Gerycz, Powers & Rolin - Beacon (2020)

There are some instruments that sound just fine if you can just get them going and stay out of the way. Columbus, Ohio residents Jen Powers and Matthew J. Rolin have made a duo out of two of them. Powers plays hammered dulcimer, and Rolin plays 12-string guitar. You might already have encountered Rolin’s swell debut LP, which got a short review here last fall. As befits a solo endeavor, it put a premium on pacing and variety by shifting between instruments and styles. When you’re one guy playing on your own, you may feel the need to change things up to keep people engaged.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but Beacon patiently navigates by a different set of stars. It builds upon the duo’s knack for finding the right sound and then letting it shimmer for a while. They’ve honed this skill by playing out, a lot; if you’re a head for free-flowing, folk-derived sounds, you play out, and you’ve done a lower profile show somewhere in the space bounded by the Great Lakes and the Hudson, Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, you may well have shared the bill with them.

But Beacon isn’t a duo recording. Jayson Gerycz, a percussionist who plays with a full slate of cassette-appreciative combos, joins Rolin and Powers, and his addition is one of the session’s concessions to the notion that sometimes a little bit more is a bit more of a good thing. Gerycz is more sound-sensitive than chops oriented, and there are moments on the lengthy performances that begin and end this tape when his elongated metallic textures and understated brushwork blend so thoroughly with Powers’ unspooling carpet of sounds that the combination feels like the product of one instrument. Rolin switches between brisk strumming and gamboling picking patterns that contrast texturally with the dulcimer while keeping pace with it, imparting the aspect of a big layered sound that varies like cloud banks, ever changing, ever the same. On the shorter pieces in between, the musicians’ contributions differentiate a bit more, adding a bit of lyric melody here or lightly stated groove there. But no one asserts their presence at the expense of the overall sound; those lessons about not getting in one’s own way have been well learned.