. That, to me, is inherently anticapitalist and anarchistic. You deconstruct capital and material in your mind and your body, and you create autonomy, and with that autonomy you create possibilities of creating other autonomous communities. 

I’ve seen words like “urgency, immediacy, and becoming” thrown around in reference to your work. Do any of those terms resonate with you? Yes, words like “urgency, immediacy, and becoming” do resonate in the sense of how improvisation as a practice for me is about completely inhabiting the immediate and creating new possibilities. It’s about playing in the moment, in the now. It’s also about building from the moment and becoming. 

Your friend Aaron Turner [of SUMAC] describes your music as “anchoring itself in the present moment,” because of how raw your improvisation is. Does that sound accurate to you? Yes, and I like the idea of “anchoring in the present moment.” Doesn’t this go back to the dharma again—the importance of current experience of the here and now? Perhaps improvisation is learning to live in true awareness and humility right now.