devblog / friday 020721 (Patreon)

Hi friends. Another week down. We did it. Look, here's a glimpse behind the curtain: this is the prompt Patreon gives us when we write a new post to you:

Pretty bleak. huh? It takes you for suckers! Quality is not valued here, only quantity. "Don't worry about those fools - they'll lap it up! Just! Keep! Posting! And also, 65LABS, we think you are suckers too - why are you putting so much effort in to deliver only things you feel are worth sharing!? HONESTLY, WRITE ANYTHING! YOUR PATRONS WILL LOVE IT!"

This is what capitalism does to you kids. Do not recommend. Avoid where possible.

The good news is that here at 65LABS, we are not so ground down by the world as the poor copy writers employed by Patreon appear to have been. Not quite so cynical. We're eternally grateful that we have carved out this space for experimentation that you have all rallied to support so enthusiastically.

And, ironically, it's been a particularly productive week in the lab. Loads of content getting produced. Patreon would be proud.

THIS WEEK

• Early in the week, during work on V2, there was a particularly beautiful computer crash. We managed to record a chunk of it and stuck it on the Discord, but it's attached here too in case you don't frequent that space. It is a nice side benefit to this project that we appear to be slowly accruing enough material to be able to release several noise albums once we can no longer tolerate the bourgeois mendacity of counter revolutionary concepts like 'melody' and 'songs'.

• A little later in the week, we had a major breakthrough in V2 development: a new mode of composing within Wreckage Systems, named AUTOCODE. It is still growing and mutating and we need it to settle into its role before starting to write up a full technical overview, but it has immediately become a useful tool. It is very much inspired by the wonderful TidalCycles, a live-coding language, but repurposed to sit inside our various Wreckage Systems to generate new melodic and rhythmic patterns on the fly. It also, potentially, opens up a door to a light weight way for 65LABS technicians to add new Wreckage Systems to the stream on the fly. Although, 'potentially' is doing a lot of work in that last sentence.

• As AUTOCODE came online, a 65LABS field recordist found themselves in the right place at the right time, and they duly documented everything that they heard. If you missed it, you can listen here: 'Procedural Piano During a Storm 300621'.

• Excellent progress was made at 65HQ Prime doing some of that old fashioned 'writing music'. It should be noted that before Wreckage Systems solidified around the concept of the live stream, we knew that the amorphous collection of libraries that we had already been amassing would be the primordial soup from which everything else evolved. As this project continues, parts of this storm of noise have crystallised into specific systems or releases. Many other parts currently exist in liminal states, much like Patrick Swayze in Ghost. We can communicate with them, after a fashion, and through our tireless work coax them into one state or another. This week, our spectre-wrangling produced some particularly exciting new bass lines and rhythms from a relatively old glimmer of sonics. It sounds like the invention of ice cubes.

NEXT WEEK

• More of the same. As you are now getting hints of, V2 is making healthy progress and every effort is being made to share Patreon-Approved ENDLESS CONTENT with you as often as possible. If things go well, then next week we might be able to start sharing occasional test streams from a secret server with you. It should be noted though that 'Phase Three' of the Wreckage Systems infrastructure (see this diagram for more information) is very difficult and almost entirely boring to talk about, as it is the part where our precious sounds leave the confines of 65LABS and have to navigate the toxic apocalypse known as 'the internet' before reaching your lovely ears. What this means in practice is that it is no small thing for us to maintain a second stream reliably. It needs to start happening eventually for V2 testing purposes, but the results might be so intermittent and underwhelming that it would make us all happier if rather than dedicating time to making a test stream enjoyable enough to be worth sharing with you, we instead post regular excerpts here like we have this week.

That's it. Good luck out there. See you next time.