Silent Running Streaming Next Week
Allllll the way back in 2011, we were approached by Glasgow Film Festival who asked us if we wanted to do a performance of a live soundtrack for them. We chose Douglas Trumbull's 1972 eco sci-fi film Silent Running, stripped out all the folky Joan Baez music and replaced it with some grandious delayed guitars, rolling toms and melodramatic piano.
It is a classic, well-loved film, although here's a pro 65days tip: even the best films start to wear a little thin if you coop yourself up in a badly-heated room in an old steel factory in Sheffield for three months and watch it approximately five thousand times while writing new music for it.
We played the film festival over a couple of nights and it went well. Various other places were interested and we ended up touring around Europe, a handful of great little cinemas, some kind of weird tent possibly in the Netherlands (?) and somehow even ended up performing it at Bestival.
This was also our first foray into claiming the means of production and doing a vinyl release all by ourselves on our own label Dustpunk Records. To pull that off, we funded it using Indiegogo, which went so well it briefly took down the entire Indiegogo website! Heady days. Of course, in our wisdom we had priced everything far too low and also offered to cover everybody's shipping, so the entire thing never actually made much (if any?) money at all. But a lot of people got vinyl and ten lucky people got hold of the now legendary '65 noise box', which was hand-built by Si and generated endless skronky noise.
Next Friday the 4th October, only thirteen years late, Silent Running is finally getting released to all the streaming services. If you can't wait for that, why not listen to it over on our Bandcamp right now? Enjoy!
UTOPIAN FREQUENCIES & DISQUIET
In case you missed the news last month: this release of Silent Running to streaming services is part of a slow roll-out of lesser-heard 65daysofstatic material into the wider world. Last month saw Utopian Frequencies & Disquiet hit streaming - two companion albums built from our A Year of Wreckage series that ran from 2019-2020.
Because the first pressings of Utopian Frequencies and Disquiet sold out so quickly, we did another run that started shipping out a couple of weeks ago. You can buy both albums on lush, heavyweight vinyl individually, both for a discount, or also with a limited edition t-shirt. The t-shirt is also for sale by itself.
(Also for those who have been asking: sorry, no plans for a Silent Running vinyl repress at this time.)
OTHER BUSINESS
When we emailed a few weeks ago, it was the first time since switching mailing list providers. This meant that for some people the email will have been diverted to spam. Apparently one way to show the email spam systems that we are in fact real humans and not a bot is if other real humans reply to our emails. So last time we asked people to reply with something, really whatever, just as a way to hopefully coax the internet into believing our communiques were worthy of our subscribers' actual inboxes.
And, honestly, the result of this was one of the most heart-warming things that has happened to 65 in a long time. So much kindness! So many dumb jokes! Excellent recipes, music recommendations, anti-capitalist screeds, just saying hi... you're all amazing. So: thanks for that! Too many of you emailed to reply to everyone, but rest assured everything was read. And so - please do feel free to continue replying to these emails. With literally whatever you like. It might or might not help out with the spam filter, but it will definitely brighten the days of four tired and confused noise-makers from the north of England.
That's it for now. Best of luck organising your Silent Running release street parties.
65.x
