Prism by Powers / Pulice / Rolin
Compact Disc released March 2023
Digital Files Below
Prism is a special collaboration for Cached between Jen Powers, Matthew Rolin, and Cole Pulice. Across four tracks, the trio soars through their own cosmic blend of Atomic Americana. Prior to this collaboration, Jen Powers and Matthew Rolin, based in rural Ohio, have created space across several intersections of DIY music communities with their American Pastoral trance music. Rolin is a deft guitar player with a sound as expressive as it is skillful; Powers’ dulcimer playing is transcendent and hypnotic. Between applying their craft to more experimental and borderline-free-jazz worlds, as well as with troubadours like Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Powers and Rolin work keeps an air of far-out approachability. Across their bevy of collaborations, the two bring a honed-in and earth-oriented sensibility while presenting music that is undeniably galactic: blasted, even when it’s soft; Appalachian Trance. Cole Pulice, an electroacoustic woodwind player and composer based in Oakland, California, creates lush and vibrant music, using live signal processing of their saxophone to slip into otherworldly surrealist dreamscapes. Pulice’s recent solo albums and collaborations elegantly plumb this post-new-age ambient jazz paradigm that Cached seems to keep rolling in. On Prism, Rolin’s guitar soars in places and gently lilts in others, a fingerstyle player more aligned with an experimental or abstracted and free approach. Pulice flutters between blistering solos and temperate swooning, punctuating their otherwise sweet, lyrical, aromatic, and nectarous tone. Powers’ rippling dulcimer chimes give Prism an enormous resonant space; her buoyant arpeggiations become the melodic air through which Rolin and Pulice tumble and drift. This is spectral and voluminous music. Full of space, full of power, protons and neutrons - simultaneously macro and micro in scope. Undeniably pastoral, the album feels attuned to nature’s beaming ultraviolets, pollen bursts, sienna-colored skies. Dazzling Cascades of horn, guitars and dulcimer draw the iris into a world of sound caught inside a beam of scattered light.
Jen Powers: hammered dulcimer
Cole Pulice: alto & tenor saxophones, hardware, signal processing
Matthew J. Rolin: guitars
mixing by Matthew J. Rolin
mastering by Matthew J. Sage
©MMXXIV