devblog / friday 261121 (Patreon)

Here we are again, demanding your attention. Another seven days of tumbling history to carry around our necks for the rest of our existence. Strange how some weeks weigh next to nothing and others feel made of granite. How much does yours weigh this time round? The 65LABS Weird Physics Branch is heroically, idiotically convinced that gravity is as much of a social construct as time, and that the greater the accumulation of emancipatory social relations and/or existential dread in one place, the heavier everything gets. That is why Jeff Bezos can pop off into space so easily - cos he’s an insignificant, empty shell of a human, and therefore lighter than a feather. Whereas we all carry around our memories like chainmail, brains like collapsing stars, welded to the earth like ancient anchors dropped from the clouds. Heavy as metal, trying to imagine better ways the world could be... So if your week was a burden, try to take some comfort in the heft of it. At least it means you’re not a billionaire.

THIS WEEK

- Live songs! Sonified scruffiness! In case you missed it, earlier in the week we shared a bootleg of some songs from our live show at Manchester Gorilla. Recorded live from the board & tidied up a little by our sound engineer Stu Condron. It should be noted that a tragic case of bad timing pressing the 'publish' button on Patreon meant we just missed the moment to call this release From the Muddy Banks of the Irwell. Please feel free to update your mp3 id tags accordingly. 

Tracklisting:

1. Install a Beak in the Heart that Clucks Time in Arabic
2. Asimov
3. Sleepwalk City
4. Supermoon
5. Debutante
6. I Swallowed Hard, Like I Understood (encore)

No Bandcamp codes cos it’s not an official release. Anyway what release? Don’t even know what you’re talking about. (If you're reading this at some point in the future and the patreon link no longer works, try checking out www.the65republic.com.)

- The severs hosting both the V1 and V2 streams were behaving erratically this week for some reason. Don’t blame us, blame Tim Cook and his automatic updates. Or at least that's what we suspect, even though they should have been disabled. Regardless, for some reason the two heroic little mac minis, each running their gargantuan, generative noise operas day after day after day, got a little tired and took their streams offline. V1 is back and, because it is public, has a consistent link (youtube.com/65propaganda/live). V2, being unlisted, does not. So, this is still secret please, but if you bookmark v2_test_stream.65daysofstatic.com we will keep that redirecting to wherever the latest broadcast is hiding. (Thanks btw to Sam Atkinson who pointed out we could do something like this weeks ago, it hadn’t occurred to us).

- Bug fixes on V2 continued, but no new build as of yet.

- The beta testing for V1 Archive has been on pause this week. It isn’t as smooth sailing as we’d hoped for. Who knew that arbitrarily deciding to release some software without really knowing what we’re doing could end up getting quite complicated?

THINGS TO COME

- Wreckage Release #5 also got a little complicated. We want each of these fully-fledged Wreckage Releases to capture a different perspective of the overall Wreckage sound. We thought this one would be relatively straight-forward, but we are attempting something a little different from our usual output, something more straight-forwardly ambient, and we want to make sure we’ve got it right. So… We’re working on it. Hold tight.

- We’ll be getting stuck back into sorting out the V1 Archive for/with the beta testers next week. Very much hoping to get this locked down soon to be able to properly return to the musical side of finishing up V2.

- A quick bump for this 65LABS Data Harvesting questionnaire. Originally tacked on to the bottom of the form where you could opt-in to getting a credit in the V1 Archive software (which you can also still do at the above link), the data collected is actually really helpful in thinking ahead in terms of Wreckage Systems and 65LABS in a broader sense. We will share these results with you in due course. 

- In the meantime, despite the Wreckage Release #5 hold up, there’ll be another little collage of sliced up noise headed your way next week! Ready your ears and stereos.

Take care out there, friends.