Wild Light Decade #21: Zodiac (Patreon)

A short and sweet hyperbanger for you this week.

By some measurements, 65daysofstatic are pretty old. Not that you’d necessarily realise due to our handsome, youthful appearance and dexterous use of social media. But we are old like the mountains. Old like glaciers. Old like the pyramids. And we are definitely old as songwriters.

Not that getting old as songwriters necessarily means that the ideas arrive at a slower rate. It does mean though that when they arrive, they carry with them the ghosts of an ever increasing number of previous ideas, both realised and unrealised. Some ghosts are weightless, but not all of them. And worse, without our youthful abandon to spur them on (or to act as a floatation device, in this weird metaphor), ideas have to struggle through the muddy lake of OVER-THINKING-EVERYTHING. And so most drown.

If this were a self-help/productivity blog, we’d extend that metaphor to turn it into a positive - only the strongest ideas get through! Survival of the fittest! But we are not. Furthermore, that outlook is not very ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ is it? Sometimes the weakest and weirdest ideas are the ones most worth protecting.

These three paragraphs have accidentally unlocked a few potentially interesting but not-at-all-thought-through ideas which cannot be expanded on right now because — full disclosure — this text is getting hastily typed into the nearest 65LABS comms terminal literally minutes before you’ll be reading it, since we fell a little behind this week. (Let’s pretend we fell behind for exciting 65-based reasons and not because all life slowly trends toward chaos.)

The point we were headed to is this: Zodiac is a banger. Why didn't it make the cut? No idea. And not only is it a banger, it's a banger that plays fast and loose with ideas. It is only two minutes long but it packs a lot in there. You wouldn’t catch contemporary 65daysofstatic coming up with an idea as strong as the arps and pads that come in at 00:59, only to let them just loop gloriously for 30 seconds and then hard cut to an outro. WHAT A WASTE! There’s a 21st century ultra-anthem tucked away in there somewhere. Imagine what Charli XCX could have done with these beats and those melodies.

All in all, this is another classic example of 65’s ability to stumble into a series of circumstances where they accidentally smother a sure fire pop smash in their weird approach to, well everything. [See also - the time they got Robert Smith to guest on a song and they made it like 8 minutes long and then cut up his vocals so much he wasn’t even recognisable for 90% of it].

Ok, gotta go wrestle with the Patreon website to get this Friday musical treat to you. There’s some good stuff still to come next month. See you there!

65.x