3650 Days of Static… A decade in music, the hard way photographer: D ANNY PA YN E / writer: REE F Y O UN I S
Less a debut and more a salvo of barracking guitar noise, glitching electronics and foundation-shaking percussion, it’s almost a decade since 65daysofstatic emerged with the ‘The Fall of Math’. It quickly became their calling card, and a relentless trinity of sound that’s doggedly endured over the last ten years. Set to enjoy a second life in the form of a long-demanded vinyl release, and a handful of commemorative March live shows that’ll see ‘The Fall of Math’ performed in its entirety alongside a mirror set of more contemporary material, it’s a celebratory bookend for the partisan fans that have backed the band through the good and the bad. See, 65days have forged their reputation by doing it the hard way. There’ve been no hypemachines, no handouts and no shortage of harsh lessons over the course of the band’s chastening history. From navigating the myriad of industry pitfalls to apathetic label troubles, they’ve made a career out of slipping through the cracks. “We know how lucky we are just to be hanging on with the current state of everything,” founder member, guitarist, keyboardist and sort-of frontman, Paul Wolinski half-laughs, “but there’s something about being in a band when you start out and that forced naivety of brainwashing yourself. We wanted to be the biggest band in the world even though we were playing this weird instrumental music. I’d still love for that to happen but it’s been tempered by a decade of being in 65days and the realities of that. We’ve played some huge arenas, big festivals and, on occasion, had 20,000 people in front of us, so it’s good to know we’re capable of pulling off shows like that.You do lose a lack of intimacy but it also makes you appreciate just how good shows to a few hundred people can be.” It’s no doubt a familiar story for swathes of young musicians plotting their bold mission statements and dreaming of what they’ll splurge their
first advance on. For the majority, it’s a pipedream, and the grim realities and the grind of gruelling touring schedules faces those not given a fasttrack past the toilet venues. “We’ve never really had that choice,” says Wolinski, “but a lot of bands that started out the same time as us have fallen by the wayside because they just can’t keep it going at the notquite-breakthrough level. It takes a lot out of you and it is frustrating when bands who start a few years later sail past you and climb up festival bills, but we remember that we have this dedicated following of people who’ve never really cared what we’re classed as, and that we’re still here. That feels like a much sturdier foundation. Someone else might have a house because they got a big publishing advance but no one remembers they even existed. We’ve never had the chance to give in to that temptation.” We move onto the subject of the glut of tags that have tracked the band since that debut storm of post-rock instrumentation, heavy guitars, and jagged, slashing electronica. Carrying the weight of post-rock, math-rock, experimental rock, electronic (sic), for a band more focused on driving in a different direction with each release, there was always a sense that these Post-its were as reductive as they were referential. “It is frustrating and we probably did ourselves no favours having this multi-syllable name when we started out,” admits Wolinski. “There are a lot of bands under the shadow of Mogwai and what they did with ‘Young Team’
and ‘Come on Die Young’ but we always felt we were chasing At the Drive In, or And You Will Know us By the Trail of Dead… but doing something electronic too. It was always a surprise when we got called post-rock but then we don’t have any lyrics, and we’ve got a really long idiosyncratic name. “We used to spend a lot of time trying to escape that whole scene because we didn’t want to get pigeonholed but now I don’t really care. I’d just like them to check in with the new record. It’s like, I didn’t hear Trail of Dead’s last record and I loved that band for years, but I sort of assume I know what it’ll sound like, and that’s kind of hypocritical of me, because people could easily do the same with our music without taking the time to listen and hear it’s moved on. If you listen to someone like Tim Hecker and Haxan Cloak, there are people doing noisier, stranger stuff but I guess we’re a more user-friendly version of that… our own little party that not many people come to.” It’s a party that felt like it was gaining momentum with last year’s release of ‘Wild Light’, though – an album that gloriously delivered on 65daysofstatic’s longstanding ability to create music of heft and depth. Energised by the band’s characteristic ferocity, it was a record continuously re-charging and threatening collapse at any moment but it also displayed a complexity and subtlety that allowed the album narrative to emerge. “I’m glad you said that because that was definitely one of the aims,” Wolinski
‘It’s our own little party that not many people come to’ loudandquiet.com
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smiles. “The big difference this time was that although we wrote upwards of 50 songs in various states of completion before we went to the studio, we ditched everything apart from the eight songs that ended up on the record and decided that for better or worse, they would be it. At that point we knew that ‘Heat Death Infinity Splitter’ had to be at the beginning and ‘Safe Passage’ had to be at the end. Although a few tracks got switched around during the mixing process, it was basically the record we’d thought it was going to be and it was really exciting to force ourselves to do it this way. I’m as bad as anyone else for skipping tracks but I think it’s an art form, and a great idea to have a collage of songs hinged around an idea. It doesn’t have to be a concept record, just broad strokes, and I think that helped focus the album in terms of making it a complete thing.” Rewind to 2010 and the band weren’t feeling so content. In an intense seven-day blitz, they recorded their fourth album,‘WeWere Exploding Anyway’, and although it marked a more overt step towards the electronic side of the group’s split dynamic, record label troubles set them back in more ways than one. Wolinski explains: “The last proper record we did before ‘Wild Light’ was ‘We Were Exploding Anyway’ and we didn’t have the greatest relationship with the label [Hassle] because it felt like they dropped the ball quite a lot. It also felt like we had to work really hard just to maintain the ground we’d already made instead of taking advantage of the exposure of moving to a new label. It was a bad experience and we happily avoided the music industry for a few years. Then in those few years everything got harder and things like touring have become more expensive so we were very apprehensive about re-entering the industry. “And then I suppose ‘We Were Exploding Anyway’ was uncomfortable because maybe we were prototyping