(W)REDUX?

As I came back to this post to check it for typos before publishing it, I wanted to edit the opening line which read 'Wreckage Systems V2 launched roughly three years ago' to be a bit more specific. I went back to see if I could find out exactly when it went live publicly and it turns out the three year anniversary is this very Friday, the 14th February.

So now I feel even more torn because, as I say toward the end of this post, perhaps this should have been published to the 65LABS backchannel rather than here at The K.N.R.U?

But, this Friday I am away anyway, taking part in the Guildford.Games Festival. I'm going to be on a panel, the title of which — 'Surviving as a Composer' — invites a lot of self-deprecating jokes that I'm going to try to refrain from making. Because as laughably precarious as this world of music-making is, I am still aware of how privileged I am to be somehow still getting away with it.

I might be on another panel too? I'm not sure. Either way, it looks like a good event, plus it is free, though it looks like there are only a few tickets left at the time of writing.

In any case, on Friday my mind is not gonna be on this three year landmark, plus 65 is not one for getting too sentimental about projects past. AND I'd have to fix the logos on the video below, which I cannot be bothered to do. So I'm posting it here after all. I'll hand over now to past-Paul and the post as was originally intended.

(WR)ECHOES

Sporadically over the last year, my brain kept returning to the Wreckage Systems project by 65days.

I won't go into what Wreckage Systems actually is too deeply here as I imagine if you're reading this in the first place you already know. If not, then very briefly: Wreckage Systems is an endless stream of music broadcasting via 65daysofstatic.com (scroll to the bottom and click the little computer) or on our YouTube channel. It is made up of 65 different generative music systems on a shuffling rotation. Each one tends to play for around 5-10 minutes before giving way to the next. Each system never manifests in the same way twice, but is deliberately recognisable as itself.

This project is still alive in the sense that the stream is still running (apart from the occasional glitch and reboot), and there's a 65LABS Patreon running where some loyal supporters help pay for server costs and the ongoing maintenance undertaken by the 65LABS skeleton crew. However for reasons covered elsewhere, it is no longer possible for us to easily update our Wreckage Systems software. Fixing this problem would be a huge undertaking and at best we would end up with a Wreckage Systems stream that sounds exactly the same. Or more likely, a working-but-less-good version. And so instead of us tackling any of that, the project remains in a kind of stasis.

Furthermore, in the three years it has been running, the way 'AI art' is shaking out has been bleak, to say the least. Wreckage Systems does not use AI. Indeed, I like to think that it was ahead of the game in terms of being fairly explicitly anti-AI. But like a lot of generative art it is still subject to being lumped into the same broad category of 'computers autonomously making art instead of humans', and while I think that the distinction between proper generative art and AI slop is one well-worth fighting for, over the last year or so it did make me wonder whether generative anything was the best place to put my creative energy. This feeling, combined with having just spent around a decade pushing at the more experimental end of electronic music production, meant that through 2024 I mostly found myself yearning to just write some good old fashioned song-shaped songs, ideally in a room with my friends from the band that I am in.

That being said.

In rare free moments recently, I have found myself messing about in Max again. Which can often lead to trouble.

I built a very rough prototype of 'Wreckage Control', which is a bit like the conductor of the various audio systems. Or maybe DJ is a better term, as the systems mostly conduct themselves. In fact, DJ isn't quite right either because it's the system that decides when it has done its thing and signals to Wreckage Control that it's time to cue up the next one. And the power of this being done in Max rather than Unity/Wwise (which is what the current Wreckage Systems is built in), is that this way every audio system can be its own standalone Max patch. And a standalone Max patch is a vast musical playground that is soooo much more open-ended than anything Unity or Wwise can offer.

And so having built that, I had to rebuild just a couple of the Wreckage Systems themselves to see how that worked. I built the 'Seed' subsystem, which is the core of a number of the more ambient systems. And yesterday afternoon I started playing with audio from a system called The MIDI Thief and I am having a lot of fun with it.

I have no idea if this will lead to anything at this point. After all, the original Wreckage Systems idea was also prototyped in Max, before endless crashes and audio stuttering made us move over to Unity. And if this does actually become anything viable for 65LABS, then I'll feel duty-bound to write about it over on the Patreon rather than here. But it hasn't got that far and it might not ever. Even if it works better than anticipated, it might not be the right move for 65days to take it on. After all, Wreckage Systems does already exist. Would we really want to do it again? Aren't we supposed to trying to write a good old-fashioned album?

I don't know. But having this new framework up and running, where I feel like I can throw together patches like this and have them exist in relation to other patches in a potentially cohesive way is quite exciting.