PILING WRECKAGE UPON WRECKAGE (Patreon)

Why, after the last major non-album project from us was titled A Year of Wreckage, did we end up calling this new project Wreckage Systems? A lack of imagination? Possibly. Running out of dystopian adjectives? No doubt. Also:

N-DIMENSIONAL MODERNISM

Adam Harper wrote in his book Infinite Music about what he calls an ’n-dimensional modernism’:

Modernism is a directional process, the music it creates is always somewhere between the old and familiar and the indiscriminate infinity of different forms, proceeding only toward the latter. It’s a relation between old and new, and any given moment of modernist music will present a mixture of what can be appreciable to a given audience to any extent as either old or new.

The ’n-th dimensional’ bit comes from there being an infinitely large musical space, a space that can be divided up and pushed inwards or outwards by musicians and listeners as they see fit. Anything can be music if enough of us decide that it is.

65LABS is striving for this kind of modernism, as described by Harper. Looking for new ways to make and present music, but at the same time aware of the importance of the familiar shapes people tend to enjoy music in. Remembering the latter seems important if we are to stop this project wandering off into the experimental avant-garde. Not that there shouldn’t be a space for that too. But most of the time, to be honest, we don’t really have the attention span.

DECOMPOSITION THEORY FUTURES

It has taken us a while but now, as a band, we recognise that in one particular way, how we think about music is both a strength and a weakness. That is this endless desire we have to move on to new things as soon as the last one is done. We tried to deal with this feeling by naming our last record replicr, 2019. A project that felt over for us before it was even released (It was recorded in January 2019, and came out October 2019) and whose name starts repeating itself before it’s even finished being said (“Replica? Replic—replic—R etc etc.) And how 2019 was like all the previous years, only faster… This isn’t to say we aren’t proud of this record - we very much are. But once it came out, our attentions turned to other things.

Decomposition Theory, a project we undertook from around spring 2017 - autumn 2018, was a victim of this restlessness. It sounds antiquated to us. Valuable at the time, but now just another vaguely-documented part of 65’s past that we try to build its future on. Lately, this stubborn march of progress feels like a mistake. Not least because we’ve started thinking about our own history in an increasingly materialist way. (More on that some other time maybe). In casual conversation between the four of us, ‘Decomposition Theory’ had become tied to a specific set of algorithmically-driven live performances. These shows were rewarding in some ways and really unenjoyable in others.

But Decomposition Theory was never supposed to be the title specifically for those shows. Decomposition Theory was intended to describe the process we were engaging in. Not necessarily using algorithms, but the overall process of disrupting and dismantling of our current practice and forcing ourselves to put it back together again in new ways. The ‘decomposition’ part wasn’t (only) because it sounded kind of cool, it was because we were thinking about composition as a subtractive process. As our Decomposition Theory Manifesto said, part of this method was based on: “A human unmaking of the algorithmic infinite. A curation of unpredictable processes… Just enough pulled from much too much. Slices of Time”.

This process evolved to become a kind of methodology and it is something that we have continued to practice ever since, and will continue to develop going forward, even though we no longer think of it as Decomposition Theory. In fact, it is sort of what we’ve been doing since the beginning. Decomposition Theory might be better described as ‘being 65daysofstatic’.

MOAR WRECKAGE

So why Wreckage Systems? Firstly: it sounds cool. Never underestimate this as the main driver of our choices.

Secondly. In the early stages of planning this project, the amount of music we were planning to produce meant that we had no choice but to lean into the various automated systems that we have been building, evolving, maintaining, breaking, fighting and swearing at for several years now. These were conceived during the development of our No Man's Sky soundtrack, they evolved through our Decomposition Theory project and fed into our last record, replicr 2019, as well as a large part of our A Year of Wreckage archive.

Thirdly, there's a wildly oblique piece of 65 writing you can find HERE, if you really want to, that riffs on the Angel of History from Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, and how we can only understand the present through making sense of the rubble of the past, forced through the lens of 65daysofstatic. It posits that music composition is a kind of dialectical process between the intuitive, uncritical creation of musical debris, and a more considered archeology of the wreckage that is produced. It also argues that all music is a kind of communism, in that any and all meaning to be found in it is made not by the musician, but by all of us.

Finally, the simple act of this being a kind of sequel. A thread. An acknowledgement that actually, none of these projects have ever stood alone and don’t need to. It’s an attempt to properly embrace Harper’s modernism. To find (without lapsing into nostalgia) new value in the foot that we keep in the past, and not have all our attention glued to the one striving for progress. As we headed deeper into this dark future, more and more often it feels like progress is kind of overrated anyway.