Francis Heery

For the players, chess is a game of competition. Defeat the opponent by surpassing their strategic prowess. A neutral spectator is able to embrace the kinetic serenity of what the players create together. The game unfolds as a slow pendulum swing, the players trading tiny motions between calculative stretches of silence, the black and white pieces intermingling and thinning over the axis of time. Heery's album hinges on a dialogue between two synthesised elements - a patient electronic surge and a dancing sequence of notes, both mutating gracefully over the course of several minutes as they pass back and forth the baton of agency. Each track revives the same theme in a different variation, deepening the dynamic all the while.

This album renders the moves made in the 1997 match between chessmaster Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue computer. Heery notated the moves longhand on paper and then composed using this data - a process he half-jokingly refers to as "old school (biological) algorithmic", mimicking the transposition of computation onto the physical realm enacted through Deep Blue. Despite the ominous significance of Kasparov's defeat at the hands of the corporate tech, this is a decidedly gorgeous record. Heery opts for a palette of warm tonalities and tidal repetitions instead of something more directly evocative of the darkness of technological anxiety. After all, there's a certain elegance and quaintness to this embodiment of advanced computation in the late 90s, with human and machine simply engaged in a battle for board game supremacy - far from the ubiquitous slurry that constitutes our engagement with AI in the present day.