KORELESS - Agor

That electronic music had the capacity to turn into a strange, oblique and elusive beast is hardly news at this point. Ever since the earliest experiments of the last century on now-antediluvian machines, the range of possibilities and nuances offered by digital manipulation has proven to have no boundaries, if anything showing a constant hunger for evolution towards an unknown where humanity and technology grow ever closer. The development of new software only makes the field vaster and more incongruous, perpetually at the mercy of trends, hype, homages and perceptions, all blended together in a rapid succession of novelties that can give you a headache.

It therefore makes sense to talk about "Agor", the long-awaited full-length debut – a whole decade in the making, to be precise – of Welsh producer Lewis Roberts, aka Koreless. What's been said above finds an almost literal explanation in the grooves of this work: dazed stretches recalling the electronic compositions of James Holden and Terry Riley, glitch fragments wrapped in shimmering hyper-pop foil, beats as disjointed as spoiled wonky, and the hazy memory of nights on the now out-of-fashion old dancefloor of labelmates SBTRKT and Jamie XX. "Agor" is as much an arrival point as it is a question mark hanging over an entirely personal evolutionary process. But making sense of it is another matter entirely.

If you find it confusing how "White Picket Fence" layers a pastoral vocal over unresolved rhythmic ecstasy inside a video directed by Fka Twigs, then you already have an idea of what awaits you. Like the impalpable works of Croatian Amor, the unboxable deserted dancefloor of Actress, and the zig-zags of Hudson Mohawke, "Agor" strikes and then flees, carefully avoiding any gaze held too long. What is "Frozen"? Peals of synth-harp and vocal manipulations wound together into a kind of alien lieder, a song from a third-millennium Arcadia where form and structure have lost their importance in favour of a purely cerebral approach. "Black Rainbow" is pure emotional tension, yet it does nothing but spin on itself with unbearable paranoia, while the close of "Hance" and "Stranger" keeps churning fragments of breakbeat and garage in search of who knows what new indecipherable language.

Rhythm finally peeks through on "Joy Squad", while "Shellshock" pushes forward scraps of a Burial-like vocal idea that, within the context of this listen, ends up sounding almost pop. And in a sense, it's already over here: in just over half an hour of explorations, experiments and genre-defying manipulations, Koreless puts together a palette of modern, abstract electronic music, pure and simple.

In Welsh, agor means open. And in this particular declension, “Agor” is certainly open to interpretation: a non-place where non-rhythm and non-composition are melted down in the furnace of a contemporary art museum to create a rigorously amorphous sculpture, to be admired with suspicion and heaps of imagination in order to eventually make sense of it.

Just as capable of zeroing in on the most infinitesimal detail (headphone listening recommended) as of fiddling about on his laptop with seemingly no rhyme or reason, Koreless leaves us like this, teetering on the edge of the road, at the sole mercy of our own perceptions. Maybe he's a genius, maybe he's a clown, but one thing's for sure: the stage name he's chosen fits him like a glove: core less, without a core.

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06/01/2022