MANAS

“It feels liberating to play as two brown people,” drummer and synthesist Thom Nguyen said in 2021, “that seek a more validating, open-minded world.” He was talking about MANAS, his radical and insurgent improvisational duo with guitarist Tashi Dorji and the way their music feels like a fight for liberation. Dorji arrived in Western North Carolina a quarter-century ago, moving from Bhutan to attend college; he soon slipped into circles that inveighed against the status quo, both politically and musically, and began down the path to becoming one of the world’s most invigorating improvised guitarists. Nguyen arrived in the area through adoption, a Vietnamese-American raised far outside the culture of his birth; he shifted among art-rock bands until improvising with Dorji sometime around 2014. A year later, they released their splenetic debut as MANAS, the name nodding to a national park back in Bhutan.

MANAS has long been an open vehicle for collaboration, from early work alongside fellow drummers Tyler Damon and Wes McCoy to a scintillating 2023 tape alongside Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Efrim Manuel Menuck. But the chemistry between Dorji and Nguyen as a tandem is both undeniable and expanding. They can move with the force of a flood traveling through a burn scar, the shards of Dorji’s strings and the tumult of Nguyen’s kit barreling downhill. But it is not all monolithic roar. On 2022’s excellent Live at Ace of Cups, the pair pull up several times during a set, as if reckoning with what they have already wrought before plunging back into the fray. Nguyen’s drumming emphasizes Dorji’s mesmeric melodic repetition, often overlooked in his solo work, suggesting that MANAS is not simply pursuing chaos but also pursuing a new system that actually works.