#jen powers

[dustedmagazine]

Gerycz/Powers/Rolin — Activator (12XU)

Activator is the third album by percussionist Jason Gerycz, hammered dulcimer-player Jen Powers, and guitarist Matthew J. Rolin. Powers and Rolin are partners as well as collaborators, and often play in entirely improvised duo settings. There is no shortage of underground free folk interplay here. There are also, as they describe them, “song-based structures,” in which melodic themes abound.

“Entrance” begins the recording with a rootsy riff from Rolin with rolled chords from Powers, gradually supplanted by metrically unstable and textural playing from Gerycz. Rolin soon incorporates raga-inflected scales and Gerycz follows with kit-fuls of fills while Powers accentuates upper partials. A gradual slowdown leads into arpeggios and repeated percussion attacks. The original riff returns, but now is savored in the new tempo and then distressed with repeating dissonant intervals from both Rolin and Powers. Bends and harmonics populate the piece’s coda.

“Sun Rays” is a short-form piece filled with chugging beats and a hummable tune. Partway through, it erupts into repeated notes and thunderous drummed punctuations. The balance is a revised version of the opening coruscated with repeated notes. Sometimes, theme-based sections and effusive improvisation are melded into a single piece. The 11-minute long title track is an example of this, with a mid-tempo riff and sustained pitches creating a thematic section that is succeeded by intensely wrought improvisation.

“Ivory '' is a durable long-form piece, probably the best music on Activator. After a melodic guitar intro, repeated intervals from the instrument plus clangorous percussion and thrumming pentatonic patterns glinting on dulcimer blend into a non-Western sounding accumulation. The next section is more placid, pitting a sustained pitch in the percussion against arpeggiations and a dulcimer drone. Then a noise-filled drone is accompanied by overtones and chimes.

The recording closes with “Stasis,” in which a repeated chord progression is treated to placid adornments. Gerycz is a fantastic power drummer, but the hand percussion that he uses here is perfect for the piece’s mood. Its gentle rattling provides a layer of non-metric activity at odds with the solid pulse of the guitar and dulcimer ostinato. “Stasis” ends without fanfare, the music simply stopping at the tail end of a progression. It is an idiosyncratic conclusion, a microcosm of the various twists, turns and surprises on Activator.

Christian Carey

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Joseph Allred

Photo Credit: Susanna Bolle

Joseph Allred grew up in Tennessee and currently lives in Boston, where he’s found good company with acoustic musicians such as Glenn Jones and Rob Noyes. Like them, he makes music that can easily be tagged as American Primitive guitar, a category that Dusted’s Bill Meyer invoked in a 2019 review of two Allred cassettes that were issued on the Garden Portal label: “Of all the musicians who convened in Takoma Park, MD last year to attend The 1000 Incarnations of the Rose festival, Joseph Allred hews closest to American Primitive guitar’s mystical spirit.”

But Allred has also made music that has little to do with that approach, and is not even played on acoustic guitar. A quick survey of the seven vinyl albums and virtual basketful of tapes and downloads that Allred has released on Feeding Tube, Garden Portal, Melliphonic, and Scissor Tail Records since 2013 will turn up songs played on piano and harmonium, banjo instrumentals, and sound collages made from cell phone recordings as well as sonically rich and emotionally commanding acoustic guitar soli. Meyer also reviewed Allred’s newest release, Michael, out on Feeding Tube, noting that “his grasp of the essence of American Primitive guitar, which is that music is not just an idiosyncratic reordering of certain influences… that are played on a steel-stringed acoustic guitar, but an articulation of one person’s uneasy relationship to the wider world.”

Mike Gangloff – “The Other Side of Catawba”

Ten Years Gone : A Tribute to Jack Rose by Mike Gangloff

This song was Mike’s contribution to Buck Curran’s 10 Years Gone tribute to Jack Rose that came out last year. In addition to being a moving tribute to his friend and musical co-conspirator, it points to the mystical, dirge-y side of the Appalachian fiddle tradition that I’m particularly fond of, evoking more than a bit the keening wail of graveside bagpipes.

Powers/Rolin Duo — St

St by Powers / Rolin Duo

A lovely ecstatic drone folk album from these lynchpins of the Columbus, OH cat-instagramming scene. Shimmery, rumbly, at once earth-planted and heaven-turned. 12-string guitar paints color washes like the album’s watercolor sun-scape cover and hammered dulcimer fills to the brim with echo, sometimes sounding on the verge of being blown apart by its own reverberation. It’s been providing a much-needed meditation and catharsis lately.

Ostad Elahi — The Sacred Lute: The Art of Ostad Elahi

Nur Ali Elahi was a Kurdish musician, mystic, jurist, and philosopher born in Iran to the Yarsani religious leader Hajj Nematollah. Despite showing a prodigious talent for the tanbur and being recognized as a master musician at an early age, he never played music in a professional performance setting, preferring to use the instrument, which accompanied him throughout his life, as part of a personal spiritual practice. The tanbur has an airy, ephemeral sound often described as dry or even ascetic, but it uses a rolling right hand technique that creates seemingly unending hypnotic swirls of notes.

Buck Gooter — Finer Thorns

Finer Thorns by Buck Gooter

I met Billy Brett and Terry Turtle about 10 years ago when the band I used to play in shared a spot with Buck Gooter on the lineup of a Harrisonburg, VA basement show. I thought of Suicide and Big Black with some primal Ramones-tinted sludge seeping through the cracks, but it was ultimately something uniquely weird in the best possible way. I didn’t get to know Terry as well as I wish I could’ve before he died last December, leaving Finer Thorns as his last album, but he was a special person and a true outsider art savant. I wish Billy the best as he carries the Buck Gooter flag forward on his own.

Stanley Brothers — The Complete Columbia Stanley Brothers

My dad sang in a gospel quartet and I used to poke fun a bit by asking if it hurt his feelings that most of the gigs they got were at funerals. Maybe because I’ve experienced a lot of loss in the last decade or so I understand the special place gospel music has around death for some of us, but I think it can call us to start building a heaven on earth just as it imagines a place where our departed friends and lovers watch over and wait for us. These recordings made between 1949-52 are some of the finest gospel and bluegrass to be found and have been my medicine for homesickness and world-weariness.

Arvo Pärt — Für Alina

I did a transcription of this piano solo for a tape that came out on Michael Potter’s Garden Portal label two years ago and found my first experience with transcription deeply rewarding. Für Alina is a quiet, introspective piece, arranged to slowly unfold and then fold back up and consisting of two voices that move together against an occasionally sounding pedal tone. When I arranged it for guitar, one of the alterations I needed to make is that I put the two voices in the same octave, whereas on the piano they’re played an octave apart. Pärt intended the dedication to “Alina” as a consolation to a mother who had recently been separated from her daughter, so distance is a theme of the piece, but I found it especially poignant that the tension between the two voices seems much more pronounced when they’re put closer together.

Julian Bream — Dances of Dowland

The recently departed Julian Bream was a giant of classical guitar but his anachronistic lute playing technique and use of an instrument with some modern amenities earned him the ire of the more authenticity-minded lutenist community (apparently a fairly ornery bunch). I don’t recommend caring too much about the difference between the right hands of a classical guitarist and a dedicated lutenist, and I still love this album of Dowland renditions for the lute. Bream is a particularly good candidate to bring out the drama and flamboyance that can be extracted from the music, and it’s always a treat to hear the joy and mastery he brought with him to whatever era or instrument he happened to be playing.

Popol Vuh — Spirit of Peace

Music can be weaponized and used to challenge oppressive structures in overt and destructive ways, but in the hands of those like Florian Fricke, it creates spaces for self-transcendence and communion with the Divine, which builds the foundation necessary for successfully transfiguring those structures or building new ones. It allows us to enlighten and empty ourselves, to become conduits for Divinity and activate it in the world. Like much of Popol Vuh’s music, Spirit of Peace speaks from soul to soul.

Alan Sparhawk — Solo Guitar

I’ve been experimenting with an electric guitar a little after having gone two years or so without plugging in at all and using some of that time to think about what the electric guitar excels at or might be uniquely capable of. Alan Sparhawk’s Solo Guitar came out the year after he had a well-documented breakdown that led to the cancelling of a 2005 Low tour and an eventual hospitalization, and this album stands out to me as a testament to how bleak and alienated the electric guitar can sound. It’s also a reminder of what made me put the electric guitar down for so long to begin with. It’s a beautiful album, but sometimes I can’t help but hear audio renderings of hellscapes Alan must have been fighting through.

Dorothee Soelle — The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

Dorothee Soelle was a German Protestant theologian who came of age against the shadow of Germany’s horrific deeds during World War II. She spent her professional career as an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and Cold War arms race, patriarchal renderings of God, and a perversion of Christianity she called “Christofascism.” The Silent Cry stands as one of her most important and widely read works. She imagines an imminent, politically engaged mysticism, one equally at odds with the violent, patriarchal exploitation enacted by capitalism, and other-worldly mysticisms that refuse social analysis.

[12xurecs]

Gerycz/Powers/Rolin — Activator (12XU)

Activator is the third album by percussionist Jason Gerycz, hammered dulcimer-player Jen Powers, and guitarist Matthew J. Rolin. Powers and

[12xurecs]

Gerycz Powers Rolin : Activator : Aquarium Drunkard

Whether Gerycz Powers Rolin are a band or simply a semi-annual happening, they have already staked a claim to the legacy of the great free r

[12xurecs]

[12xurecs]

coming January 12 Gerycz Powers Rolin - 'Activator' (12XU 152-1) preorder at 12XU.bigcartel.com or 12XUrecs.bandcamp.com

'Activator' is the third installment from the trio of Jayson Gerycz, Jen Powers and Matthew Rolin, who respectively need no introduction writ-large. For anyone observing the American underground in the last decade, whether live, on tour or across various listening formats, these names are attached to the crucial goings-on propelling the Rust Belt and beyond. 

Here we find the trio expand their collaborative vernacular across two sides of vinyl starting with the steady strumming of "Entrance", a paradox of pensive riffing and anxious percussion where Gerycz and Powers meld into a nebulous cluster of shapeshifting staccato and phantom rhythms. Tracks like "Sun Rays" and "Ivory" walk a tightrope between structured songcraft with chord patterns and concise riffs held together by steady cadence, ranging from hand bells to the bombastic, full-kit eruptions Gerycz has perfected over many years. As each piece ascends and unfurls, Powers provides a gentle tessellating from her dulcimer, with each strike landing like raindrops upon shallow puddles. The title track "Activator" displays the full range and might of the trio, highlighting and merging the many facets and abilities each individual brings to the table, forming the singular identity that has made the project so beloved. Starting with slow dulcimer swells, watery bells, and mellow, motorik electric guitar, the track slowly tangles up its own elements and tumbles itself with grace and patient beauty while ascending to an ecstatic explosion of distortion and thunderous drumming before dissolving into an iridescent singing bowl meditation. 

'Activator' leaves it all on the table, displaying a perpetual metamorphosis of different modes from improv to song structure, a display of seemingly endless possibilities executed with a nimble prowess that comes from time spent in close collaboration. Over 40+ minutes of transcendent music the trio employs these multitudes of music making approaches while remaining cohesive and articulate, beautiful and mysterious - a rare talent for the artists and a gift for the listener. 

- John Elliott 

[radiophd]

Hidden Nook, by Powers / Pulice / Rolin

from the album Prism

powers / pulice / rolin -- hidden nook

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