FutureEverything: Koreless @ Royal Northern College of Music, 25 February

Even for a producer who revels in fracturing recognisable electronic tropes into loosely connected flotsam, the addition of both Daedelus-collaborating visual artist Emmanuel Biard and the four-piece Intrada Choir from Moscow, has the potential to blast Lewis Roberts' already often teetering compositional structures as Koreless into smithereens.

FutureEverything doesn't exist to simply allow artists to parade what they already have, and so it proves that The Well, premiered at FutureEverything Moscow last year, pushes the Young Turks man beyond even his broad comfort zone. Material largely drawn from 2013 EP Yugen is given a sharp counterpoint to its cloud-break synth shimmers and pattering melodic droplets by the bassy exhales of the male choir stood behind the producer, the decision to allow the most human element of the performance to take presedence in the low-end over any form of programmed sub-bass an atypical fascination in itself.

It's the four men standing in the shadows behind the beaming circular illuminations of Biard's laser mirrors who perhaps impress the most tonight. They add a richness and density to Koreless's usually more spatially-minded pieces, and ebb and flow between taking flight above the rest of the music, or settling back into a faint, but brooding, amorphous hum.

At times it feels like Roberts hasn't fully worked out how to embed this contrastive element into his own more glottal production, pieces stopping and starting, great pauses taking place inbetween and there being an overriding sense of disjointedness looser than perhaps even his own intentions, which means that the end — when it comes — has the feel of cutting a tape reel mid-spin, bringing an abrupt end to an ambitious if slightly unfulfilling experiment. [Simon Jay Catling]