December 01, 2025|Review
Artificial intelligence has become the boardroom’s favorite miracle, a shimmering fantasy sold by dead-eyed executives who see creativity as a pipeline problem. Its sprawl is now impossible to ignore: hip-hop producers flipping AI hallucinations into TikTok fodder, major labels quietly piping their catalogs into Klay and Udio, ersatz singalongs built from data-center slurry debuting above flesh-and-blood artists on the country charts. We’ve reached the point where it feels plausible—inevitable, even—that some weekend brewery band will start covering Velvet Sundown deep cuts. Yet for all the breathless evangelism, AI’s output is hollow to the core: a paste of statistics wearing the rough silhouette of feeling, algorithmic goo styled as “human” for an audience numbed into passive consumption.
Its superficiality is thrown into brutal relief by a group like SML, the Los Angeles future-jazz quintet who inadvertently expose just how little “intelligence” there is in artificial intelligence. Where AI merely recombines, SML synthesize—folding years of theory, improvisational muscle memory, and shared psychic bandwidth into pieces that feel alive, risky, and weirdly inevitable. Their electricity is literal—thrumming through Eurorack modules, samplers, guitar pedals, and DAWs—and interpersonal, a current that surges between five musicians whose internal clocks align in ways software can’t approximate. Beneath the electronic shimmer, you can feel the pulse of human judgment, the give-and-take happening in the milliseconds between choices.
Remarkably, SML have never entered a recording studio. Bassist Anna Butterss, saxophonist Josh Johnson, guitarist Gregory Uhlmann, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and synthesist Jeremiah Chiu are almost never in one place at the same time. Each is a gravitational center in L.A.’s experimental orbit: Butterss and Johnson in Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, Uhlmann and Johnson in a trio with Sam Wilkes, Stardrum behind Chris Cohen and Weyes Blood, Chiu collaborating with Marta Sofia Honer and anchoring Parker’s Expansion Trio. They intersect constantly, but the band known as SML exists only onstage. Their debut Small Medium Large (2024) and its follow-up How You Been are collages of live performances—dispatches from a group whose shared language is so robust it feels like the product of decades, not sporadic gigging.
The method hasn’t changed so much as it has stretched outward. Where Small Medium Large drew from four consecutive nights at Highland Park’s now-shuttered ETA, How You Been gathers material from six shows in four cities, each performance disassembled and fed back to the members like puzzle pieces to be bent, re-shaped, and approved (or rejected) in slow, collaborative orbit. Stardrum lays down circling Afrobeat-leaning patterns; Butterss and Uhlmann find footholds and lock together; Johnson holds long tones until they bloom or rupture; Chiu spins a filament of synthetic texture around the edges. But after their collective deconstruction, sounds smear at the edges, rhythms fracture, and grooves twist into unfamiliar geometry. The results play like a jazz masterclass refracted through the Düsseldorf School—On the Corner and Sextant reimagined for the Ableton era.
“Chicago Three,” a drifting high point early on, captures their process in miniature. Butterss leans into a gentle waltz while Chiu sends pixelated bursts of keyboard through Stardrum’s motorik cymbal. A drone hovers like a low fog—its source ambiguous, possibly none of the instruments actually onstage. Johnson’s sax, delayed and multiplied across the stereo field, grows into a chorus threatening to swallow the tempo-keeping debris beneath it. Then, as if someone pulled the rug out from under the song, the arrangement collapses to what resembles piano and violin—except neither instrument is present at the gig. It’s dizzying, a reminder of how thoroughly the band bends raw documentation into illusion.
The post-production is bolder here than on their debut, pushing How You Been further from jazz orthodoxy. “Gutteral Utterance” opens like a VHS tape melting in a malfunctioning VCR, tape distortion clustering around Butterss’ chorused bass. “Moving Walkway” is a stoned krautrock dream: Stardrum and Butterss settle into a syrupy pulse while Chiu’s and Johnson’s fragments drift like debris caught in a low-pressure system. On “Brood Board SHROOM,” shimmering synth waves lick the skeletal remains of drums and bass, everything bobbing in a pool of reverb.
Even under layers of manipulation, the band’s spontaneity never dissolves. “Daves,” one of the least altered tracks, is a joyous, precarious hip-shaker—Uhlmann and Johnson trading angular stabs, Johnson leaning fractionally behind the beat in a sly challenge to Uhlmann’s precision. “Taking Out the Trash” erupts into chaos two minutes in: Johnson skronking through a scorched, feedback-rimmed solo while Stardrum attempts to fill every available fraction of space before the downbeat reappears. These moments remind you that beneath the digital rerouting, the telepathy is real.
And then, the two most startling moments of all: human voices. As “Daves” unravels, a whistle cuts through the right channel before the room erupts in whoops. At the start of “Mouth Words,” Chiu casually asks the sound tech to dim the lights a little more. They arrive like ruptures in the album’s illusion, revealing the ordinary mechanics beneath the sorcery. But they’re also crucial. For all the technical wizardry and post-production alchemy, How You Been hinges on something AI can’t mimic: real-time exchange, shared breath, the micro-decisions people make while listening to each other in public. These aren’t just recordings. They’re artifacts of presence—fleeting, unrepeatable, and unmistakably alive.
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