Wild Light Decade #19: SIRENS (Patreon)

Sirens like an alarm? A clarion call? Or like an enchanting, seductive, but dangerous monster? How about all three.

The end is nigh, so here we are, back at the beginning. Sirens was Sirens for a very, very long time, it’s true name only becoming apparent to us once we heard it in its final album form and understood its overall role in things. Eventually it clicked that when a song so clearly carries its sirens within and through itself, the name needn’t be quite so… didactic.

There’s not much that can be said about this track that it doesn’t say itself, loudly. So let’s not get deep into the expansive, stubborn, existential dread it broadcasts on all available frequencies. It’s Friday. It’s been a long week/year/decade/civilisation. Instead here’s a more pragmatic summary of the three tracks available for you today.

Sirens-pre2fly.mp3

For those not keeping careful track of things, the rough timeline of us writing this record was:

1. Write the songs at 65HQ and record rough demos.
2. Record better demos at 2fly studios, our local Sheffield studio.
3. Do another pass of the songs at 65HQ now we could hear what was going on
4. Go to Chapel Studios with mostly-finished songs to record them properly.

According to the file name of Sirens-pre2fly, this is a recording from the latter stages of the first part of writing. Despite being so early in the overall project, the final arrangement is pretty much in place. The intention of the song is clear. The musical discipline we slowly dragged out of ourselves is beginning to show itself. E.G - no drums until the end, even though we had drum parts. No guitar melodies until the end even though we had them. Maybe it doesn’t come across the same way to you, but listening back to it here it feels like we already knew this song inside out. We knew what we wanted from it, and just as importantly, had figured out what the song wanted from us.

Sirens-latest-more-oldschool.mp3

Curious filename. More old school? In what way? Could we have meant the 80s reverb on the drum machine snare? Or just that it was more electronic overall, sounding a bit more like early 65days productions? We’ll never know. Or, more accurately, presumably we once knew but have now forgotten.

In any case, this is included here as a download mostly because it is a nice way to hear some of the electronic layers that are still in the final version, but buried deep beneath the noise.

[TANGENTIAL NOTE FROM THE SARCASTIC 65LABS CONTENT MANAGEMENT TEAM: Cheers Patreon for recently spending some portion of your incomprehensibly large monthly income on redesigning your logo to make it look like a weird, chubby croissant and changing the font, but not to add any useful new features at all. Like, for example, being able to embed more than one track per post.. Our NATIONALISE PATREON campaign starts here. It will probably be as successful as our hostile takeover of YouTube (forthcoming).]

Sirens 1.mp3

This mix is ROUGH. Included here to finally answer the question we probably get asked most as a band: what if 65daysofstatic made Heat Death Infinity Splitter get super loud from the beginning and put some kind of triplet-y swing on the drums?

That's all for this week, friends.

Take care out there...

65.x