It’s not often that a band returns to soundtrack the same game nine years after its release — then again, most games aren’t No Man’s Sky. Once demoed on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and at splashy E3 press conferences, in 2016, No Man’s Sky was heralded as gaming’s future. And it was all made possible by the procedural generation that spawned its vast, sci-fi universe.
Nearly a decade later, as post-rock band 65daysofstatic returns to re-score the ever-evolving game, generated content is no longer the exciting futurism it once seemed. With AI slop flooding social media and AI-generated bands sneaking their way onto Spotify, the tech that once powered gaming dreams is slowly becoming a dystopian nightmare.
“It’s just capitalism, isn’t it?” says 65daysofstatic’s Paul Wolinski. “It’s ruining everything. It’s all these CEOs who don’t understand the difference between art and content.”
That’s where Journeys, a defiantly human soundtrack that stands firmly against the rise of the music-generating machines, comes in. Working alongside Hello Games’ audio director, Paul Weir, Wolinski has spent the last year transforming a series of abstract, unreleased soundscapes into full-fledged songs. Once intended as pieces to be infinitely reassembled by No Man’s Sky’s algorithm, the two Pauls strove to reimagine these ethereal bleeps and bloops into something that sounded altogether more human. The result is a 32-track, four-LP album that combines 65daysofstatic’s reworked soundscapes with original compositions from Weir.
“For this record, we were much more interested in turning all of that infinite stuff into something more intentional — something bespoke and artisan,” says Wolinski. Where the initial soundtrack Music for an Infinite Universe’s pounding drums and swelling guitars match the highs and lows of jetting off into space, Journeys is an altogether eerier creation, channeling the quiet sense of foreboding of arriving on an unknown planet, the initial score’s optimism replaced by a more unknowable reality.
“When we first started this, I assumed it would be just remixing our old selves,” says Wolinski, “but most of the soundscapes didn’t provide an origin point for an actual song at all… It was much harder, more mysterious.” Luckily, 65daysofstatic had an ethereal expert on hand: Weir.
“We were much more interested in turning all of that infinite stuff into something more intentional”
While the band went off experimenting with procedural generation in their audio / visual live shows, No Man’s Sky continued to grow and evolve, and it needed the music to match. “I didn’t want to sound like a fake 65daysofstatic, you know?” says Weir, as he sat at his synth, picking up where the band of static left off. “I’m a sound designer as much as a composer, and so that’s brought in quite a lot of abstraction into some music. There’s a lot of strange noises!”
As 65daysofstatic’s prog-laden epics combine with Weir’s synth-led ambience, the result is closer to a Philip Glass score than a noise-drenched post-rock record. It’s a marked evolution from what came before, one that matches No Man’s Sky’s journey from rocky launch into the sprawling sci-fi epic that it is today. “It’s a funny old relationship,” reflects Weir, on working on the same game for 14 years. ”We’re both constantly going, ‘All right, enough already, time to move on!’ and then simultaneously delighted by its continued strength and success.”
Image: Laced Records
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