devblog / friday 241221 (Patreon)

It’s the penultimate Friday of 2021. A year of infernal labyrinths and endless, featureless deserts. Both somehow inhabiting the same spaces in our brains. Non-linear, yet achingly static. (We all ache static round these parts).

This time last year, locked down in different countries, we made an updated version of old 65daysofstatic song 2412. It was called 241220 and we put it out on our Bandcamp for free. If you missed it last year or, like us, you listened to it a few times then forgot it existed, why not give it a blast as loud as your stereo will go? If nothing else it’s better than that Paul McCartney one. Perhaps not as good as Wham. (Rest in power, comrade George Michael).

This year, not-quite locked down in the same country, ravaged by age and lacklustre, we did not make another updated version. We did, however, make a profound artistic comment about this anti-temporal, brain-melting pandemic era by turning the loud bit of 241220 into a 65 minute long noise canvas of cathartic squall and hyper-everything. You can find that above and a downloadable mp3 should be attached to this post. In the spirit of sharing also gonna post this on our YouTube in a bit. Happy holidays!

THIS WEEK

- A lot of this week was lost to vaccine booster fever dreams and the shipping out of new merch. Hopefully at least some orders will reach you by Christmas if that was your intent when ordering. Apologies if not.

- The rest of the time was spent working on new system The Flood Pulse. As we guessed last week, the output of the system does not stand out as being radically different to the others, but it has been built with a bit more attention to under-utilised features. The upshot of this is that the variations should have a bit more subtlety in their changes, and if different iterations of the system were put side by side, how they behave differently might a bit more noticeable. Or then again, maybe not. It could have been booster brain fog wanting to make our lives a bit easier, but the feeling was that although we could have pushed it further technically, it would have started brushing up against that eternal problem of generative ambient music not having a distinct intention or personality. As we have previously discussesd, the approach for Wreckage Systems from the beginning was based on the hypothesis that it's better to have loads of smaller, simpler systems that are each able to drift loosely around their central intention, rather than have one super system that needs to be capable of doing so many different things that everything becomes ephemeral always and forever... 

- Anyway, The Flood Pulse is now in the V2 stream - V2.1.6 went online yesterday and so far everything seems to be running smoothly

THINGS TO COME AS WE STUMBLE TOWARDS THE END (of Wreckage Systems Season One)

- There’s still quite a lot of moving parts now we’ve got a clearer ‘End of Season One’ masterplan in place. V2 itself is close to being musically complete. We’re now at 63 systems (!) It seems to be (?) pretty stable and bug free. We’re not planning on introducing any new features at this point but, as we said last week, with these final systems we want to explore the edges of what’s possible.

- Here’s what the current list of things still eventually heading your way before the End comes is looking like:

• we’ll be sharing the ‘Data Harvesting’ with you all
• the release of the V1 Archive will happen
• the Wreckage Systems Technical Overview Series will be completed
• the next Research Release will drop into your ears
• the muddled ‘Content vs. Cannon’ piece of writing that came out of trying to explain our decision to abandon Wreckage Release #5, and turn it into a more low-key Research Release, will be un-muddled and posted. Maybe.
• V2 will be released across the whole of cyberspace.

That’s it for now. Good luck out there, friends. Take care, see you on the other side. Team 65.x