JANUARY DOOM (Patreon)

Hi friends.

How's it going out there? January at 65LABS is usually a quiet time, given over to dour reflection and dread games. The technicians mostly stay away, which gives the maintenance skeleton crew a chance to get out the febreze and give all the workbenches and computers a once-over.

This month however, thanks to the Accountancy Wing stepping in to turn everything back on, we've yanked the Wreckage System Admins out of their cryo-sleep and led them like dopey, confused cattle back to the code pits in an attempt to track down what has changed on the Live Stream recently that is making it more prone to crashing or glitching out.

So far they have not found any simple fixes. (More on this below.)

When we restarted the subscription, as we previously mentioned it was a genuine accident. It has highlighted though that Wreckage Systems is not really a 'set-and-forget' project. It does require our ongoing attention just to make sure the live stream keeps ticking. It is a project we are very proud of and we don't want it to stop. On the other hand, we don't want to get stuck in a loop of keeping Wreckage Systems working at the expense of pushing ever onward into as yet undiscovered territory where we onfusedly challenge what it can mean to be a band who makes weird music that some people like to listen to.

Here is a major issue we are currently tussling with. Since we started work on Wreckage Systems, the notions of generative/procedural art and, in particular, 'A.I.' have become increasingly loaded terms. As we hopefully made clear in various posts over the last few years (this one comes to mind), we are deeply, deeply sceptical about A.I. and all the algorithmic and technological answers being carelessly thrown at what are actually political and structural problems in the name of progress/infinite growth/capitalism-is-fine-actually-and-will-save-us-from-climate-change-honest. 65LABS has picked a side, and it is Team Luddite. Against us, these tech bros are not only destroying the internet, not only devaluing art, not only making the already-precarious lives for creative workers even more precarious, not only failing to understand that the meaning and magic of art is not contained in its particular combination of pixels or samples but rather created in the ripples of social relations that any piece of art makes as it pushes its way into the world, not only are they failing to understand that making art is, at best, to clumsily capture a snapshot of something larger, a fragile, flawed, always-incomplete communication of intent from one/some humans to others, NOT ONLY ALL THAT, but also (and yes, admittedly more trivially), they have tarnished this curious little space of computer-based art that uses generative tools to make itself. Because they do not use these tools in the name of exploring liquid, impermanent art that flutters around a recognisable core but never achieves a single, fixed state. They are employing them solely to be able to dig faster to the bottom of lowest common denominator Generic Internet Content.

When we claimed that Wreckage Systems briefly achieved sentience and make a 45 minute noise album, this was kind of funny and also a legitimately pretty great noise album, if that's the kind of thing you're into. But we didn't *really* believe that our software became sentient! It was just some badly written code accidentally going wrong in a pleasing way. But these Stable Diffusion/Midjourney/ChatGPT believers... they really have fallen for it. They have confused 'copyright-infringing, brute-force statistical analysis of the entire internet' with 'thinking'. And they are going to destroy us all...

And so the question for 65LABS becomes: how exactly do we respond to this? Ignore it? Laugh at it? Smash all our computers and write an acoustic record? Well, no, not that last one at least. The Luddites weren't anti-technology, they were anti-people-using-technology-to-exploit-other- people. And anyway acoustic guitars are banned here. You can never be too careful.

Conceptually, the answer seems to be 'be more human'. Or, perhaps, 'be more authorial' (sorry Barthes). It is hard, however, to curate and moderate and be present when we're talking about an infinite music stream. And, y'know, in terms of more established forms of creative expression, regular-flavoured-65daysofstatic is still out there writing regular (ish) song-shaped songs. (Very slowly, but it is happening.) And so really these concerns are more specifically to do with here, at 65LABS, chipping away at the rockface of bleeding-edge-hyper-music, where time is non-linear and sonics are less susceptible to being squeezed into tried and tested musical frameworks. What next for the labs?

Look, we still think Wreckage Systems is very cool, and we don't want it to stop, but we don't want to get trapped in it either. The last few months we have actually been quietly experimenting with rebuilding it from the ground up in a less-hostile-to-indie-developers environment (e.g - building it in something other than Unity), to see if that might open up any interesting possibilities for a Wreckage Systems Season Two. We have had some success, and perhaps if this does become the next major project you will hear more about it in the near future. On the other hand, maybe Wreckage Systems is done? Maybe it should evolve into something else? Because it feels like it would be more exciting to be building something new on top of those ideas rather than just recreating them in better ways.

So we shall see. This is, essentially, an update to tell you that we have nothing to update you on quite yet. But wanted you to know that things are moving in the background. Look: here's a gif of Wreckage Systems running in Godot:

and look, here's a GIF of the Wreckage System 'Bit Drift' running in Unreal Engine:

and look, here's a screenshot of a critical error afflicting the 'Vertical Fault' system but that tragically afflicted all the systems, caused by a Wwise version control bug in which Wwise references get lost in Unity:

This will mean nothing to 99.99999% of all humans, and honestly, good for them. For us though, it means that despite all of our very careful backing-up and archiving, we currently do not have an easy way to try to fix the increasingly buggy Wreckage Systems V2 stream. And yes this, perhaps, is us burying the lede: 🚨🚨🚨 THERE IS NOW NO EASY WAY FOR US TO FIX THE WRECKAGE SYSTEMS LIVE STREAM ACCURATELY AND/OR QUICKLY 🚨🚨🚨, and so a reckoning is coming about what, exactly, we ought to do about that.

We will leave you on that bombshell. 65LABS is pushing in a number of directions and, as all the feedback we got in regard to us accidentally re-starting the Patreon was along the lines of 'don't worry about it, happy to support you!', we are going to say 'thank you!' and keep things switched on for now. Expect updates as and when we have them, and a firmer plan in the coming weeks/months.

In the meantime, please enjoy the live recording of 'Retreat! Retreat!' from our Manchester live show last year. No Bandcamp download for this one, but hold tight as there might be more where that came from.

Finally, as some light relief and because it in no way sounds pretentious or opaque (ahem), here is our previously un-published manifesto for Decomposition Theory. We don't think we have ever shared it before (?), and it does a pretty good job of getting to the heart of our stance towards algorithmic/A.I. everything. So here you go.

See you soon.

THE 65Z.x

DECOMPOSITION THEORY MANIFESTO - 65daysofstatic, 2017

Written for the Decomposition Theory project, a series of live, algorithmically-driven audio-visual performances looking at notions of generative composition in the context of popular music. The project was steeped in the tension of the band having a distinctive distrust of ‘AI’, but a fondness for generative music techniques as tools for writing music.

1. Algorithms cannot invent the future. They can only mimic the past. But faster.

2. Algorithmic, generative music tends toward infinity. Yet the finite experience of the listener negates any possibility of a truly infinite music. It can only ever be experienced in fragments. Musical fragments: also known as songs.

3. The popular conception of songs, of albums, bands, performances: these are compromised forms. All shaped by the pressures of capitalism.

4. Yet music thrives in these contexts and the communities they create. Music unshaped by its relation to capital is increasingly hard to imagine, because we exist in relation to capital too.

5. To decompose anything, you first need to create it.

6. Frameworks for Decomposition Theory should exist in a space between states. Build them as open, endless landscapes of algorithmic processes; confine them with notions of popular music.

7. When performed, Decomposition Theory is a subtractive process. It is a human unmaking of the algorithmic infinite. A curation of unpredictable processes. Fragmentation as song sculpting. Just enough pulled from much too much. Slices of time.

8. Decomposition Theory applies to all associated forms. This is not about redefining what kind of band we are. We are saying being in a band should be a continuous process of unmaking what a band is.

The three following points were left out of the draft manifesto we wrote for ourselves during the project. Any ideas of formalising a manifesto for public release were abandoned, but these extra points still serve to articulate some of the influences and goals of this research practice:

• Only the dismantling of capitalism can truly bring about a new conception of music.
• The aim of Decomposition Theory is to map a geometry of noise. To reveal the edges of the box that confines our imagination as to what musical form, bands and performance can be. Illuminating the box against itself to see how it traps the light inside.
• Decomposition Theory is not improvisation, nor is it reliable in its form. It is a dialectical process of production and destruction. A way to use atemporality against itself by wielding our own history of creative production in the form of weaponised algorithms to create new spaces of possibility, and filling them with noise.