devblog / friday 171221 (Patreon)

Hurtling into the Dread Sublime! The 65LABS Chrono-Engineering division has been working tirelessly on some kind of ‘history brake pad’ to try and slow things down just a little, but we are no match for the colossal, dead weight of capitalism, its leaden foot grimly pushing down on the accelerator of Progress. And so instead we careen along with you into the pandemocene, providing solace where we can, mostly in the shape of sound.

It's a bit of a scattershot devblog this week. We started a few things, got distracted, started others. It all continues to come together, but not in an easily summarisable way. Nevertheless...

THIS WEEK

- First things first, the post-tour 65 merch is online and selling fast! Check HERE if you haven’t seen it yet. Some sizes have already sold out. We will be shipping as best and as fast as we can manage. If you haven’t ordered yet, remember that as a 65LABS supporter you can get 20% off literally anything in the store using the code ‘merchbot3000’ at checkout.

- We’ve been working on the next (final?) part of the Wreckage Systems Technical Overview that finally goes into the specifics of how the systems are working. It’s not ready to share yet, but it's getting there.

- There’s also that short explainer that we mentioned last week, detailing the decision about the aborted Wreckage Release #5. This will still be arriving with you soon, but as a new ‘Research Release’, rather than a Wreckage one. It would be good to try to articulate why this distinction feels important to us, but this, too, remains unfinished.

- A new system has been started. It’s called The Flood Pulse. It began by trawling through an old hard drive, and stumbling down the file path Music Archive > New 2015 > blackswanevent Project > blackswanevent3.als and opening it up to see what was inside. The project itself was mostly full of digital ruins: non-functioning software synths and missing sample files. Tucked away amongst them were a few choice stems of audio, still intact. These files - recordings from 65HQ of guitars and bass guitars producing long droned tones being re-tuned as they resonated - have been salvaged and put to work in this new system. Back in 2015, during that particular session, we had no use for loose, fluctuating tunings recorded with a fair amount of room hiss. Now they bring a much coveted liveness to a project that is necessarily heavily reliant on digital synthesis or generation of one kind or another.

Because we are approaching the full tally of 65 different systems for the V2 stream, an extra effort is now being made to push these final systems into unique or under-explored directions in terms of how they generate themselves. There are still so many unrealised ideas, and so it feels like now is the time to test a few of them out before the musical content of V2 is locked down. Not that The Flood Pulse will particularly stand out as distinct from a lot of the other systems. As you can hear from the short in-progress excerpt at the top of this post, it is a pretty low key, ambient system. But rather than being built using the generic Wreckage System tools (again - the nature of generic systems and the various subsystems will be properly explained in the coming Tech Overview post), it uses its own custom logic. At the moment, this just extends to a custom phrase generator to add occasional generative keys melodies atop the live audio base structure. You can hear the notes in the recording every now and then - currently they’re being generated using some basic random number logic, but that will be improved. What is also planned for The Flood Pulse and the remaining systems is that they will properly take advantage of the fact that each system can exist in seven different states (‘beginning’, ‘state_00’, ‘state_01’, ‘state_02’, ‘state_03’, ‘state_04’, ‘ending’). Although this feature is integral to the way the V2 stream functions and was implemented at the start, it hasn't ended up being used as frequently as we thought it would.

THINGS TO COME

- All the above will eventually shake out and turn itself into New Wreckage Content™ for you just as soon as it is ready.

- We will also do our best to publish the results of the Data Harvesting before the end of the year too.

That's it for now, friends... Who knows what next week will bring, particularly if like us you're sat huddled on this fragile, failed state of an island called the UK, braced for omicron oblivion. Good luck out there and until next week stay safe, get boosted if you can, keep your parties digital, maybe dig a cave, waive all vaccine patents you have the power to waive, if you have any spare cash please consider throwing a bit of it at THIS strike fund, and fuck the tories forever and always. 65.x