devblog / friday 311221 (Patreon)

We made it, friends. 2021 is DONE.

Wreckage Systems is actually just ten months old, though we wear it around our necks like a thousand year old albatross. We know that a lot of you who have been kind enough to support us since the beginning haven't always had the time to fully keep on top of everything we’ve been doing, so here’s the End of Year report from 65LABS, complete with links to any bits you may have missed.

MARCH

• The Wreckage Systems Patreon launched in March and supporters were treated to early tests before we launched the stream publicly. Test Streams #1, #2 & #3 are still online if you’d like a quick blast of nostalgia.

APRIL

• Wreckage Systems V1 Stream // The main stream went live and it remains live.
• Piling Wreckage Upon Wreckage // An essay/manifesto/explainer about our Wreckage Intentions.
• In Finity, No One Can Hear You Scream // An essay about No Man’s Sky and the limitations of writing ‘infinite’ music.
• Under the Summs // The first Wreckage Release.
• The Devblog // The first of these weekly ‘devblog’ updates is published.
• ZGEN // Explainer of the series of our songs Z1, Z2 & Z3 - the former being a piece of generative music, that latter making it as far as becoming a ‘real’ track on our album replicr, 2019
• Making of Prisms // An old video we made years ago and then forgot to do anything with. It’s about how we wrote Prisms off of Wild Light.
• Decomposition Theory Development Process // A short behind-the-scenes video about our Decomposition Theory live, algorithmic A/V performances.

MAY

• Leaves // A post about an old, rickety, generative system inspired by ‘behaviour trees’, and how we used them to write the song Leaves.
• Tomorrowd // The second Wreckage Release.
• PostKeyhole // A video about a system we made but never used for a special No Man’s Sky Live Show

JUNE

• Wreckage Systems Tech Overview Pt.1 // Outlines the different phases of the Wreckage Systems project.
• Wreckage Systems Tech Overview Pt.2 // Looks at our ‘Mountain’ algorithm. (This post contains a recording of some generative music)
• Available Data // The third Wreckage Release.
• Wreckage Systems Tech Overview Pt.3 // This one’s all about Euclidean Beatz
• Procedural Piano During a Storm 300621 // A lucky live recording.

JULY

• devblog / friday 020721 // There’s a track called FieldRecordingOfASystemCrash290621 tucked away in this devblog
• V2 // We enter a new phase of development of V2, where it is stable enough to start a semi-permanent test stream running, available to patrons.
• Guerrilla Rewilding // An essay about why Brian Eno is cool but also, it is important to understand that not everybody can be Brian Eno. Also class struggle, Jurassic Park memes and general antagonism.

AUGUST

• Sentience 260521 // Back in May, the live stream crashed magnificently over the course of an hour. We managed to record it, tidy it up a little, and released it here.
• Five Waves Annotated // A Max patch we used to make the replicr, 2019 track Five Waves, with instructions on how to use it.
• Lots of new systems got added to the V2 Test Stream
• We were doing a bunch of secret work on V1 Archive to see if it’s a goer or not.

SEPTEMBER

• Mimik // The fourth Wreckage Release.
• How to Capture the Sound of a Billion Volcanoes Erupting Simultaneously // A video about how we made Sister off of replicr, 2019.
• V1 Archive Announcement // We announced the V1 Archive, a forthcoming piece of software that will let you run the original version of Wreckage Systems on your home computer.
• Bit Drift // Lots more systems got added to the V2 Test Stream. There’s a recording of Bit Drift in devblog / friday 030921.

OCTOBER

• The MIDI Thief // A ‘Research Release’ which, unlike the Wreckage Releases, is more experimental in scope and therefore isn’t available outside of this Patreon project.
• Tally for the V2 Test Stream reaches 55 systems.
• There was a visual overhaul for the V2 Test Stream.
• Release #5 goes into production/mixing (not yet realising this would go wrong).
• We did a lot of rehearsing for our November live shows.

NOVEMBER

• Mumble Live Rig // Another Research Release
• Superlevel Q & A // Original English conversation of an interview with German website Superlevel.de
• Live at Gorilla, Manchester, 121121 Auto-Bootleg // A handful of songs recorded from the desk during our live show in Manchester.
• We played some actual live shows in the actual real world.

DECEMBER

• ChangeoverMix-November2021 // An hour-long mashup we made as our changeover music for the November live shows. Glitches and unauthorised remixes abound!
• Pianoblivion // Excerpt of new system Pianoblivion published in devblog / friday 101221.
• New Merch // We got our tour merch online. (Remember that as a patron you can get 20% off anything in our Bandcamp store using discount code ‘merchbot3000’.)
• The Flood Pulse // Excerpt of in-progress system The Flood Pulse published in devblog / friday 171221.
• 241221 // We turned last year’s reworking of our old song 2412 into an hour of scorched-out hyper noise. Because it felt like the right thing to do.
• Data Analysis // The results of the data harvesting we conducted earlier in the year about your favourite systems and general preferences about how this whole project is going.

ONWARD INTO THE VAST UNKNOWN

It’s always darkest before dawn, right? This means that utopia beckons. 65LABS will not be swayed. Better of futures are out there, waiting to be made.

It would have been nice to time Wreckage Systems End of Season One with the year’s end, but we’re not quite there yet. There’s a lot of loose ends to tidy up, bugs to fix, music to throw at your ears, software to launch and social media assets to clumsily make and then forget to share.

So… Good luck out there on your lateral flow hunts. Stay safe, friends. See you on the other side.