“Tornado-conjuring” improv supergroup Manas + Che Chen visits the normal bookstore! Opening for them: Jamal Moore, Nic Francis.

From their album Things of Outtakes: “MANAS are guitar and drums, with nothing more than guitar and drums. It’s easy to think about the historicization process of this form of non-Rock music in America, but it’s very difficult to think this record as “canonic”. Nowadays this form remains strong and communicative like the day 0, probably because improvisation is extratemporal, slumped in the “now”. They call every song with the name “Thing”. We meet things in the modality of the meeting or the things encounters us. So, the thing (a thing is always some-thing) needs a vital interplay to be called “thing”. MANAS can encounter things, create significance of things and disintegrate things.”
~ Körper / Leib, Italy

Tashi Dorji is a Bhutanese guitarist and improvisational musician known for his avant-garde and experimental (read: deeply gnarly, finely arty) approach to music. Tashi’s idiosyncratic take on the instrument, one defined by movement and profound openness to technique, adds up to a post-colonial disembowlment of guitar traditions that stands Tashi next de- and re-constructionist giants as various as Derek Bailey, John Fahey and Bill Orcutt.

Thom Nguyen is an Asheville-based improvisor and drummer of MANAS (w/Tashi Dorji), Wasting, We Bow To No Masters, Nest Egg, etc. Producing energetic bursts and invoking a sensitivity to space that one often associates with Free-Jazz and New Music percussion, Nguyen’s approach elegantly bridges works of sonic sculpture with a punk aesthetic of immediacy, of aggression and playfulness.

Che Chen is a creative musician and multi-instrumentalist interested in the overlapping fields of intuitive music, improvisation and tuning theory. In addition to the solo and collaborative projects here, he also plays guitar in the band 75 Dollar Bill, which he founded with percussionist Rick Brown in 2012. He is also a member of True Primes, and runs a small label called Black Pollen Press.

Event location:

Normal's Bookstore