Solutions: Answer No. 1 – Milian Mori (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Sometimes, music is more than it seems. In fact, all the best, well, the most exciting music at least, is more than the sum of its musical parts. And so it is with an artist like Milian Mori. Although on first listen, a track like Solutions: Answer No 1 might come off as a glitchy, groove-driven slice of chilled clubland music, and indeed it is, it is what is going on under the sonic surface, which is the real story here.

Milian Mori confesses to an interest in everything from maths and geometry to technology and data, and it is where such disciplines intersect with the musical world that the music is born. If Solutions: Answer No. 1 often sounds like music made at the interface of man and machine, then that is the desired effect. It is an artistic expression of the collision point between sonic aesthetics and complex, digital logic, between our own, inherent spirituality and the machine world’s rigid algorithmic patterns.

The result is music that goes beyond music. Music, like all great art, asks more questions than it answers and, as an art form, as Francis Bacon proposed, further deepens the mystery of life. If you know how to listen to a song such as this, that proposition becomes apparent.

In a world where we are worried about technology and AI in particular, stealing and devaluing our artistic outlets, creations such as this prove that there is a middle ground. Technology is merely a tool, as it always has been, and knowing the exact point of interface between the user and that tool is how you maintain a healthy balance. Solution: Answer No. 1 is, after all, the sound of a human imagination manipulating digital elements, no different from a guy with a guitar, a gardener with a spade or a designer with a digital graphic design application. It is as much the intent as the results themselves which are essential.

Through such creations, Milian Mori asks us to consider many things, from the future of music to, perhaps, by extrapolation, even what the future has in store for humanity itself. On some levels, it is an excellent, clubland musical slice; on others, it is a profound piece of sonic philosophy. When did music get so clever?