devblog / friday 210122 (Patreon)

Here we are again then. Friday Redux. Do you find yourself exhausted and exhilarated after another week of chipping away at the impenetrable face of esoteric futures? Well, it’s Friday, so put down your crude MIDI pickaxe, find yourself a patch of soft tape distortion to sink into and embrace the small oblivion of the weekend. Listen, you’re better off tucked up in this little prospective bubble of noise fiction with us than out there in the howling torrent of realpolitik. Out there: shameless, desperate power grabs. In here: shameless, romantic power chords. It’s a simple choice.

So what futures have we wrought this week? What utopias have we forged in the fires of our vital youth? Well. Let’s see…

THIS WEEK

- System65. The final V2 Wreckage System. It is done. Here’s what happened: on a cold winter’s night back when we first moved into 65LABS, a janitor stumbled across an unmarked door in the basement that hadn’t been there the day before. Inside, a small family of wild arpeggios had taken root. After coaxing them out and rehousing them in the 65LABS BioNoise Wing, over the next decade our audiotanists painstakingly cultivated them into the fibrous, arpeggiated spine of an autonomous music machine. Like a conceptual exoskeleton, capable of bearing the weight of this, the final audio system. If you’ve been following Wreckage Systems since the beginning, you might well recognise it. You can hear an excerpt at the top of this post.

- V.2.1.8 came online this morning. It includes System65. This might be the final build of V2 before making it public. We are resisting the urge to add more systems or features at this time. The completionists amongst you should also take note of the fact that, where applicable, all the systems have now been provided with any relevant extra metadata. You can see this in the tickertape scrolling text of the  ‘now playing’ window for whatever system is currently playing.

- Speaking of things being built for the final time, the Wreckage Systems V1 Archive is complete. If you submitted a credit, it has been added. If you missed it or chose to remain anonymous: your support nevertheless remains recognised. (Thanks). It feels very good for this strand of the project to be sorted, and we will be making sure we savour this quiet time before it gets into all of your hands and a million as-yet undiscovered bugs are immediately reported.

- On this note, we have made the decision that, for the moment at least, unlike the Bandcamp Wreckage Releases, the V1 Archive will be exclusive to patrons. It will be getting hosted on itch.io which, if you aren’t familiar with it, is essentially like a Bandcamp but for indie games/software. When we are ready to launch you will receive a download key to be able to download the software on the platform of your choice. Don’t worry, you won’t have to make an itch.io account if you don’t want to, but if you do have one, you’ll also be able to add the V1 Archive to your library there.

THINGS TO COME

- It’s all coming together, slowly but surely. Next up we will be focussing on reining in the final instalment of the Wreckage Systems Technical Overview series. Behind the scenes it is exploding in scope like a hyperactive supernova and, frankly, it needs to be made to stop.

That’s all for now friends. Good luck out there.