Clearing by Powers / Rolin Duo

On CLEARING -

“Peridot” dives right in, and so I will. It’s a gemstone, peridot, and may become your favorite gemstone (as it has mine since I’ve dug in to its history and cultural significance). I like volcanoes and volcanic land formations. “Peridot,” the musical piece presented here by Powers/Rolin, is soundtrack to memories of in-person witnessed lava floes and the infinite parade of Herzogian docu-footage of rivers of fire and constructive destruction. There are edits or augmentations evident, creating (or revealing) form, in the tradition of Teo Macero’s work on In A Silent Way. Because rarely does the beauty of a musical moment survive the translation from performance to recording without losing that crucial thing that made it a once-in-a-lifetime happening without judicious and usually minimal manipulation. We overdub, we mix, we edit. We master, we distribute. If you’ve ever been out in the woods with some friends and come upon a little place in a creek that’s just big enough to get in for something resembling a ‘swim’ but is more like a ‘dip’, and no-one has brought costumes designed explicitly for swimming so some begin to disrobe completely, and then you do too even though you feel awkward and never really wanted to be naked around these people (or, really, almost anyone) but do it anyway, and the embarrassment never really goes away during the whole time you luxuriate in the cold water but almost does again and again as something in you realizes that this is the best and greatest juxtaposition of flesh with moving water that could ever have happened, if this has occurred to you in your life then now you have musical accompaniment for the sorting-through of that memory. In recent years, again and again, Powers/Rolin does it right & natural, and somehow I always think of sunlight and ’sunlight’ simultaneously when I listen to their recorded work. In the great tradition of deeper side twos, “Albatross” feints at providing respite from the momentum when really it uses your newly-turned cognitive soil to sow the real seeds: be here now, again; stay stripped, start crying if you have to or want to; there are forces at play inside of you and outside of you (yes, in Ohio, of all places) that recognize and respect the value of nakedness in mind and body and can instinctually lash that value to timbre, tone and harmony in the service of beauty.

- Will Oldham, April 2024