'Archiefishal Intelligence' serves as another sensational offering from the Archie the Goldfish ensemble. Steeped within the band's typically warm textures, sublime grooves and lush production is a further collection of tracks that once again highlights the indelible skill and brilliance that Bestwick & Flowers bring to the project. Ranking high within Archie's burgeoning catalogue, 'Archiefishal Intelligence' delivers as both an outstanding introduction to their music as well as a reward for long-term fans!
- Imran Mirza, Blue-in-Green:RADIO

It was seeing a Midjourney prompt for sale for $3 that tipped me over the edge. A few words from which a large language model, trained on the creativity of others, would generate an image were supposedly worth three times what we charged for our single tracks, tracks that were created by musicians with 150 years of collective experience. (Yes, we’re old.)

I started wondering whether musicians could be thought of as large music models, our years of experience and training based on the artistic expressions of our peers and predecessors allowing us to create new works. In this analogy, compositions might be the prompts, so I wrote some tunes and gave them to my friends and collaborators.

The melodies were intentionally (relatively) simple, and the idea was to have only a little conventional jazz soloing. The guitarist Peter Bernstein has described jazz as a decorative art, and the intention here was simply to decorate the melodies in as creative a way as possible.

We took this approach because this kind of embellishment might, perhaps, be something that AI-generated music could be expected to achieve. But I don’t think AI could have produced what we have made here, and that gives me some sense of relief and hope. For now, at least, artificial intelligence is no match for (apologies) Archiefishal Intelligence. How long that continues remains to be seen.

Chris Bestwick , September 2023