Devblog April 2024 (Patreon)

Hi Friends.

Development continues at 65LABS. This month, switching on our bass amplifier blew the power not just to our studio, but the entire lower level of the building. A selfless sacrifice of the bass amp, offering itself up as the perfect metaphor for our current plight. Or, let's be honest, all of our plights in general.

Concerning last month's update: it seemed like more than a handful of people managed to miss the fact that there was a video embedded at the top of the email. This is probably the fault of Patreon, which along with the rest of the internet somehow manages to gets slowly worse with each passing month. (You know we can't do italics in our Patreon posts any more? The option is there, to make a word italic, but nothing happens. How can this be a problem that has lasted for half a year or something? How much money does Patreon passively make every single month? Why has nobody fixed it? Why does capitalism need to ruin everything?)

Well, as we all know, that last one is a trick question because ruining everything for everybody except whoever ends up being the last landlord standing is capitalism's actual main goal.

Oh wait look: they finally fixed the italics. Awkward.

Whatever, the main takeaway intended here is: Patreon is probably doing weird formatting in its emails depending on your email client, which might mean that it isn't apparent that the main content of this communique is intended to be THIS VIDEO which is supposed to be at the top of this post/email, rather than the confused thoughts you're reading now.

THE CURRENT PROJECT

As you'll see, we're very much still trying to figure out the ins and outs of this project. The general feeling is - filmed performances can obviously be good, but we don't have the means to simply do conventional live recordings directly out of 65LABS to a quality we'd be happy with.

For example, THIS LIVE SET is a bespoke filmed performance that we are pleased with. It is good because it was made as indirect promo for No Man's Sky during the wild hype cycle for that game, so Playstation paid for us to go to and do it in 2Fly Studios and also provided a bunch of Serious Camera Dudes to take care of the filming/post production.

At the other end of the spectrum of production values, it's easy enough to point an iphone at some combination of us when we are doing a lot of the more experimental, music-system building that we do, but it is not super-exciting to watch. It's the same with electronic-centric live performances - paradoxically, the 'more live' the performance, the more it results in us hunched over various buttons and synths concentrating on not getting things wrong. This also does not make for the most captivating footage.

But somewhere between these two poles there are plenty of interesting things to be captured. We are lucky as a band to be able to make music using a variety of different live set-ups, and hopefully as we keep figuring out this project, we'll start to show you more of it.

In the meantime, thanks for your patience, and enjoy the workings out!

OTHER NEWS

• If you didn't get tickets to the Haus Horo/NVLL show at A LITERAL CEMETERY in Sheffield in a few weeks then bad luck - it is now sold out. But you can catch Haus Horo at ArcTangent if you happen to be going to that.

• Paul's newsletter The Komoy Noise Research Unit continues to smash out a very particular brand of existentially-uncertain and musically obtuse polemic. This week's The Music Abolitionist Provocation is his response to the A.I. evangelists who claim they have 'solved music'. (And there's a nice little discussion of it over on the 65LABS Discord back channel which, as patrons, you all have access to). Paul's new Polinski release Meet Me by the Panamax Barricades also easily bested the new Taylor Swift album on all the major streaming platforms and he has now been crowned 'King of Spotify'. Or at least that's what he told us.

Below are this month's research notes.

Take care out there!

65.x

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UNDER THE DRUMMS 280324

Hardware used: Moog Prodigy / Some Drums

Software used: Ableton Live

Tracks From the 65 Archive: Under the Summs

Time Signatures: 5/8  

Tempo: 138bpm

Technicians: Paul (right), Rob (back)

Generative Systems: N/A

Wreckage Systems: N/A

Other notes: Under the Summs was written during the early stages of Wreckage Systems development, which happened in the midst of the pandemic. Living in different cities during those covid years meant that all the writing, recording and mixing of those Wreckage EPs was done mostly remotely. Perhaps two or three of us would be in the same place at the same time, but very rarely all four of us. What all of this means is that none of those songs ever had 'live' versions. (We had hoped to play Under the Summs during last year's Wild Light tour, but given its relatively niche nature — these EPs only exist on our Bandcamp, not on streaming services), and the limited time we had to squeeze non-Wild Light songs into our show, it got dropped.)

This session was trying out one of the ways we could perform this song in a future 65HQ live-recorded set. Live drums are a given, but exactly how we do the rest of it is still to be decided. In this take, Paul and Rob are playing to a click track. The drums and synth are live, and there's a bunch of other audio running in Ableton.