MUTEK has cooked up a strong program for its Nocturne 4 evening presented at the MTelus on Saturday, which will feature three Britons, namely Dauwd, the brilliant Loraine James and the parsimonious composer Koreless.
Main collaborator of the musician FKA Twigs, the latter finally, after 10 years of waiting, launched his first album last year. Title Agorthe unclassifiable work consolidated the musician’s reputation as a sound designer while demonstrating that he had also learned to compose songs as complex as they are evocative.
“You see, with many musical genres, if you take the percussion out, the music becomes a lot more ambiguous,” says Lewis Roberts. The Welsh musician rose to fame as Koreless aged 19 when he released the stunning mini-album 4D in 2011, which contains two sweet little sweets of ingenious garage soul bouncing over plump bass.
“I like techno, I like dance, but remove the percussion, and there, it becomes interesting, he continues. The problem is that for this music to make sense in the context of a dance floor, percussion is necessary. »
Maybe we’ll dance when Koreless takes the MTelus stage alone, a little before 11 p.m. Saturday. Some songs from the album Agor could incite us to it — the frenetic, but melodious Black Rainbowin particular, or Shellshockwhich, with its sung and hatched ritornello, suggests a house rhythm without really assuming it, which makes it mysterious.
Ambiguity first
It’s because Koreless prefers to avoid too obvious rhythmic patterns, he explains: “The problem with percussion is that, when you use them in a traditional way, you immediately associate the piece with a style musical”, house, techno, garage, trance, etc. “It’s hard to compose rhythm parts without the listener being able to instantly put the song into a category. I prefer more ambiguous stuff. »
And anyway, Roberts is himself a very bad dancer. Well, he’s the one saying it—with a broad smile, by the way. We catch the jovial musician on Google Meet on a beautiful sunny afternoon, while he is in a park in the heart of London “because it is the only place a little quiet here”. MUTEK is giving him the opportunity to visit us for the first time, he is delighted. “I already have a lunch planned with Jacques Greene”, the Montreal composer and DJ who, like Jamie XX, Four Tet and Caribou at the time, had spotted the talent of the young producer, even inviting him to launch a single (Lost in Tokyo) on his Vase label in 2012.
return to the world
However, the conception of his first album, Agor, had everything from the obstacle course. Ten years of doubts and hard work, interspersed with a few releases (the microalbum Yugen in 2013, delicious) and by his fruitful collaboration with FKA Twigs. “Am I a perfectionist? It’s a funny word… I wouldn’t say perfectionist, rather terribly anxious”, he admits, recognizing in the same breath that he had to resolve to finally deliver the album, otherwise he would still be working on it. .
“I feel liberated to have done it, he breathes. Because by dint of isolating yourself for the needs of the album, by dint of keeping silent, you end up no longer having a dialogue with the world. I feel like I’ve come back to the world” since its release in July 2021.
With Agor, Koreless moved away from club music, refined his writing skills and perfected his production techniques. This disc crackles with sonic details, the musician having the patience to spend hours, “even weeks”, shaping his sounds using the infinitely malleable Max/MSP software.
“I like all the synthesizers and software with which the gesture of creating a sound is a complicated affair,” he laughs, almost embarrassed. It inspires me, actually; the slow process of meticulously working through each sound is rewarding. And using Max/MSP, I constantly come up with cool new ideas for playing with sound material. Afterwards, you can really get lost with this software, bury hours and hours in it. I’m lucky to be able to make a living doing this,” adds the musician, who follows a very diverse musical diet ranging from jazz to classical music, including “a bit of rock” and, of course, dance.
“These days, I listen to a lot of old electronic music from the 1950s; [le travail des artisans du] Musical research group [fondé par Pierre Schaeffer] inspires me a lot these days, there’s a lot of good ideas in there that haven’t been exploited” in popular music.
We will discover some of them during the concert that Koreless will present on Saturday evening, made up of unreleased and remodeled versions of the songs ofAgor. “I’m a bad dancer, but I still move a little in concert. I also have this weird superstition that I give shows without wearing shoes because I feel like every time I wear them, something goes wrong! »