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MANAS
The most yielding thing in the world will overcome the most rigid

Since 2012, MANAS, the improvising duo of Asheville's Tashi Dorji (guitar) and Thom Nguyen (drums), has forged a path of fearless, intuitive improvisation, drawing from free jazz, noise, punk, and experimental music. The most yielding thing in the world will overcome the most rigid balances the explosive energy of their concerts with attention to texture and form, creating music that is at once volatile, spacious, and collaborative.

MANAS conceptualized the album as a score for 100 Sunset, the award-winning feature film debut from Tibetan-Canadian director Kunsang Kyirong, at her invitation. As the band entered the studio — an herbal apothecary called Ritual Botanica, tucked alongside the French Broad River, one of the oldest rivers in the world — they decided to approach the music with a new emphasis on space, repetition and restraint, building song structures in real time.

With structural unity, the pair achieve sonic unity to a degree we have never before heard from them — immediately apparent on the album's propulsive opening track, "100 sunset," which Kyirong's film uses as a main theme. Here, the tonality of Dorji’s guitar preparations and sharp-edged attack makes his guitar sound like both itself and like Nguyen’s kit, and Nguyen’s bass drums are tuned in the key of Dorji’s guitar. The structure emerges from nothing, like traveling in the desert and realizing a mirage is an oasis, on “For the Wild.” Sound accumulates like tide crashing into shoreline on “Dreams of Durdak,” and “destituons le monde” is raucous, stormy, like a circling hurricane’s eye. Often, Dorji keeps time while Nguyen ranges free, and their instruments appear to merge.

The forty-third verse of the Tao Te Ching says that “the most yielding thing in the world will overcome the most rigid,” and the emptiest the most full. “From this,” Lao Tzu writes, "comes a lesson — stillness benefits more than action. Silence benefits more than words." Here, MANAS synthesize his wisdom: stillness and space coexist with attunement and heightened presence. "Improvised music, this music-making in the immediacy and now, in the moment," Dorji says, "feels way more radical than anything I've ever done. Making improvised music and creating radical music with the intention of opening people’s ears.”

Amidst his trailblazing improvising career, which spans countless solo and collaborative concerts and LPs — including with Efrim Manuel Manuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Susie Ibarra, and criminally underrated Chicago drummer Tyler Damon — Dorji describes MANAS as "a kinship,” “a brotherhood,” “rhizomatic.” And much like a rhizome in nature, The most yielding thing... unfolds organically, a thrilling release of great natural beauty.

Tashi Dorji - electric guitar

Thom Nguyen - drums

Recorded by Shane Justice McCord at Ritual Botanical, Asheville, NC, 2025

Mastered by James Plotkin

Artwork by William Schmiechen