65daysofstatic No Man’s Sky: Music for an Infinite Universe

65propaganda / 080416 / Infinity Test

Brothers and sisters! Hear this! Here, this:

A couple of years ago we were approached by video-game makers Hello Games to provide some original music for a new game they were developing, then known as ‘project skyscraper’, now known as ‘No Man’s Sky’. A sort of hyper-real, solitary waltz through a parallel universe in search of oblivion or whatever else feels appropriate in the face of the indifference of eternity.

The game, close to completion and due for release this summer, is also procedural, meaning, for those of you who don’t ‘do’ games, that it generates itself algorithmically rather than manually, and therefore is to all intents and purposes, evil. In other words, it means that the parts of the game one journeys through are theoretically unique, built by the game itself, and you are experiencing them for the first time. And the idea was to create an audio engine that also generated unique instances of music, albeit from a central library of sounds. 65daysofstatic sounds.

Our sort of gig right?

Right now, two years later, 65daysofstatic are working really hard with Hello Games’ best scientists and magicians to finish feeding enough raw music into the gaping mouth of the insane A.I. composer-in-the-machine to satisfy the tabula rasa that will conduct this vast symphony of noise, in time for the game’s release in June of this year.

And we’re also releasing an album of some of this music.

— Album One: Music for an Infinite Universe —
M o n o l i t h
S u p e r m o o n
A s i m o v
H e l i o s p h e r e
B l u e p r i n t f o r a S l o w M a c h i n e
P i l l a r s o f F r o s t
E s c a p e V e l o c i t y
R e d P a r a l l a x
H y p e r s l e e p
E n d o f t h e W o r l d S u n

— Album Two: Soundscapes —
N M S _ e x t e r i o r A t m o s 1 / f a l s e s u n s
t o m o r r o w / l u l l / c e l e s t i a l f e e d b a c k
d e p a r t u r e / s h o r t w a v e / n o i s e t e s t
t e m p o r a l D i s s e n t / a s c e n s i o n _ t e s t 1 / k o a e c a x
b o r e a l i s / c o n t r a s t e l l a r
o u t l i e r / E O T W S _ V a r i a t i o n 1