65daysofstatic compose a soundtrack for No Man's Sky's Infinite Universe
Originally published via PlayStation Blog for PlayStation Music
Gamers everywhere are hotly anticipating the release of No Man’s Sky on the PlayStation 4. To accompany the fantastic visuals and underscore the unprecedented scale of exploration and discovery, Hello Games recruited UK band 65daysofstatic to soundtrack your journey to the center of the galaxy.
65daysofstatic formed when longtime friends Joe Shrewsbury and Rob Jones met Paul Wolinski at university. Since then they’ve been busy being “noisy and strange” for about 10 years and have recently started branching out from making records and touring into some soundtrack work, including that of No Man’s Sky.
PlayStation Music sat down with the band at their headquarters in Sheffield to discuss their music, the creative process, and contributing to one of the most ambitious and unique games ever created.
PlayStation Music
A term has been thrown around quite a bit about No Man’s Sky being a ‘procedurally generated’ game. Could you explain to us a little bit about what that is and how it’s affected your writing process?
65daysofstatic
No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated game which, as far as we understand it, means that the game is able to be as insanely big as it is because it doesn't all exist at once on the drive. It kind of exists only in formulas and algorithms so it generates the space in front of you as you see it. A lot more power and a lot more detail can be included in just a single sort of snapshot of the universe, and then when you move to another place, the computer sort of tosses that away and builds what's in front of you. So the whole thing … doesn't take up as much space to save these billions and billions of planets. It's all done with code and mathematics.
Our role was to try and do something similar with the soundtrack, because the game is going to, for all intents and purposes, be an infinitely big game so [Hello Games] wanted a soundtrack that was infinitely varied, and didn't become repetitive after the first ten hours of playing, which I think can be a problem with some game soundtracks because games are designed, as an art form, they’re something that people invest a lot more time in than films or music. And so that kind of need for longevity is what they were trying to address, and they tried to address it in quite an interesting way.
PS Music
How did the initial collaboration come about between yourselves and Hello Games?
65DOS
We first had contact from Hello Games when we were on tour in Europe and we got an email out of the blue asking to use a track that we wrote for a record we released in 2010 called We Were Exploding Anyway, a track called Debutante. They wanted to use this music to soundtrack a trailer that they were cutting to announce the project of No Man's Sky to the world …
… Often when you're in a band you get asked stuff like that quite a lot, especially when instruments and music gets used for lots of stuff. Or you hope it gets used for lots of stuff. But we tend to be the sort of people who vet that sort of thing, just in case it's a trailer for a fascist takeover of a South American country or something like that [chuckles]. So we just asked a bit more about the project and they were really forthcoming … At the time it was called Project Skyscraper, which is a really exciting name I think, and they sent us some screenshots.
… Shaun [Murray, of Hello Games] sent us an email that sort of was almost like; imagine a film director with no budget describing to the board of directors at Warner Brothers or Sony what they're seeing in their head and what they need the money to film. So this really sort of expressive email about how the game would work and what he saw. And we just thought, "Well, this sounds incredible, and it also sounds like exactly the sort of project that we're looking for." So we sent Paul to London to meet Shaun …
65DOS
Yeah, it was really easy as a meeting. It was really nice. … I went there hoping to sort of pitch 65[daysofstatic] to the game and Shaun had gone to that meeting hoping to pitch 65 to the game too, and so it was really easy. We were both like, "Oh, right, great. We should totally do the soundtrack to this." And he was like, "Yep." And that was kind of it. We drank coffee and talked about, like—
65DOS
Your collection of Asimov novels
65DOS
Yeah [chuckles]. And sort of took it from there, I guess.
PS Music
I know genre's a loose word - but the genre of the band has been quite-- math rock has been thrown around a bit. Do you feel that that complements the game? I know Shaun's mentioned that the No Man's Sky universe is essentially “maths.”
65DOS
I guess we get called math rock from time to time. We get called a number of things, none of which wholly make sense to us. I don't fully understand the term “math rock,” but I guess it's that kind of like angular, weird time signature, start stoppy sort of guitar music. Some of our songs are like that, I guess. It's not really how we think of ourselves.
65DOS
I think in general the people that we've met over the years who define us as math rock, or not as math rock, tend to be very, very militant about what that definition means, and unfortunately, or fortunately for us, we haven't really spent too much worrying about that because, actually, we get a lot more done when we don't worry quite how we're defined, so it's nice to remain fluid.
So I think we've made some records, part of which might have had a math element to them, but we were always pursuing the sort of emotional compelling nature of the music, rather than trying to make something that fit into a genre. I think that's more likely the reason why Shaun asked us to make music for the game, is because No Man's Sky is, I think, a fairly unique game at the moment. It's out there doing something that hasn't been done before. I don't know if I can claim that we're a unique band, but we're certainly trying to be. So I think hopefully he heard something - he heard a bunch of people who were trying to transcend what they're capable of as individuals and make something that is stranger and better than they could come up with alone, and I think that's what Hello Games are trying to do with No Man's Sky as well.
65DOS
I think there's a good analogy in Shaun saying No Man's Sky is essentially a universe made of maths. It's sort of self-deprecating, and it's really clever, but that's not why they've built the game. They've built the experience and the maths is like-- it's the thing that makes it work, but they're not presenting it sort of like, "Look how clever this is." It's more like, "Have this. And have this experience, and it's really exciting." And so that's certainly how we've always approached music.
65DOS
Completely. And I don't think that's what's captured people's imaginations. I think there might be some people out there who are really concerned with the technicalities of how the game creates itself, and that is a really interesting conversation that's being had, obviously, in the games industry and now, to some extent, in music. There's clearly going to be a relationship between these two mediums going forward.
But I think what's really captured people's imaginations is that the endeavor of No Man's Sky is to make something that is beautiful and interesting. It could be the most technical game in the world and this computer could be like building billions of planets, which is what it's doing. But if it was a cold, artless place to be there would be no point in it. So I think that's really the point.
… We don't play a lot of games, but I think No Man's Sky is a moment in gaming, or whatever you want to call it, and in a year's time or two years' time, or ten years' time it will be superseded by something, because that's the nature of human consciousness, isn't it [chuckles]? We'll move forward into something else. But we're part of this conversation now, so we're not trying to do something that will be forever. We’re not trying to do something with the music that will be forever seen as the end and be all … of procedural music. We're just trying to do something that contributes to the conversation, and I think that's what the game's trying to do as well.
PS Music
So you kind of touched on it a bit before about No Man’s Sky being a distinctly beautiful looking game so in terms of the visuals, did [Hello Games] help yourselves, or did they influence the writing process for the soundtrack?
65DOS
The aesthetics of the game is really interesting because that first meeting with Shaun we spoke a lot about sort of those kind of '80s sci-fi book cover aesthetic, the sort of vivid colors , and how a lot of sort of modern sci-fi is … all kind of greyscale and super bleak and desaturated like seriousness. They were going for something more vivid and perhaps more hopeful, but also kind of scary at the same time. So that was nice.
… In the initial conversations we all had something that we all kind of understood but then when we went away to actually start writing, we didn't really get much more guidance beyond the initial screenshots and the videos that they'd presented at the time because, for a start, the sort of nature of that game in the way that they're building it, … it wasn't like there was a lot of building blocks that they could then show us and we could soundtrack them because the whole thing's so dynamic and wouldn't have fixed anyway. There was nothing to actually soundtrack in terms of action and that was quite-- well, a little confusing at first.
We were expecting that there'd be more obvious kind of visual markers because we're soundtracking moving images, but then it kind of, as we sort of got into it, realized it wasn't strictly necessary because it sort of helped us … keep the music alive and less formed because that's what needed to be in the game anyway.
Those kind of just initial quite simple ideas were enough for us just to use our imagination, and I think we felt like quite trusted. Like, we were envisaging maybe, "Right. You finally got a soundtrack project. It's really big, and it's possibly going to have Sony involvement." So we were thinking, "Okay, well this is fantastic, but firstly we need to write a load of music that is the best it can be for this game, and we need to do it in a timeframe that we're not really used to. And secondly, we were sort of expecting loads of sort of executives to descend on it and go, "Well, you know, can you do this, and--?"
65DOS
“Cut that more sci-fi”
65DOS
Yeah, “put it into four-four.” “Have you heard the first Pink Floyd album?” “Yeah, come on man, you're square [laughter]."
But none of this happened, so I don't know whether we were actively protected from that sort of intervention or whether, I suspect Shaun has protected Hello Games and us from all of that, to sort of keep the creativity of it all intact. So I think we felt trusted with this project. We felt trusted to go and do what we do. But at the same it's really intimidating. We're in this room and the only idea of what the game's going to be is what we can imagine from what we've been told.
PS Music
In terms of writing the sound track was there any other sources of inspiration that you guys had leaned on?
65DOS
… As far as inspiration goes it was tricky because they wanted us to write a [65daysof]Static record. That was kind of our brief, and that was really flattering but unexpected and confusing because we've always tried to write a new record with different approaches every time. We were terrified of nostalgia and treading water. It'd just be like getting lazy in our song-writing. So it was very strange to have to sort of actively look back at what we'd done before that had inspired.
… They'd been listening to our back catalogue while developing the game, which is incredibly flattering and so before we got involved with No Man’s Sky, I reckon that the next sort of 65[daysofstatic] material would have been quite like super experimental and noisy and abrasive. Even though they said they wanted the next 65daysofstatic record that wasn't really what they wanted. So we had to sort of kind of work out.
65DOS
No, no they wanted like nice 65.
65DOS
The nice, yeah
65DOS
And we'd sort of explored all that [chuckles] so
65DOS
So it was weird …
65DOS
Because actually the opening of the record isn't nice. Supermoon, which is the track that's out there now, was a conscious effort to sort of reference Debutante (which was the original track that they licensed) but without sort of ripping it off, sort of bettering it. And we were really anxious about that whole thing.
65DOS
It's pretty narcissistic to say that we're our own influence as well isn't it, now that I think about it.
65DOS
Well yeah, or the destruction of our past is our own influence which is like tearing that apart. So you know, and I think now … we wrote that almost 18 months ago and it's great, it's different. Those anxieties have gone away. Because we sort of wrote something really fast and it worked out really well. Not all of the record is as nice as that. Definitely so.
I don't know what I want to say here because I think an entity like this you'll sort of name two or three things and then that will be the influences for the record. And that's not true. I think the truth is more that you sort of bring your best professional musical self to the project of this sort of size and you know that it's going to be really high pressure and it's going to be a really short amount of time and I think we just immersed ourselves in stuff outside of here that might be suggestive of space and time and sort of future thinking and backward thinking and dystopias and utopias and there's a lot of stuff that you get through in the consumption of film and music, and stuff that resonates with that. So I suppose just curating it into your brain and then using that to write big Sci-Fi movies.
PS Music
So as a band you guys have written and recorded five studio albums so far, so how did this soundtrack differ to that process?
65DOS
The way that the No Man's Sky writing process differed from the previous records that we made was, initially, not greatly. It was sort of a project that had two thrusts and we knew that the most immediate thing that we had to do was to just write a record in that sense. So I don't know if you want to correct me but I think the only real difference was time, really, and that we have a lot less time to write the record. Normally when we write a record we don't really have a formula, but we tend to gather a lot of material really quickly and then chuck 90% of it away to sort of get to where we're trying to be. And I think this time we have to just got in synch a lot more and just got a body of work together.
65DOS
The parallel was that sort of knowing that it was heading towards this kind of procedural soundtrack as well. But at the very beginning we didn't know the specifics of how that exactly would come together so it was kind of like writing the song, collecting and cataloguing the parts of the song, and like what Joe was saying about the ratio of what we tend to do versus what makes it on a record. It's not always that most of its rubbish - although a lot of it is rubbish - but there's sometimes good stuff that just doesn't fit in the context of the song that it ends up being, but we still like it. And I think that came in real useful because we weren't throwing those things away. We were just sort of putting them to one side, and then—
65DOS
I mean really with a record you're looking for a feeling and it's very hard to quantify what that is and often in the gestation of music it becomes really clear early on that something's just not going to work, and then sometimes it happens much later when you're put hundreds of hours into something. It can just fall apart at the last moment, which is quite painful really, because you've got this thing that you've all invested so much in and suddenly - and I can't quantify why - but suddenly it just becomes clear that it's not going to live, and it has to die [chuckles]. And I think that's how we would explain it to ourselves.
65DOS
To be honest I sort of thought like Supermoon was the … special case in point because the reality of being involved in this game and the time frames and the demands that we wouldn't put on ourselves if we were just writing our own record meant that suddenly Supermoon had to be finished because we were going to Vegas to do this thing for PlayStation where we'd be announced as doing the soundtrack and debuting new songs. And we were like, "Well, we need another 6 months to finish this song." But we didn't have it, and we had to like book emergency studio time, and getting it recorded.
65DOS
"Guys, that new track you've done is great. What do you think of it?" "Well, we think its crap [chuckles]! Derivative, a pastiche of our worst work." But no, we like it now.
65DOS
Yeah, we do. We just needed a bit of distance. But that kind of wrong-footed us in a nice way because it turned out that it was actually okay in the end.
65DOS
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. We haven't really answered the question though. I think people have asked me more recently like, "How did you get all of that sound design and make a record of it?" And that's the reverse. We did the reverse. We made the record and then after the record was mixed and mastered-- well not mastered, just, as we mixed the record and we had a sort of second album's worth of stuff which was less defined arrangement-wise, we used all that and put all that into the game and added to it.
65DOS
I think it's fair to say that we made that decision quite early on that we should focus on-- it's in the same way that we do touring. Like we took touring versions of songs and recorded versions of songs and we've learnt to distinguish them a lot more, and what works best in these contexts. It was like rather than trying a sort of one size fits all soundtrack that was a bit soundscapey, but maybe wasn't as interesting to listen to because it was deliberately more ambient or whatever. It was a clearly separated, here's a record, and it's going to stand up as a record on its own right in a fully fixed way, and then here's the game soundtrack. And rather than squeeze songs into that, we're going to build that from the ground up to work in that context in its own way and then we'll pull from this as sort of like source material and adapt it, but not rely on it. It's not like we were just remixing it into the game.
65DOS
Yeah, that's true. In hindsight, a lot of that soundscape stuff is quite skeletal, whereas the album had to be more fleshed out because that's what we sound like. So we had to make those decisions, but the soundscape stuff feels-- we've much more recently been working on the in-game audio, and a lot of those things are quite broad strokes. They're quite skeletal, and there's lots of room in between them to explore what they suggest. So that's been quite useful.
65DOS
Just as the sound design aspect of it, there's a bunch of stuff on Supermoon that kind of sounds like space ships that's just not going to work in the game because there's going to be space ships [chuckles]. Noises and motors and engines and just like general ambience. Audio director Paul Weir's been - he's our boss in that world anyway - kind of putting it all together. Working with him has been really helpful.
65DOS
He’s got his own space ship noises
65DOS
[laughter] Yeah, he doesn’t need ours
65DOS
He gets paid a lot of money to make them, he doesn’t want ours
PS Music
Has there been any standout moments in the soundtrack, or standout tracks that you could identify for yourselves that you're proud of?
65DOS
Well the opening half of the record I think is, I love it all, but –
65DOS
It’s weird, then
65DOS
Yeah, it does get really weird. The opening three tracks of the record I think are really strong. Monolith, which is the opening track, is unlike, I don't think we've done anything like that before. No one's heard it yet but that's a pretty full-on piece of music, isn't it?
65DOS
It's more the body of work, isn't it? It's never been about-- I don't reckon what my favorite track is, it's more like I'm just glad that it works as an album and also as standalone tracks.
65DOS
I hope the soundscape stuff's received really well because it feels like a journey to listen to. It's really sort of out of time. It doesn't demand-- it's quite fluid. I like that we were forced to do something like that, and we've ran with it, as it were. Do you think--?
65DOS
I think so, yeah. I think the soundscapes were interesting because we wrote the soundscapes as representations of what the game would be like in order to sort of use that material actually in the game. But I think that's almost like, as far as thinking about the future of all of this, the potential for the generative music, procedural audio, it's fascinating. Even since we did the soundscapes, what we've learnt and how we'd approach them now, understanding how the logic behind this software works in order to feed our sounds into it, it's evolved quite a lot I think. So I'm happy we've documented the stages a little bit.
65DOS
Yeah. You've learnt a lot of programming, haven't you?
65DOS
Mm-hmm.
65DOS
Loads of stuff. I don't get it. Someone does [chuckles].
PS Music
Moving away slightly from No Man's Sky and the soundtrack, as a band are you guys avid gamers?
65DOS
… I don't think as a band or as individuals we really play a great deal of computer games. I don't play a lot of stuff. I'm aware of games.
65DOS
I played a lot as a teenager. Like on the Amiga. Things like Monkey Island and Beneath A Steel Sky I was a big fan of. And then we were in a band for a long time and kind of lost track of that world.
65DOS
When we first met we used to play Tony Hawk's a lot, and we used to play Grand Theft Auto as well when 65[daysofstatic] first started. And then we thought, "Hang on. We better stop playing [chuckles] these games and get some work done because we need to be better as a band!"
65DOS
It's always been on the periphery. We're certainly not dismissive of them and can totally appreciate how it's evolved into a really exciting medium that doesn't just have to be about shooting the bad guys and really obvious narrative tropes. We can see it with potential for music as an art form that is so responsive to the audience's own agency within it. It's fascinating. It feels like the very stages of really, really grasping that. So probably should be starting to pay more attention.
65DOS
Well I'm thinking now. I'm thinking of all the games we have played actually and how I sort of feel I have to keep away from them because they're very addictive things, and I think I don't end up getting a lot of them, but I'm just thinking about Tiger Woods Golf that was on that tour bus. Stopped getting off. Just stopped getting off the tour bus and stuff like that.
PS Music
So with PlayStation Music, you can actually create basically a music playlist while you're playing games, so who would be in your ideal music playlist for playing games?
65DOS
I don't know if I know enough about playing games and stuff where I would actively want to soundtrack the game myself. I like that No Man's Sky has a soundtrack that is supposed to help the game along. It's a bit like going to see Blade Runner and it not being Vangelis, but it's like Katy Perry or something. It would be a different thing. But I can imagine playing No Man's Sky and listening to a lot of Brian Eno stuff actually. We've been listening to quite a bit of recently, like ambient stuff. But hopefully-- you know, there's always the worry that it would be better than the soundtrack we've written … [chuckles] because he's Eno, so.
65DOS
I guess it's supposed to be a certain type of game. It feels like doing a disservice to a composer
65DOS
Yeah. I think this is what I'm trying to say.
65DOS
Yeah, that that computer game director is putting his vision together, which obviously isn't very on message with the PlayStation Music service, but I guess there's other types of games that I'm less familiar with, but I guess the footballing games, and the car racing games, and the sort of more sociable games rather than the immersive ones which I suppose are more suited to different types of soundtracks that don't have to be so locked in to the experience that's being created.
PS Music
We touched on this slightly earlier. In 2014 you played the first PlayStation Experience which was in Las Vegas. So how did it feel to have basically composed this music before you were going on stage to actually play a live for the first time?
65DOS
Going to the PlayStation Experience in Vegas was definitely a notable episode in 65's career for many, many reasons.
I mean we hadn't been signed on to soundtrack No Man's Sky for very long at that point so we were right in the middle of writing the soundtrack. I don't think we were even halfway through writing the music that we have now, but we had to complete three or four tracks for that, two of which we ended up playing live. So those terms alone it was more stressful and we had less control over the situation than I think anything we've done for a long, long time.
One of the tracks was Supermoon, and we had definite anxieties about that track, but in the end it was great because we were forced to finish the track and sat right here, actually, the Friday we before we flew out we were forced to finish it, and that was great.
Sometimes that's really good to have to work within those parameters where you're forced to do something, because if you're obsessed with controlling everything as we are, you can end up going through endless iterations of something, and you sort of miss the right one, whereas here we were forced to finish it.
65DOS
The PlayStation thing, playing it was amazing because there was a big PA and there was a lot of visuals there, and I don't know if anybody [reading] this knows much about this but we don't have access to quite large PAs and loads of visuals a great deal [chuckles], so we're a weird band who plays tiny gigs. So that was really, really cool.
I think the gig was great. It sort of felt really good in the room. It felt like there were a lot of people there who were having a really great time. But the gig, the live show, was a bit of fresh air to quite a long weekend in the middle of the madness that is Las Vegas. Not our holiday destination of choice I don't think [laughter].
PS Music
So can fans of 65 expect to see any of the No Man's Sky soundtrack in any future set list or in any future live performances?
65DOS
Definitely, yeah. The main record is made to be played live. Not in its entirety but there's a great deal of it we've written as we would write a record definitely with playing live in mind. So I think we've already started playing some of it.
65DOS
And there's going to be No Man's Sky—
65DOS
We're also working on this—
65DOS
--performances. Like with [Sónar 2016]. We're going to do that in Barcelona in June and that'll be an entire show built from the No Man's Sky material. There's a lot of that to choose from and we're still sort of working through the best options about how we can present that, because it's a really interesting opportunity to not just to make it significantly different from the usual 65 show, which is kind of noisy, and a bit scruffy, and exciting hopefully. The main album tracks will work in that context, plenty of them, and we will do that in our regular shows too because it is our new record, but it does lend itself to something very different that we're going to explore.
65DOS
I think the thing is that we've spent three to six months now tearing apart the music that we wrote a year a ago and putting it into the game, so our attitude to that music has completely changed, and it doesn't seem fixed to us, so we're trying to develop a way of playing some of that music live which we inherently feel has less parameters, and so the possibilities of playing it live are much better. Although you've then got to make sure it then doesn't fall apart. So … that’s where we’re at now.
PS Music
So going back to a bit of videogame history, this is not the first time that we've had game developers work with established musicians. In the past we've had games like Quake where Trent Reznor did the soundtrack and they added little Easter eggs into the game. For 65, do you reckon there's going to be anything that the players of the game should look out for within the game? Any sort of Easter eggs?
65DOS
[chuckles] I don't know if Hello Games have added anything into the game. It may be that it's something as simple as a monument to the frustration that they felt with having to work with us [laughter] on some unnamed planet somewhere!
It may be that along the lines of, if you put enough monkeys in a room with a typewriter they'll write Shakespeare. That a procedural game will, by its very definition, throw some idea of our agency within that game, but I think the game is too much of its own thing. But who knows. Who knows how angry they are with us [laughter]!
PS Music
That's brilliant! Just to kind of sum up No Man's Sky and its soundtrack in one sentence, how would you do it?
65DOS
If you had to sum up No Man's Sky and its soundtrack in one sentence you would say it is a bunch of people striving to make something that is intangibly... [chuckles] It's like flying close to the sun. It feels like something that is—
65DOS
Unparalleled ambition in a game like that.
65DOS
Yeah
65DOS
Someone's got to do it first, and it's incredibly exciting to just be on the periphery of it, because—
65DOS
Because it's a great thing that they've tried to do. And they've stuck to their-- Sean and all of them haven't compromised on the original idea that they told us of what they were trying to do. And this isn't a one sentence you see, but they have not compromised, and I don't know what pressures have been put on them, but I do know that industries like the games industry have huge pressures on them, especially when you try to make something that's commercial and, as far as I can see they haven't changed their original idea, and they certainly haven't asked us to be anything that we aren't. And so it has a sort of dignity to me, and we're just really glad to have been a part of something that's felt creative even when it was difficult.
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Be sure to check out all 65daysofstatic’s albums, now streaming on PlayStation Music! [Ed. also streaming on Spotify]