Originally written for Clash in September 2021. Read the original article here.

The pursuit of perfection takes time and, in the case of musician Lewis Roberts, it’s all about leaving no stone unturned. As Koreless, it’s a journey that’s taken him over half a decade, refining long gestating works into his debut album, ‘Agor’, which stands as one of 2021’s most beguiling releases.

Deftly straddling the worlds of ambient and contemporary classical music, while ultimately not really sounding quite like any of them, Agor is an album that defies easy classification and serves as a fitting statement from an artist who has spent the past decade quietly innovating from the shadows.

Following the release of his debut EP, ‘4D’, in 2011, Roberts joined forces with Sampha to form the duo Short Stories, releasing the tracks ‘On The Way’ and ‘Let It Go’. He would later sign to Young, releasing the startling five-track EP in ‘Yūgen’ in mid-2013, before setting out to start work on his debut album.

Ever the perfectionist, Roberts has spent the best part the past eight years refining the project whilst busying himself with various collaborations, touring his AV show ‘The Well’ worldwide and, perhaps most notably, working FKA twigs to co-produce Magdalene.

May saw Roberts’ long-awaited return at Koreless with the release of ‘Moonlight’, a striking re-imagining of British composer Benjamin Britten’s interlude of the same name, following the release of remixes for the likes of Perfume Genius and Caribou earlier in the year.

Clash recently sat down for a chat with Roberts to reflect on ‘Agor’, the stories behind its evolution, defying genre classification and the enduring inspiration provided by pop and a sense of impending doom.

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I was looking back at interviews you gave around the time ‘4D’ was released in 2011 and there was a great quote where you were talking about the emotive quality of the work and the mission statement was “never bangers”. Ten years later, ‘Agor’ is out in the world and it feels like that still holds true.

Yeah, I guess that’s generally the leading factor when making anything. It’s chasing after that feeling… Yeah, that still holds true. Some things really don’t hold true from those old interviews, but a lot of things do.

No one really makes a habit of going back to their early interviews. That was maybe a bit unfair of me.

[Laughs] Well, no, but someone posted a clip from I think the only video interview I ever did around then and it basically just describes Agor. It’s really funny, because it was about ten years ago. I don’t really remember the interview, but it was cute. I looked like a little kid.

I’m interested to know how the music you were listening back then took you in the musical direction you went in. I understand you were listening to a lot of Cafe del Mar in the early days.

I guess it wasn’t even specifically Cafe del Mar, but just general electronic music from that period that just had this sort of quality to it: kind of apocalyptic. I love that sort of threshold between something really sweet, but also really, it kind of feels like impending doom. That lovely line between the two, when they meet with the kind of opposites meeting. I love that. That whole era for me kind of did that. And yeah, I think you can’t really have one without the other.

It’s like this undercurrent of sort of melancholia.

Kind of, but like, kind of quite violent – like a violent melancholy, or something… Frustration.

In terms of the timeline for the record, some of these tracks have been through many iterations over the years. How far back do some of these pieces go?

‘Black Rainbow’ is the oldest. I think that was almost on ‘Yugen’. It wasn’t quite ready, or something like that, or it didn’t need it. So a lot of the others are pretty new. Some of them happened very, very quickly. Some of them didn’t, so there hasn’t been a general rule. Some of them have been with me in different ways for a very long time and some just came together so easily… but there have been these little shapeshifting songs that have been following me around and haunting me for a while, yeah.

Did you feel a sense of pressure as time went on?

The label were really cool about the whole thing and I really thank them for that. They were checking in and I would be like, “It’s not quite there.” And then there were times where I’d disappear for quite a long time and wouldn’t speak to them. Then there were times when I was a bit more present, but they were like, “However long it takes, just do your thing.” So that was amazing. But then, yeah, pressure for me? I don’t know, really. I probably could have put more pressure on myself. At the same time, though, it just sort of took as long as it took. And it’s kind of fine.

When is a piece done for you? Is it ever done?

I think there is a point when it’s done, or you approach the point where it’s done. There are a few places where I’d taken stuff out when we were mixing and it’s not in the final mix and whenever I hear I’m like, “Damn, I wish I didn’t take that little bit out,” but generally feel like the track’s done, which is nice. I’ve recently been going back and listening to some of the older versions, because I’m putting the live show together… Some of the kind of more ‘straight ahead’ versions, and they’re also done in their own kind of way… I think a song can have so many lives. There are so many different ways it can be. So yes, the album is definitely a finished set of music, but there probably were different ways that that could have materialised in the end.

Tell me a little bit about the production of the record itself. I understand you used audio plugins for noise removal and stuff that isn’t traditionally used for music production.

I mean, specifically to kind of go in on that, I think filters are one way of cutting frequencies… Nothing above this frequency can come through, but noise reduction stuff works with what’s called an FFT, and so you split the audio bands into, say, 1,024 bands, and you control each one… It’s like a different way of controlling the frequency response using PCAs per band.

And it’s just another way of doing it and to me it’s a bit more bit more interesting, a little softer, and more fizzy, sometimes… I think my process is to add a lot of distortion and add a lot of harmonic information and then try and find ways of taking it out again to get further away from the original point. You can do that with filters, but PCA, FFT stuff is like another way of filtering and it’s just a way of making something messy, cleaning it up, making it messy again. You kind of kind of go through that a few times and then you end up somewhere else, which is nice.

Do you find it interesting at the end of that process – revisiting what it sounded like along the way?

I mean, sometimes it sounds totally different, but then I love committing that to an audio file and then you forget about that history and it just becomes this thing. And then it’s like you kind of start again with that. That’s what I really like about making music, it’s that kind of constant renewal of sounds.

In terms of the actual arrangement of the record, I understand you were inspired by a Quora post, right?

[Laughs] Yeah. I mean, the arrangement of the songs I found quite difficult… That took quite a long time, trying to find ways of keeping things moving without it just being this big messy, shouty mess. You know what I mean? I think about Daft Punk records or something and they just kind of move just at the right pace, so that was something I really struggled with or spent a lot of time trying to do.

But then the structuring of the album itself, I had all these tracks and they didn’t really make sense together as an album, because I’d been trying them in all these different arrangements. Then I Googled ‘how to arrange an album’ [Laughs]. I just found a Quora Digest post that told me and I just followed that method, and then I listened to it and I was like, it’s great, it’s really good, it works.

No shame. I mean, people have made albums following The Manual by The KLF, so…

Exactly. I have a song that isn’t on the album, but I struggled with it a lot and had all these like parts and I couldn’t really work out how to glue them together, and then I ended up putting Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’ on the grid, beat matching it at the same speed and just like moving blocks around to match the structure of that song… So the songs are totally different, but just copying the structure by moving all the bits around, and there it is, it’s done: a big thing at the end, a little kind of weird thing at the start… It’s a totally different context… It’s a little bit like sampling, but you’re not going to get into trouble.

Regardless of genre, everything comes back to pop to some extent, doesn’t it?

Well, yeah, I feel that there’s a reason that these sort of formulas work. And sometimes it’s worth trying other ways, but sometimes if what you’re working with is already quite abstract, it can be really useful to just try and force it into a very conventional structure, either within it, within a track, or within a whole album or something. It can be a nice way of making abstract stuff make sense – to force it into a very rigid and straightforward structure.

We’ve covered pop, let’s talk classical. You released ‘Moonlight’ earlier this year, which was your take on Benjamin Britten’s work. How big an influence is classical music for you?

Yeah, Benjamin Britten’s an interesting one, because he’s not one of the cool composers… but some stuff from him, there’s something very weird about it, I think, and this was one of them… Mostly I started just trying to learn to play the song, just to see what the chords were doing and then just sort of ended up playing it kind of differently and then it turned into that.

So it was born out of curiosity, really – to understand how the piece worked?

Well, a little bit of that and a little that I wanted to put something out before the album, just because I felt like I’d been working on everything for so long that I wanted something that sort of just happened and didn’t have all this baggage with it. I thought about maybe doing a cover, or something, and so I was listening to a lot of stuff. I wanted to do something that wasn’t a bit of original music, just something that felt less pressured. So that became that, basically.

I feel like genre has become less relevant, in order to put artists into boxes and classify them one way or another, but I’m always interested to ask artists like yourself where they feel that they sit if they had to define their sound. How would you kind of position yourself, if you had to?

Can I ask you that question first?

Of course! I mean, I would probably say “electronic” but maybe that’s a bit broad.

What happened to electronica? That was sick, right? I haven’t heard that for about 10 years.

Remember how iTunes used to arbitrarily ascribe genres? You’d download a Daft Punk album and it would be listed as ‘electronica’ and it’s not an electronica record.

No, that’s true. I wonder how important this stuff is for algorithms and stuff like that.

I mean, Spotify says everything is pop, so I don’t know what to believe.

Yeah, I don’t know, man. I think like, there hasn’t really been a new genre for so long. I mean, unless you’re like a purist drum and bass head, or something, it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. I think the names couldn’t keep up with the changes at some point… I think even the electronic side of things is weird because everything is electronic and also everything’s not electronic. Like, there’s not that much synth work on the record. It’s quite acoustic sounding too.

You’ve touched on it briefly, but what can we expect from the live shows?

The record has quite a lot of twists and turns and I think that doesn’t always translate so well to a live setting, so that’s why I’m kind of going back to earlier versions a lot to find them in their more junior form, where they’re a little bit… I don’t want to say raw, but more simple.

Is it that they’re a bit more malleable in that early stage? You can kind of move parts around a bit?

I just think that there’s less information and I think, in a live setting, you don’t want that much information… You’ve boiled it down and got rid of all of the shimmering surface level stuff to its bare essentials. I think that, for me, is what I enjoy more than a live thing. So I’m kind of trying to work out what the core of some of the songs was and how to kind of extend that and make it longer and more hypnotic.

Is it an enjoyable process for you, going back and doing that? I imagine that could be quite an intimidating prospect, deconstructing pieces like that.

It’s intimidating from a files point of view. I swapped software halfway through the album process, and so it’s an absolute nightmare from that point of view. It’s like dealing with the Library of Alexandria, or something, but it’s kind of like looking through an old photo album.

Finally, have you got more lined up in the way of remix work?

I’m a bit funny with remixes… Like the Caribou one, I’d sort of been trying for ages and I emailed him to say, like, “I just can’t do this. I’m sorry, I just can’t find anything.”

And then a few weeks later, I just was like, actually, I’ve got an idea and then I tried it… But yeah, I find it quite hard to commit to because you generally have to turn something in. It’s not like when you’re working on your own music, if it’s not sticking, you don’t have to turn it in and you don’t have to release it… With a remix, you’re not contractually obliged, but you do have to give something, so I’m quite wary of taking them on unless I’m pretty sure I can pull something good out. I don’t want to knock out crap remixes.