devblog / friday 251122 (Patreon)

Hi there, friends and comrades.

And so we reach the final Friday of another month. And as usual, with it comes another update from 65LABS. A slight adjustment this time: as patrons already know, the Patreon subscription is currently on pause. Because of this, and in case Idiot Space Bro destroys Twitter, in order to make sure as many people as possible remember that we still exist, going forward these monthly updates will be unlocked for everyone, not only patrons.

So, for any first time readers: Welcome! This is the skeleton crew from 65LABS, sending out our monthly dispatch from this currently dormant research space during some much-needed band downtime. During 2021 into spring 2022, this place was a tumult of activity! You should have seen it. Breakbeats shimmering in the midday heat, tangled waveforms climbing like vines up every wall, excitable groups of distortion pedals running around outside with the joyful innocence of labradors… A spectacle of noise and chaos. This hive of confusion was the base from which 65 were developing their Wreckage Systems project.

Wreckage Systems, in case you really are new here and don’t yet know, is an infinite stream of music. It is happening RIGHT NOW, and has always been free for everyone. Tune in. Get dancing.

The version that you can see on the stream is ‘Wreckage Systems V2’. This Patreon was used as the hub for sharing a lot of development work that went into it. Streams, weird technical breakdowns, music unreleased anywhere else, vital 65LABS safety diagrams, glimpses into the confused praxis of 65days, software, occasional slabs of unexpected noise and/or computer sentience, earnestly-written essays about the suspicious nature of ‘A.I’… So many different things. If we were still in the 20th century it would probably have been called ‘a multimedia art project’. Of course, here in the 21st century it is simply known as ‘posting content’.

We bring up this material history of Wreckage Systems to make a point. The internet conditions us to desperately surf the crest of the endless tsunami of New Things the online world throws at us. Every. Single. Day. To fall off the crest of this wave would be to drown in the depths of Old, Forgotten Things, out of date memes and fomo. But! Even though, by internet-time measurements, something that was published last week might as well be from the jurassic era, it doesn’t actually mean that it is no longer worth your time. It might, in fact, be ‘quite good’.

Surely, if you’re reading this at all but never signed up to Wreckage Systems, you must be willing to believe that all of the top tier content that lives on in the archive might be, at the very least, ‘quite good’. So whilst this project remains on hiatus, if you would like access to it, this is how:

• Sign up to the Patreon on whatever tier you prefer (they all offer the same access).
• You’ll be charged for a single month.
• You WILL NOT be charged again until we resume this project, and when that happens you’ll be given a good amount of notice.
• You’ll then have access to the Wreckage Systems archives. Which, in our humble opinion, are well worth the entry fee.
• Also, you won’t have to remember to keep checking back for these monthly updates, they will arrive automatically in your inbox.

Ok, with all that out of way… what’s new?

Salvation E.P, the debut e.p from Haus Haus (Rob from 65days' new band), came out the other month, so you might have already grabbed it from their Bandcamp. But if streaming services are more your thing then this should be appearing on all of them next week. 

An interview by Wired with Paul about the Wreckage Systems project that appeared in their print version earlier in the year appeared online yesterday. You can read that HERE, if you like.

It inadvertently throws up a curious question about copyright, content, and artists getting paid. For the original interview, even though we offered to produce bespoke Wreckage Systems graphics for them, Wired insisted on sending a very good photographer all the way from London up to Sheffield to capture all of 65daysofstatic in a painstakingly-crafted portrait of four earnest, ageing band members stood amongst musical equipment, pretending to know what they were doing. The photo turned out great and accompanied the interview in the print version. And yet the image used for the online version is some kind of generic circular waveform image licensed from Getty Images… How come? The original photo must have certainly cost them more than most people would ever consider spending on a photo… Is licensing a random image from Getty cheaper than paying the photographer for additional rights to use the photo online forever? Is there an underpaid/overworked features editor who simply does not have the time to go through the Wired archives when it’s quicker to type ‘algorithmic music’ into Getty and paste in the first hit? Is there not an in-house Adobe Illustrator wizard who could knock up an ‘algorithmic art’ image like this one in about 30 seconds? Did they lose the photo?? Is it possible that we are over-thinking this?

Perhaps this is only interesting insofar as it is a nice segway to the very contemporary problem of making and releasing things in this Age of Content. Gotta get that new content online. Keep it coming. More, faster, Harvest them clicks… In a year's time will an equivalent image even come from Getty, or rather be the output of a text-to-image AI, accelerating the precarity of freelance artists ever further?

(This is not an attack on Wired, in case that isn’t clear. The article itself is the result of a really enjoyable, thoughtful interview, written by a long time 65 supporter who very much gets what we’re trying to do here.) It is only to say that the plight of contemporary ’content-makers’ in any medium is a desperate one.

We present no answer or useful conclusion to any of this. This dispatch will not solve the problem of capitalism’s desire to reduce all art and music to ‘content’. All we know is that it feels more important than ever to protect slowly-made art against the coming Content Wars… How to match this feeling with maintaining a monthly subscription model? Rest assured, we have our best minds working on it. In the meantime, there’s a dormant research lab to maintain. The oscillator vats are close to overflowing, and those hungry FM synths are not going to feed themselves.

Until next time, friends. Take care of each other, fuck the tories, fuck Keith Starmer’s fealty to a fascist future in particular since it seems like he will become the ultimate middle manager overseeing this already-sinking country’s tumble into doom. Also fuck Elon Musk because obviously. Bye!

65 Comms Team
NOISE SILO 4F
SYNTH MEADOWS
65LABS EASTERN QUADRANT