There was once a sense of momentum to the music made by Lewis Roberts, the Glasgow-based producer who records under the name Koreless. "Up Down Up Down" from 2009 matched elegant patterns to a skittering beat, delivered via a YouTube clip depicting traffic pouring in and out of a city. Now, some four years later, Roberts is all about suspending figures in time, chopping out the forward thrust altogether. The basic elements were already in place-- cut the beats from "Up Down Up Down" and the track wouldn't sound out of place on Yūgen, a five-track EP for Young Turks that forms the most significant Koreless release to date. But this isn't simply a case of Roberts figuring out where he can go by muting the drum tracks on his sequencer. There's a whole world of thought in Yūgen, a creeping sense that its weightlessness was only arrived at after long hours of procrastination.
Roberts discussed how his music is positioned far from anything that could be described as"real" in a recent Rising feature, emphasizing his love of artifice and rigidity. There's no looseness here, no feeling of him trying to overmatch the binary code scrolling down his screen. Instead, there's a sense of parity between man and machine, of Roberts respecting the framing devices his artificial working partner puts around his output. There's a feeling not dissimilar to the one Kraftwerk found on "Computer Love", where a tender synthesis of human emotions and mechanics are set in motion. At its best, on a track like the stuttering closer "Never", this EP resembles something like dialect between Roberts and his computer, getting close to Isaac Asimov's concept of a study of the personalities of intelligent machines. It makes even more sense when you learn that Roberts is a committed sci-fi fan.
If the goal of Yūgen is to remove the everyday from the equation, it only partly succeeds. But this isn't necessarily a failing of the piece; far from it. In fact, the sense of human emotion that bleeds into each track is what makes it so inviting. It shifts through feelings of loss, hope, and unease, with Roberts often fudging the sound to take it to the brink of malfunction. At times it's reminiscent of a clear-eyed take on the experiments Daniel Lopatin has uploaded to YouTube under his SunsetCorp moniker, especially when he splices the vocal sample on "Ivana" across acres of chimerical synths. It's a very visual record, reflecting the way the Haxan Cloak's Excavation conjured up images of a painfully laborious stumble through the afterlife. But Yūgen is more future dystopia than hellish fantasia. "Sun" is all glassy skyscrapers crashing into a purple sea, ripped straight from the cover of a pulpy mid-century science fiction novel.
While lost in Yūgen's world, it is useful to think back at how the Koreless sound has evolved; the earlier "4D" had traces of a soulful vocal, something Roberts would surely balk at now. His remix work for Foals seems even more incongruous, but presumably the paycheck makes up for it. Still, even in those pieces you can hear him slowly beginning to erase the world from his work. Yūgen is likely to feel similarly transitory to those early releases. This feels like a beginning, a place that Roberts has worked toward that isn't necessarily going to be where he's going to land. In the Rising feature he talks of more rules, more restrictions, getting to a point where "I don't get any input into it," as he puts it. That thought echoes common considerations about true artificial intelligence, something that feels potentially terrifying and revelatory, but leaves the future tantalizingly wide open.
