Move 78 - The Algorithm Smiles Upon You (2021)

The Algorithm Smiles Upon You

It's 13th March 2016 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea. Lee Sedol, the world champion of Go, an ancient Chinese board game, is considering his options. He's three games down in a five-game match against a computer program named AlphaGo. Having so far been destroyed by his AI-powered opponent, Sedol stuns spectators and commentators by adapting and playing a move so strange that it completely baffles AlphaGo and its algorithms, leading the program to scramble for historical data to make sense of it. The move - which represents Sedol's human response adapting to meet the challenges of an ever-evolving technological world - was move 78.

A year later, in Lichtenberg, Berlin, Chloë Mills sat in her new apartment, in a new city, uncomfortably swiping through hundreds of profiles on Tinder. Having never used a dating app before, she decided this fresh start was the perfect time to throw the algorithmic dice. She eventually took a shine to the thumbnail of one presentable bearded face which belonged to Nir Sabag, an Israeli-born Berlin-based jazz drummer. The two met in a bar near Görlitzer Park and hit it off. The algorithm had served its purpose.

After dating Nir for several months, Chloë introduced him to her slightly annoying older brother Aver, inviting him along to a gig that Nir was playing. Once Aver had been to several of these gigs - realising there was something more to Berlin than industrial clubs and all-black dress codes - he began to make friends with some of Nir's musical pals, in particular Doron Segal.

Aver, Doron, and Nir frequently met up at a family-run pasta shop near Doron's apartment in Weißensee. They would talk endlessly about music and eventually began planning collaborations, the first instances of which can be found on Dressed For CCTV, Aver's second release with UK-based label Village Live Records. Months before the album's release in 2018, the trio began rehearsing for live shows, re-working Aver's hip-hop instrumentals into a more jazz-orientated style. Later, Hal Strewe was recruited on bass and Move 78 was formed.

In their first recording session, the band - joined by saxophonist Omri Abramov - initially played improvised versions of several of Aver's beats: Middling, Housecat & Live From the Village. In the second half of the session, Aver played the band clusters of chopped-up sounds from his sampler, to serve as a technical provocation to generate their human improvisations. The ways in which the musicians were reacting to these programmed sounds resonated with what Lee Sedol had achieved in Seoul two years earlier when he played that unexpected move 78: a human reaction to the technological world.

That day they recorded five 15-minute jams, leaving Aver with over an hour's worth of audio to rearrange and produce. He worked on the sessions for several months, layering and reprogramming the recordings to create the structures, hooks and style that defines the band's sound: a balance between free flowing improvised jazz and automated, programmed hip-hop, with the first of these attempts being Faye.

The band's second and third studio sessions took place in February 2019 and June 2019 respectively. Improvising was the sole focus of these sessions and they laid down six hours of brand new material. The first jam of the second session became Pearls Before Swine, and the last became Sanctuary. Daisies and Normal Jazz are built from the third session, with all four tracks representing a progression in Aver's ability to tear up, rebuild and re-imagine the band's improvisations into structured tracks.

After working on the sessions for another year, Aver had exported over thirty individual tracks from the original eight hours of music. Many of these tracks were then refined with additional recordings of improvised flute, violin and French horn. Doron Segal not only guided the musicians in these recordings, but also further manipulated the tracks Aver had exported by using a range of synthesis techniques to reinforce the technological processing central to Move 78's sound.

Following the release of a well-received limited edition 7" in October 2020, this ep represents the first collection of finished songs to emerge from the band's large body of music, with work also under way on a full-length album titled Automated Improvisations, scheduled to be released later this year.

Berlin, January 2021