Sheffield’s 65daysofstatic head to Amplifier Bar on Friday, March 13.
MATTHEW TOMICH chats with guitarist, Paul Wolinski.
No one else sounds like 65daysofstatic.
That’s pretty unusual for a post-rock band – though they resist the term ‘post-rock’ – considering the genre is over-populated by Mogwai imitators and songwriting clichés. Yet over a decade into their existence, the Sheffield quartet have a style unto themselves that few attempt to replicate thanks to their inimitable on-stage dynamism and penchant for frenzied electronica. Guitarist Paul Wolinski admits that in their early days, they took their cues not from instrumental pedal obsessives, but a turn-of-the-century alt. rock and the new technology of electronic music.
“The two keystones were At the Drive-In as far as guitars and being a band went, and because this was early 2000s, there were people like Kid606 and the rise of the laptop kid,” says Wolinski. “Because it was the first time laptops were ever powerful enough to do that kind of thing. The glitch aesthetic was still new and exciting and it felt like those were the kids making the really revolutionary music.”
Though their most recent string of shows saw them play their debut album, The Fall Of Math, in full for the first time to celebrate that record’s 10 year anniversary, 65daysofstatic are looking forward. Wolinski champions their latest effort, Wild Light, as the best thing they’ve ever done, and it’s easy to see why. While The Fall of Math and the records that followed brimmed with a youthful intensity and a maximalist approach to songwriting, Wild Light is an understated and thoughtful post-rock masterpiece where every second of sound is paced for maximum emotional impact. The band’s love for the chaos of guitars-meet-electronica has evolved into a seamless synthesis of the organic and the artificial. This is the sound of a band with nothing left to prove to anyone but themselves.
Which isn’t to say that 65daysofstatic are above seeking new challenges; their latest project is soundtracking the upcoming procedurally generated sci-fi video game, No Man’s Sky, a process that involves writing not just songs, but the tiny elements of melody that make up the sonic world of the game’s universe, allowing a near-infinite loop of music. The brief from Sean Murray, head of the design studio Hello Games and a long-time fan of the band, was simple: write 65daysofstatic songs. So where do you start? Despite the open brief, Wolinski and his bandmates relished the chance to work in such a radically different way.
“It’s such a unique opportunity to collaborate in that way rather than just write a soundtrack. We’ve realised that we’ve never really been able to articulately explain our creative process until after we’ve made something. When we’re in the middle of it, you’re making it up as you go along. You have to feel your way through in the dark. But right now it’s just lots of conversations about, ‘Okay, does that guitar riff sound like it would exist in space? Yes? No? Probably not’. And we have to just take it from there, which is perhaps not the most romantic way of imagining music writing, but that’s the unglamorous reality.”
