Though this is the first full Aquarelle release, its five electro-acoustic ambient-drone domains are populated with the panache and poise of a veteran. Working instruments up into a light lather, with myriad motions within seemingly static sustains, minimal cathedral-esque dronescapes are run through with a filigree of treated tone colours.
[Listen | Purchase] “…an exploration of sound textures created by multiple tones in very dense tunings performed in long durations. The layering of long tones only very slightly distinct in pitch creates a multitude of beats and generates complex overtone patterns and other fascinating psychoacoustic effects. The combination of apparently static surface textures and extremely active harmonic movement generates a highly original music that, while having things in common with early drone-based Minimalism, is utterly distinct in sound and technique.” That’s an excerpt from the wikipedia entry for Phill Niblock, but it could apply equally to Ryan Potts, a man half a century Niblock’s junior. Bringing a strong influence from classic American minimalism of that era, Potts’ Aquarelle project combines this with his own endowment. Aquarelle is a style of painting using thin, usually transparent, watercolours, which, like the title, links nicely to his sonology – a less austere texturalism couched in circling phases of acoustic threads and electronic strands.
Three years of revisions and deleted scenes have served to optimize Slow Circles, and, in an age where every sound is recordable, parsimony is at a premium. Not to propound unthinking minimalism, but rather to reflect on the felicitous economy of means at work here. Though this is the first full Aquarelle release, its five electro-acoustic ambient-drone domains are populated with the panache and poise of a veteran. Working instruments up into a light lather, with myriad motions within seemingly static sustains, minimal cathedral-esque dronescapes are run through with a filigree of treated tone colours. The pieces possess a deceptive surface stasis; below is secreted a Brownian motion – of strata, superstrata and substrata, of acoustic, electric, and electronic. Various currents find confluence in Slow Circles, filtered loops overlapping in recursions, unfurling with acoustic guitar, bells, and bows of found sound unbound. “Brill” starts with a slow release of long drawn-out strands of variously textured pitches, as acoustic guitar strums turn to hums and heave into thickening static-laden life (remote echoes of Endless Summer?). “Everything Changes into Itself” (audio clip below) opens with a tremulous hum that swells into an infinite fibrillating chord-wave; within a new chiming life starts to surface, then relents into a more serene space, leaving behind solitary string plucks. Deliberate acoustic slip-shows like this are rare, most rendered acousmatic as Potts plots his tones’ tweaked trajectories, hand heavy on his metamorphic devices. “A Good Egg” is a brief liquid lull drawn from a well of smooth thermal drones and gloop; then comes “Clementine,” protean, flickering, teeming with fireflies and candle flicker, bells and chimes, birds in flight, all under their own cyclic laws, yet informing each other, accruing increasingly dense waves of guitar, distilled from the caustic electricity of MBV, old shoes given a fresh gaze. The final neo-psychedelic dronescape of shimmer and fade noise and acoustics, “In Days of Rust,” gathers clouds of static and a panoply of infinite guitar into a tonal surge steepling up to a aerial view of the sight below.
Coming back down, Slow Circles is presented on Potts’ own fledgling imprint, Rest + Noise, in a wax sealed vellum envelope with artist notes, containing three of a possible seven photographs. The music feels similarly crafted, as if various thicknesses of brush had touched it with variously inciding strokes to temper and tint textures. The whole is invested with a present-ness, while still carrying a similar cargo of vintage shoegaze extract as 2007’s Of Memory and Momentum. This Aquarelle, though, paints with a fuller palette with a cache of revenant motifs, and a certain expressive expansiveness often overlooked in ambient drone circles. In these slow circles, there’s a sense that the smallest speck of sound is emplaced so as to give a refresh to surrounding cadences. This bespeaks a skill at effecting transmutations within pieces that distinguishes it from more generic cousins.
Slow Circles is out now on Rest + Noise. [Listen | Purchase]
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