devblog / friday 240921 (Patreon)

Happy Friday, friends. In keeping with the general tone of the UK, we have experienced a shortage of blog-worthy progress here at 65LABS this week.

Fortunately there is no lack of Actual Progress. There is plenty of New Content in the works that we are eager to throw into the merciless jaws of The Internet when it's ready, but sometimes that takes a little longer than a week.

Also, since the world has desperately tried to stretch a print out of 2019 over reality and pretend that everything is back to normal, real world logistics and responsibilities are leaking into our cosy bubble of Pure Musical Research and demanding our attention.

Specifically, it is a little know fact that some of the 65LABS employees moonlight as members of this weird band called 65daysofstatic, and this week saw them picking up their rusty samples, dusting off their cracked plugins, attempting to untangle cables (futile) and definitely not worrying about remembering how to play all their songs. And next week will see all four of our intrepid little noisemakers in the same actual room at the same time for the first time in well over a year.

This is all in the service of the three UK shows in November which, although they have apparently been close to selling out for about a year, are still not actually sold out.

(Short aside: a few people have asked us about covid-security at these shows, but we don’t really know right now. It would be great if people wore masks, but we're not sure if all the venues are asking this or not and they currently cannot enforce it anyway. For any kind of covid-pass, it will depend on the venue and closer to the time we will shout loudly about any requirements. It would be great if people social distanced but we’re not sure if there’ll be space. What we can say is that 65daysofstatic crowds tend to be courteous and radically friendly. So if you venture out, you’ll be in excellent company, none of whom would be there if they had any suggestion of having covid.)

We’ll be squeezing all the energy that has built up from the last time we played a show OVER TWO YEARS AGO into these dates. The shows are in London/Manchester/Edinburgh on 11/12/13 November. Support from AK/DK. Ticket links HERE if you’re interested.

THIS WEEK

- We turned 65HQ back into a rehearsal room instead of at 65LABS outpost. This took a non-trivial amount of time.

- We actually never toured replicr, 2019. Although a few of those tracks made an appearance at our Decomposition Theory shows, they were in more electronic, algorithm forms, designed for a drum kit-less and Joe-less three piece setup. Now we are once again a full band — an assemblage of four humans, speaker vibrations and distortion — and so we are reworking some of the new songs to be performed accordingly.

- A couple of new bugs noted on the V2 stream (Thanks Kelly on the Discord!). But not fixed. Hoping they'll fix themselves at this point to be honest.

- If you need any encouragement to finally head over to the 65days Discord Server then WesGibsonL5 posted an ancient 65daysofstatic remix of a Feedle track in the bootlegs sections and asked for any info about it, which we just managed to pull out of the depths of our bedraggled memories. One for the completionists perhaps. Nice track though, especially if you're into low budget early twenty-first century sampler production techniques.

THINGS TO COME

Going to skip doing a ‘NEXT WEEK’ this time because the band will be rehearsing, and this might mark a slight shift in the 65LABS routine. So instead, here’s a few things that might have got mentioned in passing, but haven’t been forgotten, and will still be heading your way in 2021…

- Release #5. We even know what this is going to be. Another shift in tone. The raw material is pretty much already gathered but post-production will be a major factor in getting the sound we’re after.

- The Continuation and Eventual Conclusion of the Wreckage Systems Technical Overview. It’s been a while since we published one of these, but we’d still like to cover at least some of the following: the Seed Systems, the Available Data system, the Mist System, the ‘standard’ system template, and some incredibly dry information on the actual 65LABS-to-Cyberspace Pipeline about how the stream is actually happening (not least because it would be great if any actual programmers out there can see a way for us to make it less complicated)

- Other Thing. You know, the thing we've been teasing about that we hope to announce soon and that we’re not gonna give any more info about right now.

- Miscellaneous Tangential Blog Posts/Diagrams/Videos (?) Certainly the blog posts... your appreciation of the Billion Volcanoes video was duly noted, although they take a little longer to put together. It would be cool to do more though.

- And, of course, the eventual launch of V2. Which technically means that you lose a patreon perk of having the secret stream, but hopefully that will be dwarfed by the ocean of good feeling knowing that you’re helping Keep the Stream Alive for everybody across the whole of cyberspace.

So! The Confused Adventures of 65LABS continues apace. It couldn’t be done without you. Thanks so much and stay tuned. Stay safe out there and if you really feel the need to panic-buy, don't worry about stocking up on noise, we got you covered. See you next time.