SUPERLEVEL Q & A (Patreon)

Back in September there was an interview with Paul Wolinski, a 65LABS technicians and one quarter of 65daysofstatic, published in German magazine Superlevel. It was not solely about this Wreckage Systems project, but covered the evolution of 65daysofstatic's experiments in audio-visual glitchiness beginning with the No Man's Sky and how we ended up making infinite streams of noise here. This interview was previously only available in German, but thanks to interviewer Florian Zandt we have permission to publish the original Q&A in English here for those of you who are curious...

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FLORIAN ZANDT: When did you start engaging with video games in general and when and why did you start taking them seriously in a "business" (i.e. working on video game related music / visuals) way?

PAUL WOLINSKI: In general, when I was a kid I was lucky enough to have a ZX Spectrum and then, a little later, an Amiga 500. I spent far too much time on them, but rather than get into programming, I got into MIDI and started using my Amiga to sequence music and then for the next couple of decades computers were primarily musical tools for me and I sort of lost track of video games.

Much later, with 65daysofstatic (the band I am one quarter of) getting the opportunity to do the soundtrack to No Man’s Sky was a huge learning experience and it coincided with me scratching an itch to push myself into learning new ways to make music that ended up becoming a PhD in algorithmic music. Through that I started using Unity a lot, not to make games, but as a music-making and music-visualising tool. And also through No Man’s Sky the four of us in the band were teaching ourselves software like FMOD and Wwise to figure out how to write the ‘infinitely long’ soundtrack.

Post-NMS and post PhD, this new layer of technology has got tangled up with 65daysofstatic’s desire to find new forms to write and present music in. This led to some A/V projects that became music videos. I used an open source framework for Unity called PhiOS that I found on the internet. Unbeknownst to me at the time, PhiOS was made by Phi Dinh, lead developer on Recompile, and they were using a newer version of PhiOS in the game for the UI. So through a fortuitous series of coincidences and conversations, this led me to work on the game Recompile as the UI Programmer, putting glitches all over the place. Which is what I have always been doing really. Glitching stuff. Trying to break computers in interesting ways.

FZ: Your Bandcamp profile says you're living in Berlin at the moment. What made you want to be in this city in particular and do you have any connection to the indie game scene there? I can vividly imagine one of your songs as the BGM for the Brutalism-inspired virtual event space that the A MAZE Festival held their conference in a couple of weeks ago.

PW: Locating to Berlin was a mixture of personal and aspirational reasons. It’s an incredible city, I have much love for it. I have completely failed to do any networking or make useful connections in the indie game scene. I am very bad at this. I think I wrote an email to A MAZE once, but never got a reply. I missed this last conference, but I’ve always got time for a bit of brutalism.

FZ: No Man's Sky is a sandbox for spacefarers, Recompile a glitchy action platformer in digital structures akin to the Matrix. Are you specifically drawn to sci-fi themes in your work apart from 65dos or could you also imagine scoring a fantasy game?

PW: So far it actually seems like sci-fi themes are drawn to us. We are big fans of the genre, but it would be great to try soundtracking other kinds of films or games. We don’t really have an urge to become composers for hire, able to smash out whatever style of music is required of us, but I’m pretty sure we do actually have a wider range than only ever doing sci-fi. I am a bit torn about the idea of doing a fantasy game though. It’s not really my area of interest, and although part of me would love to get to grips with a load of ancient folk instruments and do noisy things with them, there’d be every chance that we accidentally start writing hours-long, sprawling fantasy-prog odysseys. And nobody needs that.

FZ: You self-describe your solo work as "full of noise", and for Recompile, you've also worked on visual glitches. What draws you to this specific aesthetic that sometimes foregoes melodic / harmonic resolution, be it visual or auditory?

PW: Making noise is good for all kinds of reasons. It illuminates the edges of the medium you’re working in, and it is a way of accepting that the medium is always gonna be tangled up in whatever you’re trying to express. I think it’s also a kind of utopian impulse. What was once considered noise is now considered music. As people find ways to make noise aesthetically-pleasing, they’re adding new elements to this huge library of socially constructed meaning that humans have created to be able to communicate feelings to each other.

FZ: You've worked on procedurally generated video games in the past, which is also reflected in the two soundtrack versions for No Man's Sky. In what way has working on games influenced the Wreckage Systems project? Would you have thought of it without the work on NMS?

PW: I doubt we would have ended up making Wreckage Systems if we hadn’t done No Man’s Sky. NMS was a steep learning curve but it opened up so many new areas that we wanted to explore. The soundtrack to the game was just a tiny subset of that experience, and so there were various limitations, both creatively and technically that we needed to abide by. That was fine because we wanted the soundtrack to support the vision of Hello Games, but it did very much leave us asking: ‘what would happen if we made this kind of thing purely for ourselves? How could this technology fit into the template of being-a-band?’ We like trying things that push the idea of what a band can be, so it was inevitable that we would end up trying something like this.

FZ: Can you give me a little insight on how Wreckage Systems works and how it differs from other "auto-generated" music bots on YT like Dadabots' Relentless Doppelganger?

PW: I think what Dadabots do is fascinating and extraordinarily clever from a computer science perspective, but it feels like a very different domain to the one we are operating in. 65LABS are sceptical of machine learning and ‘A.I-made art’ in terms of the output they tend to produce, from both an artistic, and perhaps more accurately, a phenomenological point of view.

This is because for us, the waveform that makes speakers vibrate to make sound is really just one small part of what ‘music’ is. That's physics, but by itself it isn’t music. Any and all meaning that it generates in the listener is made from all the social relations bound up in those sounds. I think that understanding, listening to and enjoying music are all social constructs.

So... these neural nets that are trained on hundreds of death metal songs or whatever, which can then generate these infinite streams of synthesised death metal that sounds a lot like the songs it was trained on. Again, from a computer science perspective that is amazing, and it's a provocative artistic statement, but as a listening experience, I don’t really understand it. Those original death metal songs that were fed into the algorithm were so much more than just audio recordings. They too are social constructs. They hold human intent, shared meaning, the ideas and identity of the band that made them, perhaps for the listener of those songs they hold memories of seeing that band live or when they first heard the record it came from... and on and on. How could the neural nets ever learn how to parse any of that stuff when they are learning how to generate algorithmic death metal?

And so Wreckage Systems is coming at this from a completely different perspective. We have no desire to train computers to make music. Feeding an algorithm with music until it can write its own songs sounds as pointless and impossible to us as the myth of the self-driving car. We want to bend computers to our will. To embrace the inherent bias in the algorithms we design, and to use computers to make music with us, rather than for us. And so compared to Dadabots, our algorithms are laughably simple. But that’s fine because to us they are just a means to an end, rather than artefacts in and of themselves. Rather than trying to create macro-level ‘write us a song’ algorithms, we are more interested in micro-level tools that build phrases or rhythms are process sounds, but can all exist in mostly human-made structures. We still want to be able to communicate our intent through our Wreckage Systems, not just let the computer do what it wants.

FZ: You've already compiled one EP from the Wreckage Systems project, where do you see it going from here? How long do you think you will keep it running?

PW: A good question. At the time of writing, we are currently mixing release number four, and have plans and music for more. The main point of the Wreckage Systems project is the endless live stream. But at the same time, we are aware that an endless stream is not able to utilise one of the things we all enjoy most in music, which is finite, structures of sound, that are fixed and therefore knowable. Things that can be listened to and then re-listened to, and sound the same, and then over time become familiar. Otherwise known as ‘songs.’ The endless stream of music is for sure a utopian impulse worth pursuing, but in the meantime, songs are still great aren’t they? So that’s why the releases are also part of the project. Once we feel like they have run their course, we’ll just have to see what happens next. The 65daysofstatic masterplan has always very much relied on a heavy dose of making-it-up-as-we- go-along.