Wild Light Decade #20: Safe Passage - Lubomyr Version (Patreon)

And the hits just keep on coming.

Hi friends. It's the end of another week, so here's another shovel full of Wild Light treasure glittering into your brain.

It is fair to say that 65days’ piano parts are generally not known for their subtlety. This is not our fault. The problem lies in the way pianos were originally designed - there are just so many available notes! Gotta press them all, as quickly as possible.

This being the case, it was no small feat for us to keep the opening quietness of the album version of Safe Passage to be as minimal as it is. To pull this off, we employed a technique called ‘Piano Offsetting’. Much like carbon-offsetting, it is a cynical, surface-level sleight of hand. It gives the illusion that we care about producing elegant, sophisticated, stripped down musical compositions. But the truth is, we've not really reduced our piano notes at all. There’s as many as there ever was, probably even more, but we just hid them somewhere that nobody would think to look: an unreleased b-side re-imagining of the same song.

'Safe Passage - Lubomyr Version' is piano as a flock of birds. Or a forest of feathers. It is what would happen if there was a reverb uprising, or what it would sound like if our shadows suddenly became 3D and were friendly, not creepy.

This track was captured live in Chapel Studios on whatever grand piano they have there, while we were recording the canonical version of Safe Passage. We have no memory as to whether it was caught accidentally or on purpose, but either way it will have been mostly improvised, hence no considered arrangement and an ending that, ultimately, we felt was a little too abrupt to be able to call this a finished song as release it as such. It is named after Lubomyr Melnyk, the fastest piano player of all time, who was probably on heavy rotation around that time.

OTHER BUSINESS

There are absolutely more important things going on in the world than the plight of a weird noisy band from the North of England. We haven't really been active on social media since the end of our tour but that's just because we are very bad at social media. We don't mean to be silent or circumspect regards what is happening in Gaza right now. To be clear: Hamas does not equal all Palestinians. The state of Israel does not equal all Israelis. Criticising the state of Israel's illegal occupation of Gaza and now what appears to amount to attempted ethnic cleansing is not antisemitism. This is far too asymmetrical to be called a war and the fact that in the UK even the supposed opposition cannot bring themselves to say it is wrong (never mind describe it as the war crime it is) for Israel to cut off all water, food and power for 2 million people, something like half of whom are under 18 years old, is a disgrace. That any of these sentences are considered at all controversial is a huge cause for concern. The UK is a failed, enfeebled state these days, but the ghost of its empire casts a very long shadow.

Two years ago, when an unconscionable amount of bombs (that's more than zero bombs) fell on Gaza, we hastily put out Asymmetry, a pay-what-you-feel song and passed on the proceeds on to Medical Aid for Palestinians. We haven't got the wherewithal or music to do the same right now, but do feel free to grab the track for nothing (don't buy it!) and, if you have cash to spare, please consider sending what you can this way: https://www.map.org.uk.

OTHER OTHER BUSINESS

Ok, now to the plight of a weird noisy band from the North of England.

As we have previously mentioned, the Wild Light Decade project is nearing completion. There's some special things we have left to share, so we think that next month will likely be the final one before we hit pause.

Not sure how clear it is from your side of things, but Patreon has recently undergone some kind of redesign that makes everything a lot worse. The backend in which this post is getting written is literally broken.

We have mentioned before that we should nationalise Bandcamp. And Patreon. This is not a joke, it is a deadly serious demand. (Unrealistic demands are very different from unserious demands. This is something that the 'grown ups are now back in control' politicians like the current Labour party cannot understand, hence their commitment to not having any vision and not being willing to change anything except possibly the speed of collapse. Although even that doesn't apply to the imminent collapse of our school buildings that they refuse to say they'll fix.)

The thing is, Bandcamp and Patreon are companies that found a way to make easy, infinite money. Just imagine how many millions pass through these companies each month. Plenty to pay their staff well, keep the various servers and software frameworks ticking over, with enough left over for the CEOs to buy yachts or monkey jpegs or cosplay as Elon Musk or whatever it is they want to do.

BUT THAT IS NOT ENOUGH IF YOU WANT TO SERVE YOUR GOD OF CAPITALISM. It is never enough. You have to keep growing. Always and endlessly. And as you run out of space to grow into, then the only way to keep making the line go up is to start hollowing yourself out. Making your service worse and/or more expensive, and try to collect as many yachts as you can before it all turns to shit and you get to leap to safety with your golden parachute.

So this week Bandcamp got sold by Epic Games to some company called Songtradr and immediately half their entire staff were laid off, including, conveniently, all of the main Bandcamp United union organisers. There's no call for a boycott yet, and frankly, if/when 65daysofstatic have to remove our catalogue from there on principle, it will be a very tough day for the finance wing of 65LABS. Our yacht consumption is gonna take an undeserved hit.

The only hints Patreon are slowly headed in the same direction are this terrible new website and, well, the whole history of tech startups up until now.

Similarly, we found out this week that Mailchimp, which is where we run the irregular but very important 65PropagandaNetwork mailouts, has just changed its terms to say that it is allowed to feed all of its content into some kind of dumb AI model for something or other. A classic 2023 move that will surely turn out as well as if they'd had the foresight to pivot to embedding NFTs into their emails a couple of years ago.

WHO IS GOING TO SAVE TECH BROS FROM THEMSELVES!?

The answer of course, is nobody. Unless it is us. And/or guillotines.

The point of all this is - as a band who began at the dawn on the twenty first century, we have the privilege of already seeing our burgeoning livelihood destroyed by technology once and so we are able to take all this with a kind of dead-eyed, desensitised gallows humour. Because ultimately, we somehow pulled it off. We have managed to be a band for twenty years now. As if we could be so lucky! Every extra day being able to make this thing a part of our everyday lives is a special treat.

It is clearly going to get harder in the coming years. One way or another, in terms of our financial reality, it has really been the five hundred or so of you who are signed up to this Patreon who keep this weird machine ticking over. We expect nothing from you (apart from your undivided attention), because we understand that every one of us is fighting their own particular battle against having-to-exist-under-capitalism.

That being said, for as long as you're able, we hope you'll stick with us, whether that means while we put ourselves in the hands of these failing tech platforms until they implode/force us out, or whether we boldly try to carve out our own tiny space on the internet that doesn't rely so heavily on them. If that is even possible these days.

That's all for this week. Next week we'll post a banger and absolutely no existential dread, for balance.

Ok, maybe some existential dread.

Take care out there friends.

65.x