Aquarelle - Leave Corners

A Closer Listen

Autumn is a time for reflection and evaluation, a pause before giving thanks, an opportunity to put all things into perspective.  Four years after August Undone, Ryan Potts again releases an album that is perfect for fall, its measured pace and autumnal tones as gorgeous as the changing of the leaves.  There’s even time for silence, as demonstrated by the pauses between chords on “Open Absence pt. 1”.

The title is a reference to Leviticus 23:22:  When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field when you reap, nor shall you gather any gleaning from your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the stranger.  Aquarelle is generous in tone as well as in time, the warmth of his compositions suffused with an inner light.  Compared to the relative stillness of “pt. 1”, “pt. 2” sounds like a harvest, the instruments slowly surging forth like vegetables from fertile soil, the hums like the threshing of grain.  But even here, there’s room for inner peace, as evidenced by the patience of the acoustic guitar.  Orchestral timbres create the soothing atmosphere; the album lands on the pillowed side of drone.  This is music of safety, of belonging, of the end of the day when all things are put away.  To stretch the title, there are no corners, nothing to startle or hurt.  Instead, a feeling of blessedness washes over the listener, never more apparent than in the bells of “Brass Logic”.  But as Leviticus implies, when one’s cup runs over, it’s better to share one’s bounty than it is to hoard it.

The term aquarelle refers to “a style of painting using transparent watercolors”.  This gentle touch is applied to Potts’ entire discography, but is especially present here.  Leave Corners attempts to paint a thin layer of peace upon the listener, and by extension, the world.  If the final fading chords linger in the mind, then the album has done its job.  When the music ends, we’re a little bit quieter, our souls a little bit calmer ~ perhaps as a result our actions will be a little bit kinder as well.  (Richard Allen)

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Immediately, Aquarelle wields a very distinctive compositional technique. He fills space and then vacates it. This creates a very different kind of quiet; one that still bears the imprint of its former occupier, quivering with the residue of sounds recently departed. Just how harsh lights leave glowing silhouettes in my field of vision for a short while after, this silence bears the ever-fading memory of those cello harmonies and foaming distorted drones, clinging to the air like electricity, tracing the shapes of stirred oceans and complicated cradles of plucked and strummed guitars. Of course, the name “Aquarelle” tugs my mind helplessly toward thoughts of the water, but Leave Corners is truly tidal in its dynamic narrative. In, out, in, out. And thus, every “out” is not just an emptiness, but an inversion of happening – truly an absence, bristling with the frequencies that no longer ring through it.

These pieces are a ballet of filling up and draining away. “Cut Stone” rises to a boil of distortion and rasping overtones – with strings swimming in harmonic shoals beneath – before reducing to wisps of interference and crumpling microphone membranes, showcasing only those sounds that come to claim moments of coastal quiet (the strong wind, the gentle roll of the ocean). The opening of “Brass Logic” teases at a Steve Reich-style intersection of rhythm and harmony, with bells in stereo dialogue and strings raised upon platforms of cymbal wash. Distortion spurts upward and threatens to consume the entire frame, only to fade gradually out of the picture. Suddenly I’m left with crisp, minimal instrument interplay – cello, bells, cymbals, drones – each shape vivid against the newfound quiet, the edges crisper for being previously so obscured, the tranquility rocked by the din from whence it came, and the din to which it may inevitably return. Leave Corners is an album that floods the plain of time. Into every moment, Aquarelle places the kernels of history and becoming. The spectre of the turbulent past. The anxious speculations about the future.