Wreckage Systems Technical Overview [Part One of ???] (Patreon)

"If you wish to make a Wreckage System from scratch, you must first invent the universe" - Carl Sagan.

"You could say that the universe itself is the OG Wreckage System" - 65daysofstatic.

This post is the beginning of a series about the technology behind Wreckage Systems. We can't get through it all in one go. Nobody has the energy for that, least of all us: the archivists over in the 65LABS Historical Revisionism wing.

The creation, formalisation, presentation and deliveration of these systems from our brains into yours is a multiphase process. This diagram breaks paints a broad picture of the phases relevant to us going forward:

Phase One is perhaps the most nebulous phase of them all when it comes to any kind of formal analysis. Currently, there are two schools of thought at play at 65LABS when it comes to the oblique, intangible beginnings of musical creation: MISW (Music Is Sine Waves) and MISR (Music is Social Relations). The MISW crew have got maths, physics and neuroscience on their side and are pretty sure that since music is just lots of sine waves stacked on top of each other, it should be solvable by studying enough MRIs and a few million years of evolution. Basically it's just nice patterns. Meanwhile the MISRs have got a much better acronym, an .epub of the collected works of Marx, and the ability to squeeze Mark Fisher's ideas about capitalist realism into a conversation no matter what is actually getting talked about. The struggle between these schools of thought gets right to the heart of the 65daysofstatic compositional process. Like a stake.

So for now, we will put Phase One to the side. Maybe we will return to it later, but as the next posts may well demonstrate, the risk is that the more transparent and explainable we here at 65LABS try to make this project, the more it is stripped of its romance and revealed to be nothing but the bourgeios, bloated code of amateur programmers, kept afloat on commerical software, cheap Linux servers and the latest developments in Apple M1 Silicon.

The next post in this series will get stuck into Phase Two. This is where the real tech-heavy action is currently happening. It will focus on the workflow from the point where we have a small library of musical ideas, and look at the various ways we have been turning those constellations of noise into generative music systems. This is also the part of Wreckage Systems that is currently undergoing a major overhaul to upgrade everything from V1 to V2.

Phase Three is the part where all of those systems are turned into a cohesive whole — Wreckage Systems — that, much like The Lawnmower Man, is uploaded into cyberspace to be enjoyed by, presumably, millions if not billions of people. We've not checked the numbers recently. Currently, Wreckage Systems exists as a single piece of software. What you see on YouTube is the visual front end, and what you hear on both the YouTube stream and the canonical audio-only stream hosted at 65daysofstatic.com is the audio coming from this single piece of software. Because 65LABS Sheffield Branch (aka 65HQ) is generally subject to the kind of hi-jinks you'd otherwise only see in a 90s Bill Murray movie, rather than risk hosting it there, Wreckage Systems is currently running remotely on a Mac Mini in a data centre in Dublin.

Phase Four is, unwisely, inviting some kind of interrogation into those ephemeral connections between all of us. Which sounds quite hard. Harder than making weird generative music systems, that's for sure. What even is music in 2021? Why is this Patreon? Is this a parasocial relationship? Is this a savvy experiment testing new forms for presenting and distributing music? Are we seizing the means of production here or just further alienating ourselves from our work? Is ramping up production through automated technologies devaluing every single audio vibration we worked so hard on making special in the past by making too much of it? How do you as listeners relate to our infinite systems compared to our concrete music? What are we all even really doing here? It is entirely possible that when we get to this part of the series, the analysis of Phase Four may well end up just being a list of further questions.

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Ok. Well, we hope this whets your appetite. Full disclosure: we anticipated that this first post would be jumping straight into the nuts and bolts (ones and zeros) of Phase Two, but to be honest, we spent a whole lot of time on that diagram instead of writing anything. And there are only so many hours in the day. And these systems aren't going to wreck themselves...