Mountain dulcimers are lightweight wooden instruments with only three or four strings; they look like guitars on a diet.
Instrumentation is sparse, pairing summer's day-on-the-stoop acoustic strums with a instrumental grab bag including banjos, dulcimers, ocarinas, hand drums, and shaken percussion.
Much of it has a suspended quality, of time stretched out, elongated, with overlapping waves of strummings that variously suggest guitars, harps, bells, and dulcimers constellating about a central drone.
These Central Asian performers and singers play plucked and bowed lutes, dulcimers and drums.
