No Man's Sky: Journeys - NEW ALBUM
Hi friends. It's us again, that strange band you like. Still here, still doing odd things with unruly noise in unlikely time signatures.
But not today. Today we are announcing A NEW ALBUM!
Hello Games are releasing No Man's Sky: Journeys via Laced Records. It arrives on all the streaming services on 18th September, the vinyl will become available for pre-order at the same time, and it's made up of music by 65daysofstatic and Paul Weir.
Two lead tracks are available RIGHT NOW to give you a taste of it: Vostok, written by us, and Paul Weir's The Journey. You can find them on your streaming service of choice or check here:
WHAT IS THIS EXACTLY?
NINE YEARS AGO, shortly after No Man's Sky was originally released, 65daysofstatic created another set of soundscapes, entirely different from anything on our original soundtrack album. These soundscapes were written to be generative and endlessly changing, and so only ever existed inside the No Man's Sky game's universe... UNTIL NOW.
But wait! Do not misunderstand this as a low effort product tie-in. You surely know us better than that. This album is not some old generative soundscapes lazily thrown onto vinyl. There are already many hundreds of hours of that all over YouTube.
No. The 65daysofstatic songs on this album are precisely that: songs, not soundscapes. Over the last twelve months we delved into our original recordings and rebuilt them not as endless soundscapes, but as finite, intentional pieces of music. Proper, actual, song-shaped songs.
And that is only half the story, as No Man's Sky: Journeys is an album by 65daysofstatic and Paul Weir. Half the tracks are ours, half are his; and the album as a whole we slowly built together, deliberately weaving our tracks together to create the best possible (*ahem*) journey. Also it's a double album. So it's a lot of music.
Paul Weir is the audio director at Hello Games and also some kind of sound wizard. He created literally every single sound you hear in No Man's Sky that isn't 65daysofstatic. And while at first that meant handling the sound design of the universe and its inhabitants, over the last nine years as No Man's Sky continued to evolve and grow, Paul Weir took up the baton and produced many more hours of music to grow and evolve our original soundtrack.
This album is very much a labour of love created by Paul, Hello Games and us. We look forward to sharing the rest of it with you in a few weeks.
THE LONGER JOURNEY
Nine years ago, No Man's Sky—a video game that held an entire universe inside its procedural generation system—was released into the world by Hello Games. Unlike the plight of so many other games where the release marks the end of development, for No Man's Sky its release was just the beginning: to this day Hello Games are working on it as it evolves and thrives through update after update.
A trailer for one of the many, many updates to No Man's Sky since it was released in 2016
Our involvement with the game had started all the way back in 2014, a couple of years before release, when we embarked upon writing an infinitely long, infinitely noisy soundtrack to match the scope and ambition of the game.
What began as a brief from Hello Games to simply 'write some 65daysofstatic songs and we'll worry about how to put it in the game' turned into something much more collaborative as we got to know the crew at Hello Games and they realised that we were a much nerdier band than they'd ever anticipated. We became increasingly involved in the process of turning our linear songs into dynamic soundscapes that existed in the game and responded to the actions of the player. We built up these massive sound libraries in 65HQ using our hacked together, ramshackle generative music systems and then dumped them on Paul Weir to fuel the actual No Man's Sky audio engine.
The whole process was a trial by fire. We were making up the rules to how to build 65days-flavoured generative music systems at the same time we were building 65days-flavoured generative music systems. We turned our entire rehearsal room into a giant patch bay, sending everything to everything else for months on end and recording all of it.
It was only once we had done it that we knew how to do it, but by then it was already over.
Happily, shortly after the release, Hello Games asked us to do it again, for The Path Finder update. No album this time - just more in-game soundscapes. And so we got a chance to do something while knowing how to do it. A rarity for life in general, and certainly in the context of writing 65daysofstatic music.
The big lesson we had learned was that if we were writing endless soundscapes from the ground up without the music also needing to make sense as 'proper songs', we'd approach it very differently. So we did. And it was liberating, knowing that this music never needed to be made concrete, that it would only exist in this other place, always alive, always changing.
But that was then and this is now. And putting together the material for the new 65daysofstatic songs on No Man's Sky: Journeys presented a whole new challenge, flipping the whole process on its head. Instead of dismantling our songs and turning them into endless soundtracks like we did for the original soundtrack, this time we... re-mantled (??) songs from the liquid magma of the Path Finder soundscapes, finding a harmonious balance between the always rough-around-the-edges sonics of 65 and the lush, expansive cinematics of Paul Weir's work.
And so that is what No Man's Sky: Journeys is: a snapshot of a work that has been evolving for nine years. Or a new interation of an infinite soundtrack to an infinite universe. Or 80 minutes of gorgeous sci-fi bangers. Or all of the above.
OTHER 65 NEWS
Is announcing a new album not enough?! Give us a break.
Remember: even though our Wreckage Systems project is currently in low-maintenance mode, we made a super-cheap tier on the Patreon in case you'd like to gain access to the vast 65LABS archive that is hidden in there whilst also contributing to the server/running costs. And regardless of whether or not you do that, the Wreckage Systems stream remains online for all to enjoy.
Also: Paul from 65 has got a solo Polinski live show coming up in 65's home town of Sheffield on September 13th at Alpaca Festival. More details HERE. Great line-up, should be fun.
That's all for now.
Take care out there, friends.
65.x
