devblog / friday 280423 (Patreon)

Hi, friends. April is over.

First things first: Do you have your tickets to our autumn Wild Light Tenth Anniversary shows yet? Look, here's a GIF of dates:

GLACIER TACTICS

The ecosystem of 65LABS is a fragile balance of cultivation and wilderness. Spring is usually a time for the tentative blooming of new sonics out in the wilds, and the careful sowing of future noise in our more regulated workshops. On a clear day the shimmer of reverb-drenched delay lines is already visible over the Southern Guitar Plains and the scent of fresh glitch is thick in the air. There's a new batch of soundlings poking through the soil over at the Drum Sample Greenhouse Quadrant. We're usually cultivating kick drums all year round, just in case. It's the only way to guarantee the correct frequencies, as it takes at least ten generations of finessing the subsonics with our proprietary ultra code before they'll start yielding a rib-shaking affect at the desired intensity.

But as you know, The 65LABS Wreckage Systems project has been on hiatus longer than we first anticipated. This springtime is less a torrent of desperate, new life, more a glacier of slowly thawing confusing. Whispers from over at the Imagineering Wing is that the New Ideas Advance Research Group are still unsure how to follow 'infinite music'. Wreckage Systems Season Two? Some other audacious future nonsense? Just getting those four guys from 65daysofstatic in a room together to write some music for a change?

Answering that is above our pay grade. We're just the skeleton crew here, and so even though it's spring, this year's planting activities are a bit more sedentary.

DATA CROPS

All that being said, we do have some developments to report. The 65LABS Data Horticultural Wing was in need of some fresh hard drive cuttings for this season's cyberplanting. So they swung by one of the 65LABS Megabyte Composting Silos to see what they could find, and stumbled upon a badly catalogued stack of knackered old digital memory boxes.

Upon firing up a nearby 65daysOS terminal and hooking one of the boxes up to the terminal's coaxial hyperhose, they quickly realised that what they had discovered was a relic from the Noise Harvests of the early 2010s. It seems like this particular stack is a 2011-2012 vintage - the period when our intrepid 65ers were stumbling around in a cold rehearsal room in Sheffield trying to figure out how to write what would become known as 'Wild Light'.

NOISE ARCHAEOLOGISTS

Knowing that they'd happened upon a treasure of great import, they sealed off the area and called in the 65LABS Noise Archaeologists to do a proper accounting of that ravaged, bit-rotted data to see what, if anything, could be salvaged.

Experts on 65days history will be aware that during the 2011-2012 period, the main way for the band to produce and record their demo ideas was to use a battered laptop running a copy of Logic and a host of cracked plug-ins for things like software synths or FX. The result of this is that, unlike, say, a jpeg image, or a nice little mp3 where all the necessary data is neatly packed inside a single computer file, a 65 demo is a messy project folder of sprawling data, MIDI files, audio recordings and a lot of moving parts that all need to work in concert to be able to properly recreate whatever it is the demo is supposed to be doing. And all of these moving parts are prone to entropy at varying speeds.

This means that opening a decade-old project on a modern (though, let's be honest, still kind of battered) laptop is a little like wandering into a ghost town. The shape of the song still exists. Any raw audio recordings of the physical, actual band mostly still exist. But the digital tracks that run alongside them and the various digital fx used to tame the raw audio have generally vaporised/collapsed/disintegrated in one way or another. The cracked software is long-since patched and broken. The folder hierarchies and file paths lost to history; synth presets turned to bit-dust. Ironically, the only synthetic tracks that tend to still work are ones where a software synth had been rendered down to audio because the computer didn't have the RAM or processing power to run that many synths at once. The computer's weakness was the only thing that kept the music alive across this vast and notably dumb decade.

There is no doubt a juicy hot take to be found in that little story about the built-in obsolescence of technology, but the 65LABS Hot Take Team is on holiday. So please just imagine that here: [HOT TAKE]. The point is - although we have quite a lot of precious 65DATA to catalogue and consider, it is not necessarily as simple as opening an old project, hitting play, and listening to whatever weird noise the band were making that day.

On the other hand, there could be something worth sharing in all that, um, wreckage. And this year, the year of the Wild Light Decade, seems like it ought to be the time to share them. And so, at some point soon, there might [italics very much ours] be a short-form Patreon project where we all sink down together into the sunken depths of the lesser-explored corners of the Wild Light period.

Wild Light Decade: A Rummaging. No. Too clumsy.

Wild Light Decade: A Pillaging. No. Too violent.

Wild Light Decade: An Archaeology. No. Too earnest.

Wild Light Decade: Miscellaneous Stuff We Found On Our Old Hard Drives. No. Too catchy.

Ok, maybe we'll let the Hot Take team handle the branding when they come back. In the meantime we'll wait for the full report from the Noise Archaeologists to decide whether we have unearthed enough hidden gems to switch the Patreon subscription back on for a short spring-summer project where we tiptoe around the perilous edge of Retrospection Canyon. If we do - you'll get fair warning in case you don't wanna start getting charged again! And if not, then there will still be a smattering, a vague smudge of free patreon posts featuring half-forgotten memories of some good, noisy old times. And hopefully this will tide us all over as the 65ers warm up their rusty, aching limbs, prepare for the Wild Light Tenth Anniversary shows, and try to finally figure out a live version of Black Spots that they enjoy playing.

So... Stay tuned for either an announcement, or the awkward absence of any kind of announcement.

Happy May Day! Fuck the tories!

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