Strong Words, Softly Spoken: How Kwes Became Warp's Resident Soul Man

It's the hottest day of the year so far, with a 27C sun blazing down on London, but Kwesi Sey is indoors. "It's gorgeous today," he tells me while sat at a piano in his North London studio, "but I couldn't hang out for too long cos it's so hot." Instead of luxuriating outside like much of London, he's hard at work. I catch Sey in the middle of working on the score for a short film and looking for musical equipment online. Elsewhere on his agenda, he has artists he's working with for Bokkle, the label he started alongside his brother. He speaks softly and thoughtfully, punctuating his responses with "Thank you's" or short laughs. This could be due to lack of sleep or sun – he apologises for being "really zoned out", and giving answers that he considers disjointed – but his head is on straight. He is a focused man. The sun can wait.

While most recognised in industry terms as a producer and songwriter – able to bring the best out of artists as disparate as pop star Eliza Doolittle and ex-Anti Pop Consortium member Beans – Sey also has an expanding catalogue of art-pop solo material under the name Kwes. Debuting in 2009 with the 7" single 'Hearts in Home', he had been working steadily with labels like Young Turks and XL – "getting on with stuff", as he puts it.

At the time, a solo career wasn't the end game – just being able to work with musicians was the primary goal. "I really wanted to get work experience and do A&R," he says, "but at the time I had never really worked on other peoples' music as much as I wanted to." So he made his own music. Then one day, Warp Records got in touch with Sey's manager. Shortly thereafter, he was going back-and-forth with the label over Myspace. In November 2011, he signed to Warp as a solo artist.

He remembers being introduced to the label at the age of 12 via Chris Cunningham's infamous video for Aphex Twin's 'Windowlicker'. "I saw this 'Windowlicker' video and it was just mind-blowing to me. It still is but, watching at age 12, it was a trip and a half." He does an impersonation of his pre-adolescent thought process: "How… how… how are they able to get this on TV?" From there, he began digging into the label's back catalogue and what their roster of artists represented. Every once in a while, he remembers that he is now part of that roster. Sey puffs out, as if to show how surprised he still is at how everything has turned out. "I just really wanted work experience," he says. "I guess it's worked out for the best."

At the time of signing to Warp, he was beginning work on his debut album. A stickler for levity, Sey decided that the album would be 10 tracks long – one of the few rules or deadlines that applied to the record. He travelled to Congo with Damon Albarn, made music with close friend and collaborator Micachu, released 2012's Meantime EP, had the single 'Bashful' playlisted all over British radio, re-imagined arias for opera performances, appeared on TV as a member of Bobby Womack's band, toured, toured and toured.

Now and then he would write a song destined for the debut album, but the process was unhindered by stress. Warp stayed out of the way. Sey's approach towards making an album was free, but the idea of the album and how to approach it stayed on his mind. Then he started recording near the end of 2012, and all that planning "went out of the window". Sey stopped playing live shows and devoted his time to working on music (he says he has no plans to play live, "at least for a little while").

The debut album, called ilp. (pronounced ill-pp), was released in October 2013. The previous years' Meantime EP introduced Kwes as a warm, glitchy eccentric, singing about falling for older women and rewriting the Beach Boys' 'Vegetables' so he could sing from the perspective of a cabbage. ilp. does not do away with the warm love songs and off-kilter humour of his earlier work, but it complicates matters somewhat. It teems with sonic detail, packing in droning passages, staggered percussion and abrupt bursts of atonality. Musique concrete recordings ("present in almost everything I've done," says Sey) punctuate songs, from mutterings on railways to nearby squawks of wildlife. In its harshest moments, it turns to austerity with light thumps or muted keys acting as funereal percussion.

Sometimes a bonafide hook will peek out, like the gentle affirmations of loyalty on single '36'. There are melodies, but they often sound odd and uneasy, as though they are too nervous to bloom. Then there are Sey's vocals: less sly than on earlier material, more guarded, often crackling or collapsing altogether. There are glimmers of Warp alumni in the music – Jamie Lidell's soul reinterpretations, Oneohtrix Point Never's romantic electronic disassembling - as well as inspirations ranging from Frank Zappa to Electric Circus-era Dilla. Yet ilp. sounds unlike any of these, and unlike anything else.

"There's a lot going on in there," Sey reflects on the sound of his album, which he maintains was not laboured over despite its many intricacies, intricacies that he is still discovering nearly a year after its release. "I didn't intend for it to come out that way." Since writing his first song on piano at age 6, he has been trying to take what he loved from his inspirations and then subvert it. In a way, this helps to explain the homemade, off-centre feel to his compositions; in another way, this could be a result of his confidence as a musician. "At times I question my musical proficiency in a musical sense," he tells me, sharing that he believes he is still learning the aspects of producing music. "I'm always thinking it could be great if I could find other ways of working. I just like sounds, really."

One of the charms of ilp. is that by its end, it becomes interactive. After a run of particularly melancholy tracks, the vinyl edition offers you the low-key finale of 'Parakeet', keeping in tone with the emotional complexity of the album. Digitally, the album culminates with a rendition of 2012's 'Bashful', a relatively straightforward song that feels like a breath of fresh air. Sey agrees in regards to 'Bashful', calling it a "reward for going through that whole record", but also calls 'Parakeet' an "ethereal" end. It depends what you, the listener, want to take from the experience as you leave the world of Kwes. This is another part of the artist's idiosyncratic approach: "I didn't want to follow that tried-and-tested track-listing format where you start really strong, then you have the mid-section where you have a ballad or two and then you bring it all back. I didn't take any of that into consideration."

Talk about the album gives way to anecdotes about the late Bobby Womack, who Sey played with on 2012's The Bravest Man in the Universe. I ask what he learned from the experience, and after a pause he says "restraint". After listening to the sonically packed excursions of ilp. it seems ironic. "It's still something I'm learning now," he admits before explaining a little more. "The way he performed… it's very feel oriented, it's not rooted in technical proficiency at all. Talking about me questioning [my proficiency], it was just a nice reminder that all of that really doesn't matter at all. People just wanna hear you."

So it's about honesty, I say. "I guess so," Sey shrugs, moments before I leave him to continue making music away from the blazing sun. "If you have more in your repertoire, that's also great, as long as it's coming from a place outside of all of that. An honest place."

You can follow Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy on Twitter here: @danielmondon

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