Faith Coloccia is an American, Seattle -based pianist, keyboard player, vocalist, percussionist, graphic artist, and photographer (and the wife of guitarist-vocalist Aaron Turner of Sumac). Tashi Dorji is a Bhutanese experimental guitarist based in Asheville, North Carolina, known for his duo with drummer-percussionist Tyler Damon and his Kuzu trio with Chicagoan sax hero Dave Rempis.
And Their Power Was Alive is Coloccia and Dorji’s first collaborative work, and it was recorded remotely between 2021 and 2025. Coloccia recorded the piano, organ, and tubular bells at the Unkown Studio in Anacortes in 2021. Dorji added nuanced guitar layers at his home studio in 2021 and 2022, and Coloccia added vocals and percussion on Vashon Island in 2024 and 2025.
The album blends Coloccia’s melodic piano playing and intimate, dreamy vocals, her textural drones with Dorji’s ecstatic, distorted and noisy guitar improvisations, and suggests unpredictable, melancholic and haunting sonic meditations. And Their Power Was Alive is an urgent yet fragile and poetic response to the worldly chaos and a world full of excessive force, and the first words Coloccia that sings are: «Cosmic Horror! / I am nothing, I am no-one. / barely exist! Emptiness!…» capture the album’s dramatic atmosphere.
And Their Power Was Alive sounds as if it addresses the spirits of the untimely dead and a planet’s natural world shaken by climate change. It stresses how impossible it is to separate the intimate and the political in this unsettling era.
Eyal Hareuveni
Faith Coloccia (piano, organ, tubular bells, vocals, percussion), Tashi Dorji (guitar)
