Following the release of singles ‘White Picket Fence’, ‘Joy Squad’ & ‘Black Rainbow’ Welsh producer Lewis Roberts aka Koreless releases his much-anticipated debut album Agor via Young / Remote Control Records, an album over five years in the making.
There is an idea of hidden depths suggested by the title of Koreless’ debut album. Agor is the Welsh word for open and it’s an apt name for a recording which exists at sensory thresholds, helping guide the listener from one realm to another less visited.
Agor is unlike any other record you’ll hear. It straddles the worlds of dance, ambient and contemporary classical while not sounding like an example of either. The bristling ecstatic trills and rushes of ‘Yonder’ rub up against the euphoric breeze of ‘Black Rainbow’, ‘Shellshock’ and ‘Joy Squad,’ while ‘Act(s)’ and ‘Strangers’ connect Lewis to a much more distant world: a cybernetic daydream of the composers Benjamin Britten and Edward Elgar.
The album’s lead single, ‘White Picket Fence,’ has a spine-tingling anthemic quality to it – with a symphonic melody and a faceless vocal hook. An evidence of Robert’s mass refinement, there are subtle occurrences throughout which he refers to as “ruptures”, where the “bottom falls out of the track and it suddenly collapses into nothingness, like a plane taking off then bursting into the clouds”. It also happens on ‘Frozen’ he explains – “you get some gut-wrenching feeling when the music bursts outwards and collapses into nothing”.
Agor welcomes you to dive into a world of beauty, ecstasy and slow-motion horror, just below the surface.
