The North-Carolina electric guitarist Tashi Dorji and Indiana-based drummer-percussionist Tyler Damon keep deepening their unique, free-improvised interplay that feels at home in free jazz, metal, rock and Buddhist monastic music. Their latest album, «To Catch a Bird in a Net of Wind», second for the Viennese Trost label, follows «To The Animal Kingdom» with danish saxophone player Mette Rasmussen (2017). It is released as the Dorji and Damon duo receives much-justified attention with the Kuzu trio, composed with another sax player, Chicagoan Dave Rempis.

«To Catch a Bird in a Net of Wind» was recorded in March 2018 at the May Chapel in Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago, as part of the Elastic Arts’ Exposure Festival. The first, title-piece rolls according to its organic, inner rational. It begins with Damon’s metallic bells suggesting an evocative, Eastern ritual, soon dancing along the sensual-cyclical guitar lines of Dorji and solidifying the dramatic percussive work. The tight interplay intensifies and morphs into a liberating ecstatic-spiritual climax and again, into an abstract, minimalist conversation, offers later on a kind of distorted, noir-ish, cinematic enigma, accumulates enough thorny rhythmic power, and eventually, methodically tames its raw power.

The second piece, «Upon the Rim of the Well», offers a more open framework, and explores further the thorny undercurrent of the first piece, in a much confronted and uncompromising manner, and as on the first piece, sticks to a winding path to destinations yet unknown. Dorji and Damon lock upon a massive, heavy pulse, slashing and blurring each other’s gesture with manic conviction, exercising repetitive, fractured ideas, and enjoying gentle, poetic games without losing the fertile, intense tension for a second, as true, elastic artists of the art of the moment.

Eyal Hareuveni 

Tashi Dorji (g), Tyler Damon (dr, perc)