I sometimes think of Gerycz Powers Rolin as more of an event than a band. The Columbus-based duo of dulcimer player Jen Powers and guitarist Matthew J. Rolin are a permanent musical and domestic partnership capable, on their own, of some absolutely stellar work. But the expansion to a trio seems more like happenstance. In late 2019, Cleveland-based Cloud Nothings drummer Jason Gerycz was all set to record a Rolin/Powers Duo session for the Garden Portal label and wound up sitting in on the proceedings. Anyone who has heard the woozy, beautiful fruits of their conference, which appeared in March 2020 as the cassette Beacon, knows that something quite extraordinary occurred. Gerycz’s clattering percussion pushed the already formidable union of Rolin’s doleful, ruminative guitar lines and Powers’s euphoric dulcimer into something of frightening beauty and intensity. The follow-up Lamplighter was recorded at Gerycz’s place in fall 20202 while Rolin and Powers were in town for a family wedding. By their own account, this one had a shade more deliberation than the entirely improvised debut, but not much. What emerges from the second album still sounds spontaneous and unrehearsed—distinct, sometimes dangerous forces coalescing into form like a weather system.
Their third album, Activator, is a decidedly less cataclysmic affair, but arguably a lovelier one. One might mistake Rolin’s reverberant guitar and Gerycz’s pointillistic drumwork on the opener “Entrances” for an old Gunn-Truscinski Duo track, until Powers’s trembling dulcimer begins to fill out the middle. Before long, guitar and dulcimer are fluttering in tandem like the glassy wings of some enormous cicada. The bright “Sun Rays” is a hallucinatory ramble of a song, that sounds a bit like peaking at first dawn. But it is the long, gorgeous title track that might be the most accomplished piece the trio has ever recorded. Based on a gentle, spiraling strum from Rolin, Gerycz’s bells and cymbal wash and Powers’s dreamy zither-like playing turn “Activator” into some kind of rustbelt new age masterpiece. “Activator” anneals, like metallurgy, heating and changing shape and growing ever purer and more refined. The drone and skeletal gamelan of the even lengthier “Ivory” proceeds like an homage to La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. And after the intensity of that track’s undulating tonalities, the sweet album closer “Stasis” feels like an exhalation.
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 rock ensembles of the turn of the millennium: Pelt and Jackie-O Motherfucker—or even their Aussie cousins in the Dirty Three. Three albums in, and they continue to make works that fuse folk forms with new age revery and minimalist heft. Whenever you find yourself down on the United States, just remember they are still making ecstatic music in Ohio. | b sirota
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