Beneath the now behemoth-sized machinations of ‘No Man’s Sky’ lies a rhythm that ties that sense of wonder and exploration together. You might have noticed it, that heavy post-rockish presence that Sheffield-based band 65daysofstatic worked in tandem with developer Hello Games not just to create “noise” as some may put it, but to tailor a unique musical experience for the player that acts not only as ambiance but a sort of secondary companion as they muck about through the infinite universe.
I’m a bit of a fan, you could say, and so when the opportunity arose that I may so ask questions to the bright minds behind this unit, notably Paul Wolinski (one of the four members of 65daysofstatic), about themselves and how the music or soundscapes or however-you-want-to-put-it comes to life within No Man’s Sky—well, I was positively enthralled. And I hope you, my fine reader, can take away key points on how video game music comes together and how it can be essential to your journey through the cosmos.
Heads Up! This interview has had its formatting adjusted to improve readability, but otherwise its contents remain intact.
Who are you and what is 65daysofstatic? What genre of music do you lovely lot specialise in? And what in the world is “Math Rock”?
Hi. I am Paul Wolinski, one of the four people who collectively make up 65daysofstatatic. We are a noisy instrumental band from Sheffield in the north of England. We specialise in trying to avoid falling into any particular genre, but people mostly call us ‘post rock’ anyway. We do get ‘math rock’ too, maybe it’s because we have a fondness for unusual time signatures?
Can you tell me how that relationship with Hello Games came to be? And what was it like creating music for a video game rather than, say, a traditional standalone track for a solo album?
Hello Games got in touch with us to ask if they could use an old song of ours called ‘Debutante’ for the announcement trailer of No Man’s Sky. As soon as we saw their concept art and understood what kind of game they were making we said ‘Yes you can, and do you have anybody to do the soundtrack yet? Because if not, we should talk’. And it just went from there.
The difference in approaches to composing for video games versus albums is huge, especially when a game is as open as No Man’s Sky. With an album, the song takes centre stage. It is designed to hold people’s attention as a standalone piece of work, and also make sense alongside other songs so collectively the album flows. And all of that is under our control.
In comparison, there is an unsolvable tension at the heart of video game music, because music can only exist through time. But in video games, unless it is a scripted cut scene, then you never know precisely what the player is going to do when. The music has to be able to respond to a changing environment. But, you know, if you think there might be a dramatic change in mood coming in the next, say 30 seconds of gameplay, say, the peaceful exploration might turn into heavy combat, then it might be a bad idea to trigger a one minute long song of calm exploration music. Thinking about how to apply music effectively to a game is full of hundreds of decisions like this. It’s a great challenge though.
No Man’s Sky was a fairly ambitious project I remember. And while I have played some of it myself in recent years, I am far more familiar with the first soundtrack release, which I still listen to today!
Could you describe the ethos of the first sounds written for No Man’s Sky? What is the player supposed to feel when they hear 65daysofstatic’s “static” when they breach the hundreds, if not, thousands of skies within the game?
Thanks, that is nice to know! The approach we took with the music was I think the same approach Hello Games took with the game itself, which is this: a lot of sci-fi comes from this vast, sweeping perspective. It’s like world building from the top down, or from the outside in. Think of any Hans Zimmer sci-fi score – it sounds colossal, like he is soundtracking the movements of galaxies, or maybe the entire universe. We wanted to try a different perspective: still capture that vastness of space, but from the inside out. To capture that sense of the lonliness and vulnerability of being a lone, single individual, this tiny dot of life, looking out at the universe. Does that make sense? In any case, that was our ambition. So, like, I think our song ‘Asimov’ often plays when new players leave the planet and fly into space for the first time. And that is a massive, noisy song. But it’s not ‘the sound of the vast universe’, it’s more ‘the sound of the feeling of becoming untethered from the planet and entering the vastness of space and being a bit overwhelmed by it’, you know?
Yeah, to put it more succinctly, I think I can probably sum up most of 65daysofstatic’s existence by saying that pretty much all our music is the soundtrack to ‘feeling overwhelmed’.
The music and its arrangements in No Man’s Sky works differently than in other games. Could you describe that a bit for us?
I can try. We started by writing an album of ‘normal’ songs, (which is what the original soundtrack is). At the time, for each song we were building ‘sound libraries’. With 65days, it is quite common for a song to start as a gentle piano melody and end up as some kind of guitar-laden drum’n’bass banger. Or vice versa. So with the NMS soundtrack, we were diligently archiving all these variations, alternative melodies, sound palettes, and so on. And then later, to build the soundscapes for the game, we dis-assembled the original songs, and together with all of these libraries, built these dynamic, generative, endless pieces of music, with various levels of mood and intensity that got hooked up to actions within the game.
We didn’t know what we were doing, and I think that was actually our greatest power. Because it meant we didn’t know what couldn’t be done, didn’t know what was frowned upon by game developers, we weren’t burdened by any technical responsibilities. We just invented these weird generative music systems, then passed them over to Paul Weir (the audio wizard at Hello Games) and he had to worry about making them all work inside the game.
Now, nine years later, we’ve arrived at the latest ‘No Man’s Sky: Journeys’ soundtrack release – the second official album for the game. I’ve listened to it and I loved it, but I want to hear it from your own words: how has the game’s music evolved over the course of its nine-year journey among the galaxies? What does Journeys bring to No Man’s Sky?
In an early update back in 2017, Hello Games asked us to produce a lot more soundscapes. The first album was already released, and this new music was only intended to be extra in-game score. Since we’d just been through this huge trial by fire where we invented our own ways of making endless soundscapes, for this new music we skipped straight to that approach. The tracks were never ‘proper’ songs first, they came into existence by us feeding new ideas directly into our generative systems.
So for the 65daysofstatic material on Journeys, it was actually the reverse process of how we made that first record. That original album is the songs that later got turned into soundscapes. Whereas with Journeys, it is the soundscapes that got turned into songs.
I’ve noticed a new composer in the ranks of this score, Paul Weir, who is Hello Games’in-house composer! As far as I’m aware, only 65daysofstatic was credited with No Man’s Sky’s first score. Could you tell us a bit how your band and Paul Weir have worked together on the game’s sound? What has the collaboration looked like?
Yes! The original soundtrack album was just 65daysofstatic, but as mentioned above we’d been working with Paul Weir on the technical side of things since the very beginning.
After our soundscapes back in 2017, we didn’t add any more music to the game, but of course as everybody knows the game kept evolving and updating quite dramatically, and more often than not these updates would require bits and pieces of bespoke music. So for the last nine years while we were off being a strange, noisy band of questionable commerical success, Paul Weir has been adding that music when needed. So this collaboration on Journeys is the most accurate representation of how the game sounds now. Some of Paul’s pieces he sculpted out of generative soundscapes like we did, and some were written as ‘concrete’ pieces. And over the last year or so we’ve all just been passing things back and forth.
Our main goal was to make a record that works as a standalone listening experience. We could have made some kind of 10 hour boxset of generative soundscapes, but that didn’t feel right. Those soundscapes exist already in the game, or if people want they can find hours and hours of our generative systems running uploaded to YouTube. We wanted to make something deliberate, intentional, and human. Something that respects ‘the album’ as an art form while capturing the mood of the No Man’s Sky universe. So that’s what we did.
Are there any video games you and 65daysofstatic are playing right now?
I did a quick poll of the others and the answers were: The Secret of Monkey Island and The Case of the Golden Idol. The classics never go out of style. Also I just finished Clair Obscura: Expedition 33 and thought it was an absolute triumph from beginning to end.
Thank you for your time!
65daysofstatic have quite the discography, and more recently they released the aforementioned ‘No Man’s Sky: Journeys’ music album across streaming and music platforms alongside a vinyl release. This latest album marks the second album release for the game, the last one coming out all the way back in 2016—of which, you can check out thisaway.
