A long overdue update on the recordings, the music, the game, the servers, the math and the unreasonable amount of machinery now required to make a forest ambience give you a tiny imaginary object.
Hey everyone :3
It has been quite a long time since I wrote a proper text about Reverie Field. There have been patch notes, Wiki pages, guides, announcements, technical updates and probably far too many explanations of why one particular Sonic Relic needs another Relic of a particular level so that a passive Farm somewhere on an illustrated map becomes several percent more productive. What I have not done for a while is describe the project as one thing.
The last time I really tried was in 2024, when Reverie Field was still a fairly small game growing around my online field-recording radio. I already thought I had made it unnecessarily complicated then. Two years later that version feels almost elegant.
The radio is still at the centre of everything, but the structure around it now includes Levels, Talents, Sonic Relics, Active Resonance builds, crafting, a player market, auctions, long-form Expeditions, passive Farms, seasonal progression, achievements, Secret Phrases, referral networks and player-run Crews. Discord has become part of the game’s social infrastructure. There is an Android version, a large Wiki, and an AI assistant whose existence can mostly be explained by the fact that the Wiki itself became large enough to require assistance.
Behind all of this sits an AWS production system with containers, load balancing, Redis, MySQL, workers, queues, an internal bot service, a CDN, monitoring, a separate test environment and several different kinds of state depending on how unpleasant it would be if a particular piece of information disappeared. I now occasionally find myself thinking about Redis leases, container health and load balancers while supposedly working on a project about listening to birds.
Somewhere beneath all of that machinery there is still a microphone standing in a field.
That is probably where the story should begin.
It still starts with a recording
Field recording has been part of my life for many years, both professionally and outside work. I have spent an unreasonable amount of time walking around with microphones, waiting in forests, sitting beside roads, returning to the same places in different seasons, recording machinery, weather, interiors, cities, animals and ordinary environments that most people would never consider worth preserving.
One of the things that has always fascinated me about the practice is that an interesting field recording and a useful production ambience are often two different things.
Commercial sound work rewards control. An ambience usually needs to support an image without suddenly becoming the image. Recognisable conversations, inconvenient vehicles, aircraft, very distinctive birds and unexpected events tend to be removed because they make a recording harder to reuse. We build convincing environments out of layers partly because reality itself tends to contain too much information.
A real place has no interest in this discipline. Somebody closes a gate somewhere behind you. A train arrives twenty-three minutes into the recording. Wind changes direction. A dog makes a completely irreversible creative decision. People appear and disappear. Machines start, stop and return. Somewhere behind a building an object falls over and nobody ever explains why. The acoustic balance of the place changes while you are sitting there.
From a library perspective, all of this may reduce the usefulness of a recording. From my perspective, it is often the reason the recording is worth keeping.
I wrote years ago that these files sometimes feel like fragments of life to me, almost like personal horcruxes. It sounds slightly ridiculous when applied to WAV files, but after enough time it becomes difficult to see them simply as sound sources. A field recording contains the place, the equipment I was using, the weather, the trip, whatever was happening around me and a version of the world that may never sound quite the same again.
Radio Reverie Field grew from that feeling. I wanted a place where these recordings could exist without immediately becoming Forest_Ambience_Clean_Loop_03.wav, without having to justify themselves through a search result or a production use case.
Sometimes a recording can simply be listened to.
Field recording eventually stopped feeling like an activity
At some point field recording stopped feeling like something I specifically go out to do. It became much more ordinary than that, almost embarrassingly so. There is usually a recorder in my backpack and a small stereo pair with it - often Sennheiser MKH 8040s, sometimes a compact Schoeps CMC 6 with 2hs capsules setup. They are expensive microphones, obviously, and I am perfectly aware of what they cost, but after enough years they stop occupying that ceremonial category of equipment you take out of a case with slightly trembling hands. They become tools. I do not walk around thinking that today may be the tragic day when I finally destroy a microphone. I put them in the bag because there is a reasonable chance that something worth recording will happen.
I probably take the technical quality of these recordings for granted more than I should. Once you arrive at a compact setup that you know extremely well, it becomes possible to make recordings of genuinely world-class technical quality almost anywhere without turning the process into an expedition. Good small microphones, a quiet recorder, sensible wind protection and years of knowing how the whole chain behaves remove a surprisingly large amount of friction. There are much cheaper microphones that can produce excellent results as well, and I would never suggest that an MKH or a Schoeps automatically makes an interesting recording. What expensive, familiar equipment can give you is simply confidence that the technical side is unlikely to be the reason you missed the moment.
That distinction became increasingly important to me, because the thing I am most dependent on in field recording has very little to do with equipment. I can choose the recorder, the microphone pattern, the spacing, the gain and the location, but I cannot order the world to perform. A tram has to pass at the right distance. The wind has to change in an interesting way. Birds, machinery, people and weather have their own scheduling department and I have never been given access to it. The most important variable is therefore often simply being present, with something capable of recording already close enough to reach.
I think this is why carrying a recorder became so natural to me. It is less a deliberate professional habit now than a permanent state of readiness. A camera person may notice light changing across a wall; I notice that the ventilation system in a stairwell has just entered a strange rhythm, or that the street outside suddenly has an unusually clean acoustic gap between two streams of traffic. Most of these moments will never become a commercial library asset. Some of them will never become anything at all. But I like having the option to keep them.
Of course I still make dedicated recording trips, and those can become technically much more elaborate. I have gone out specifically to build Ambisonic recordings, IRT Cross arrays and other multichannel systems where microphone geometry, rigging, positioning and monitoring become a significant part of the work. I enjoy that side enormously. There is something satisfying about carefully constructing a spatial array and knowing exactly what kind of image you are trying to bring home. But strangely, the longer I do this, the more I value the opposite situation as well: two small microphones, one recorder, very little setup, and the ability to react immediately.
The equipment matters because it should disappear as a problem. Once I trust the chain, my attention can move somewhere more useful — toward the place itself. That is probably the point I have been moving toward for years. I no longer think very much about whether I am carrying “serious” microphones. They are simply the pair that happens to be in the backpack. What matters is whether, at some completely ordinary moment, the world decides to produce something I would regret not keeping.
And because the recorder is already there, quite often I can.
There was another archive growing next to the recordings
Field recordings are only one half of the material that eventually ended up inside Reverie Field. For roughly the same number of years, another archive had been accumulating beside them: music.
Calling it a “music archive” perhaps makes the whole process sound more organised than it really was. A lot of it came from years of electronic experiments, unfinished sessions, tape loops, synthesizers, samples, cassette machines, noise, resampling, old mixers and long periods of deciding that all of this was probably pointless, followed by equally convincing periods of deciding that it might actually be the most important thing I was doing.
Very normal creative behaviour, in other words.
Tape became a particularly large part of this. Over time I somehow accumulated a rather unusual collection of cassette and tape machines: a Marantz PMD740 in beautiful collector condition with its enormous original leather case, a PMD222, an early Sony TC-D5, a Fostex XR-7, a Uher Report 4000, an ELFA 201-3 Stereo and various other devices that have passed through the studio over the years.
It would be easy to describe the whole collection as “lo-fi”, but that word is much too blunt for what these machines actually do. There is plenty of dirt available if I want it, obviously, but there is also density, compression, surprisingly good fidelity, extremely particular overload behaviour and very different relationships with transients, noise and frequency response. The Sony TC-D5 alone is enough to spend an unreasonable amount of time reconsidering what exactly people mean when they call analogue equipment “warm”.
Some machines are excellent at remaining surprisingly polite. Others have very clear ideas of their own.
The PMD222, for example, can take a hot signal and turn it into something wonderfully dense without immediately collapsing into mush. A cassette multitracker such as the Fostex XR-7 opens an entirely different set of possibilities because the recording medium becomes part of arrangement and routing. The Uher and ELFA machines belong to yet another world of speed, headroom and mechanical behaviour and sounds terrible, warble and WOW'y and this is what I need. None of this is objectively better than recording the same signal cleanly into a modern converter. That would be a strange claim to make.
It is simply a very large palette.
And because the machines are physically here, I can use that palette on almost anything. A field recording can come back from somewhere, enter the studio, go through tape, be slowed down, saturated, re-recorded, combined with synthesis and later return to Reverie Field in a completely different form. Synths and samples can take the same route. Sometimes a recording remains recognisably a place; sometimes only its texture survives.
The signal chain has gradually become its own little ecosystem:
MATERIAL
field recordings synthesizers
│ │
├─────────┐ ┌─────┤
│ │ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
samples samplers / sequencers
│ │
└───────┬──────┘
│
▼
analogue routing
│
┌───────────┼────────────┐
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
tape cassette mixers
machines decks / saturation
│ │ │
└───────────┴─────┬──────┘
│
▼
recording / resampling
│
▼
compositions
│
▼
Reverie Field
│
mixed back together
│
▼
music + recorded worldThere are also a few wonderfully specific objects in that middle section. I have a Boss BX-600 mixer, which people who know it will immediately understand requires very little explanation. It can be a small miracle of overdrive when driven in the right way. There is also a pink-purple Fostex Hexamix MN06, an absurdly compact little mixer with its own very recognisable way of saturating signals.
Neither of these things was purchased because I required another transparent line mixer.
Transparency is well covered elsewhere.
At the centre of the electronic setup is a Synthstrom Deluge, which has gradually become one of those instruments where explaining why I like it would probably take longer than simply giving somebody the machine for a month. People who know, know. It is sequencer, sampler, synthesizer, sketchbook and increasingly something closer to the central nervous system of the studio.
There is also my old Roland MC-909, which has been with me through enough projects, moves and general abuse that it eventually received a custom enclosure design as a kind of military decoration of the end of the world. It has genuinely been through fire and water with me and somehow remains one of those machines I can turn on and immediately begin doing something with.
Around these larger pieces lives a collection of other older or slightly strange devices: a Yamaha QY700 sequencer, the first Korg Electribe ES-1 - still one of the fattest and most immediate little samplers I know - a number of Behringer recreations of classic semi-modular synthesizers, a Sonicware SmplTrek and various smaller machines that enter and leave the setup depending on whatever particular obsession is active that month.
Then there is the iPad, which deserves an entirely separate paragraph because iOS music production is almost its own parallel universe.
I am a huge fan of it.
There are synthesizers, granular processors, samplers, strange sequencers, spectral tools, modular environments and effects on iOS that do not really have direct equivalents in my hardware setup or even on the desktop. Some of them cost less than lunch and are genuinely unique instruments. The fact that a thin glass rectangle can contain an experimental studio that would have seemed completely absurd twenty years ago still feels slightly magical to me, and I use it constantly rather than treating it as a miniature substitute for “real” studio equipment.
All of these things coexist without much respect for categories. An iPad synth can go through the TC-D5. A field recording can become a wavetable or enter the ES-1. Something sequenced on the Deluge can go through a cassette machine and then come back into the computer, where it gets mixed with an ambience recorded three years earlier on another continent. A small piece of noise from an obscure old microphone can end up providing more character than the synthesizer that was originally supposed to be the main sound.
That microphone collection has become another branch of the same problem.
Over the years I have accumulated a fairly substantial group of vintage dynamic microphones from roughly the 1950s through the 1970s. Some are well-known models; others are obscure enough that searching for them online produces a few old photographs, a scanned catalogue page and almost no meaningful information about how they actually sound.
I find that fascinating.
A microphone is an unusually intimate piece of old technology because its entire purpose is to transform the physical world into an electrical signal, and two apparently similar old dynamics can have completely different ideas about what that world should sound like. Some are dark, some nasal, some strangely open, some incredibly flattering on exactly one thing and fairly terrible on everything else.
I use them rather than simply collect them. They appear in music, Foley, voice recording and professional game-audio work. Some have already found their way into recordings made for commercial projects. One thing I want to do in the near future is finally start documenting more of them properly, because several of these microphones have almost no useful listening tests online at all. It seems slightly absurd that a device can survive for sixty years and still be represented on the internet mainly by an auction photograph taken under a fluorescent kitchen light.
Eventually I would like to fix at least a small part of that.
None of this collection appeared according to a sensible master plan. It accumulated through years of searching, finding something interesting, deciding that I had enough equipment, finding another thing, becoming disappointed with the entire process, selling something, missing it, becoming excited again, spending several months convinced that hardware was an elaborate form of procrastination and then having one particular machine produce a sound in thirty seconds that justified keeping it for another five years.
There have been long periods when all of this seemed completely unnecessary. Why accumulate tapes, obscure recorders, old microphones and strange little mixers? Who exactly needs another piece of experimental electronic music made by sending field recordings through machines whose primary technological achievement is that they have survived since 1974?
Probably nobody.
That thought used to bother me more.
Eventually another possibility became more comfortable: perhaps it is enough that I need it.
That change has been surprisingly useful. Once the work no longer has to continuously justify itself to an imaginary market, the machines also become less like trophies. They become a personal vocabulary. Some are expensive. Some are cheap. Some are objectively inconvenient. Some have terrible noise figures. Some are incredibly good. Their value to me increasingly comes from the fact that I know what happens when I send something through them.
It is the same relationship I described with field-recording equipment. A good tool eventually disappears from conscious attention. The interesting question becomes what I can do with it.
And somewhere during all of these years, the music began to converge with Reverie Field.
There are already roughly fifty original compositions in the game, and that number will continue to grow. Some pieces are older than the game itself. Others were made specifically after its visual and sonic language had become clearer. Increasingly, though, it has become difficult for me to tell where “music I happened to make” ends and “music for Reverie Field” begins.
The reason is that this music was gradually shaped for exactly this environment.
It has been built around tape noise, saturation, repetition, field recordings, synthesizers, resampling, unstable textures, long forms and sounds that leave enough space around themselves to coexist with the radio. The Field recordings can continue underneath or alongside it without feeling like somebody forgot to mute an ambience track during a soundtrack cue.
That relationship took a long time to find.
The music is designed to be mixed with the radio and with the recorded world rather than simply placed on top of it. In many cases parts of that recorded world have already passed through the music before returning to it. A field recording may become texture inside a composition, while the composition is later heard together with another field recording being broadcast live.
At that point separating the categories becomes fairly pointless.
The recordings and the music have started to live the same life.
They share noise, machines, spaces, tape, microphones, accidents and a certain amount of technical abuse. They were made over the same years, often with the same equipment, during the same periods of enthusiasm and doubt. Some were created very deliberately; others survived from experiments that only became meaningful much later when the rest of the project finally caught up with them.
Saying that the music and the sound “breathe the same air” sounds dangerously close to something that belongs in a press release.
Unfortunately, that is basically what happened.
It just took several years, a lot of procrastination and far too many tape machines to get there.
The radio came first
Radio Reverie Field began as a 24/7 internet station assembled from my own field-recording archive. The first version was conceptually very simple: organise recordings into playlists, schedule them across different days and times, and let the archive continuously play.
That station is still running.
The broadcast itself is hosted separately from the game through AzuraCast on hosting. AzuraCast is an open-source internet-radio platform; in very simplified terms, Liquidsoap handles the AutoDJ side of things - playlists, schedules and the continuous programme - while Icecast exposes the broadcast stream to listeners.
The sound therefore travels through a fairly conventional radio chain:
RADIO REVERIE FIELD
Real places
│
▼
Microphones / recorders
│
▼
My field-recording archive
│
▼
AzuraCast
│
├── playlists
├── schedules
└── station logic
│
▼
Liquidsoap AutoDJ
│
▼
Icecast
│
▼
/radio.mp3
│
├────────► Web player
├────────► Android app
└────────► Direct radio listenersKeeping this broadcast path independent from the game has turned out to be one of the healthier decisions in the whole project. When somebody listens through the website or Android app, the MP3 stream travels directly from the radio infrastructure. If eighty or a hundred people are connected, the Flask application does not have to spend its time pretending to be an extremely expensive audio cable.
The radio carries sound, while the game observes what happens around the act of listening. That second responsibility is where things began to become substantially more elaborate.
Turning listening into game state
The first playable version of Reverie Field came from a fairly innocent question: if people are already spending time with these recordings, what happens if that attention leaves some kind of persistent trace?
The first answer was Points. A listening session lasted for a while, then the account received progression. Levels followed. Levels produced Talent Points. Relics appeared. Systems began influencing other systems, and the browser timer that had been perfectly adequate for a tiny experiment quickly became a very bad foundation for anything persistent.
The radio stream itself knows nothing about the game, of course. Icecast has no reason to care that the listener is Level 46, that five Listening-school Relics are currently active, or that the account is missing one Memory Word from a Secret Phrase.
The solution was to keep the audio path exactly as it was and build a parallel authoritative path for game state. When a player presses Start Listening, the AWS backend creates a listening session. Audio continues arriving directly from AzuraCast, while the game independently tracks session ownership, elapsed time, heartbeats, reconnect behaviour, limits and the final settlement.
Today the simplified path looks something like this:
PLAYER
│
Start Listening
│
▼
sono-game.com
│
Route 53 / ACM
│
▼
Application Load Balancer
│
▼
AWS ECS / Fargate
Reverie Field web
│
┌───────────┴───────────┐
│ │
▼ ▼
ElastiCache Redis/Valkey AWS RDS
│ MySQL
runtime sessions │
leases and locks durable state
heartbeat state settlements
counters/cache progression
│ session history
└───────────┬───────────┘
│
▼
authoritative settlementRedis is very good at the live part of this problem. It can answer whether a session is currently active, which session owns the listening lease, when the last heartbeat arrived, whether two requests are racing each other and whether a temporary limit has already been reached.
Three hours of somebody’s life, however, deserve a little more durability than an expiring Redis key. The current system therefore checkpoints enough listening state into MySQL that a temporary Redis problem, an expired runtime key, a connection failure or a restarted application task does not automatically turn a long session into mythology.
Recovery introduces another problem: restoring missing time is useful only if the same period cannot then be awarded twice. Over time this has produced settlement ledgers, idempotency protection, leases, heartbeat pacing, reconnect windows, locks, durable reports and a hard four-hour session limit.
This is the sort of architecture you apparently end up with when you insist that listening to rain should count properly.
Nobody warned the forest.
What the game has become
The most useful description I have found for current Reverie Field is a persistent audio-progression RPG built around a living field-recording archive.
Listening remains the central engine, although two accounts can now develop in completely different directions. One player may optimise long sessions and Listening Relics. Another may concentrate on Daily, Tasks and Learn. Someone else spends most of their time buying, selling and upgrading Relics. Other accounts grow through Expeditions, Farms, seasonal competition, Secret Phrases, referral networks or Crews.
During 2026 especially, I have spent much more time connecting these systems than merely adding isolated features. The result can be represented only approximately:
LISTENING
│
▼
SESSION SETTLEMENT
│
┌────────────────┼─────────────────┐
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
Points Levels Relic rolls
│ │ │
│ ▼ ▼
│ Talents Sonic Relics
│ │
│ ┌────────────┴────────────┐
│ ▼ ▼
│ Active Resonance Memories
│ │ │
│ ▼ ▼
│ Builds Secret Phrases
│
├────────► Crafting / Market / Auction
│
├────────► Seasons / Achievements
│
├────────► Expeditions ─────► Farms
│
└────────► Referrals / Crews / social systemsEven this diagram is already omitting a frightening amount of context, but it communicates the basic idea: most systems now return to other systems eventually.
Sonic Relics and Active Resonance
Relics are probably the clearest example of how much the project changed. The original Sonic Relic was simply a rare object that could appear after listening. Several rarities, different artwork and a bonus already seemed quite sophisticated at the time.
A current Relic may have rarity, level, recording quality, source, school, Memory Word and several functional affixes. It can be crafted, upgraded, merged, burned, sold on the player market, auctioned, offered directly to another player, bound into a Secret Phrase or routed through a specialised build.
The central loadout system is called Active Resonance. A limited number of Relics make up the live configuration, and their schools and affixes determine which systems receive the current bonuses. The distinction between owning an object and actually routing it made the inventory much more interesting. A player can have thousands of Relics while only a carefully chosen group defines the present build.
Different Resonance configurations can also be stored in Fader Banks, because eventually I discovered that even my RPG loadout presets wanted to become something resembling snapshots on a mixing console.
The audio vocabulary around these systems has become important to me for another reason. I never wanted Reverie Field to feel like a fantasy RPG whose swords, mana and equipment slots had simply been renamed after recording equipment. The terminology makes sense only when the underlying behaviour earns it. Routing, signal chains, resonance, memory, patching, gain, banks and relays are useful metaphors here because the systems actually behave through selection, signal paths, accumulation, recall and interconnection. The language grew out of the structure rather than being painted onto it afterwards.
At some point I realised I had effectively created an equipment ARPG without swords.
I am comfortable with that.
A Relic can remember something
One of my favourite additions was giving Relics a second identity through Memory Words.
A word attached to an individual object may initially look almost decorative. Across the wider Archive, however, those words belong to hidden phrases. Reconstructing a phrase requires the actual Relic units carrying its component words; simply knowing the sentence does not complete anything.
The objects themselves have to remember it.
Those Relics can then be bound into the phrase. Completed phrases become persistent history, unlock rewards and music, contribute to Mastery and eventually interact with the build system in their own right.
This has created a very enjoyable kind of secondary value inside the collection. A Relic with unimpressive stats may suddenly become important because it happens to remember shore, dust, window or some equally ordinary word that has been missing for weeks.
The effect is surprisingly archaeological. A collection stops being only a spreadsheet of modifiers and becomes a storage place for fragments.
Expeditions turned recordings into places
The normal radio is continuous and deliberately somewhat anonymous. You enter the Field and hear whatever the station happens to be carrying at that moment.
Expeditions are the opposite. Each one is a specific long-form recording associated with a specific place and presented as a journey. The recording can be played normally, or the listener can start a Verified Route, during which the game follows the complete playback path and validates the journey through to its end.
A successful route becomes persistent Expedition progress. Repeated completions can affect later rewards, and finished routes reveal more of the illustrated Expedition maps.
Those maps have gradually become worlds of their own. They contain recordings, routes, portals, hidden areas and persistent Farm locations. Visually they are heavily stylised; acoustically they remain documentary. I like that tension. You may be looking at something that resembles a strange illustrated atlas, but underneath it is a place that genuinely sounded like this at a particular moment.
Reverie Farm gave those places a longer memory
Once Expeditions existed, I began to dislike the idea that someone could spend an hour with a recording, reach its end, receive a reward and then have no reason ever to think about that location again.
Reverie Farm grew out of that problem.
Certain Expedition locations can reveal persistent production nodes. Once discovered, they continue generating SONO or Relic Fragments over real time and can be upgraded. Capacity changes, production changes, temporary buffs appear, Talents and Relics affect the output, and Achievement progression can influence it as well. Later routes can also depend on progress made much earlier.
The relationship is cyclical:
listen to a place
│
▼
complete its Expedition
│
▼
reveal the map
│
▼
unlock persistent hotspots
│
▼
develop those locations
│
▼
change future progressionMechanically, Farm certainly belongs to the idle-game family. Conceptually I prefer thinking of it as a way for a recorded place to remain active after the player has left it.
Daily, Tasks and Learn
An account does not need to begin every visit by solving a Relic configuration that resembles a modular synthesiser dropped onto an Excel sheet.
Daily, Tasks and Learn provide much simpler rhythms. Daily creates continuity, Tasks give players structured objectives, and Learn asks somebody to listen carefully to the current broadcast and leave a short description of what they hear.
Learn has had an amusing technical history of its own. An earlier version used generative AI to produce feedback for these descriptions. Eventually I realised I was sending sentences such as “I hear water and a distant tram” to a large language model so that a server somewhere could formulate a sophisticated version of “yes, that sounds like water and a distant tram”.
Current Learn uses a large authored feedback bank and lightweight classification instead. It recognises themes including water, wind, transport, machinery, interiors, weather, animals and human activity, then responds from curated sets written for those categories.
Generative AI eventually found a more appropriate job elsewhere in the Field.
Seasons and the problem of old accounts owning time
Any long-running incremental game eventually encounters a simple problem: permanent progression is very good at making permanent progression even more permanent. Without separate competitive windows, players who have been around for years tend to dominate future events before those events begin.
Seasonal listening creates another clock. A Season has its own activity race and historical record, while the permanent account continues around it. Seasonal rewards and Signature Relics can remain afterwards, preserving evidence that the player was there.
As the system developed, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter also acquired slightly different relationships with the rest of the game. The effect is subtle, but I like that Reverie Field now has a sense of time beyond account Level.
A persistent Field benefits from having weather.
The Achievement Archive
Achievements began as ordinary badges and have gradually become a second history of the player.
The Archive now records listening milestones, Levels, Relic collecting, crafting, market activity, Expeditions, Farms, Secret Phrases, Seasons, referrals, Crews and a growing collection of increasingly specific things somebody can manage to do over the lifetime of an account.
Those badges contribute to a Player Rank, and Player Rank itself can return an actual gameplay bonus. As a result, two operators with roughly similar Levels can still have completely different histories.
That is more interesting to me than one number describing who is “ahead”.
Some of these achievements also travel into Discord as roles, because by this point the border between the client and the community around it has become deliberately fuzzy.
Reverie Crews and the social Field
For much of Reverie Field’s existence, players interacted without truly belonging to shared structures. Leaderboards, referrals and markets connected people indirectly, while progression itself remained mostly individual.
Crews changed the shape of that relationship.
A Reverie Crew is a player-created organisation with its own progression. Members continue receiving their normal personal listening rewards, while a very small mirrored trace of their activity enters a shared Crew reserve. As the Crew grows, it advances through seven organisational ranks.
The early hierarchy borrows from a production sound department: Production Sound Mixer, Boom / First Assistant Sound, Utility, Sound Service and Trainee. Further progression gradually transforms the organisation into a Studio Collective, a Production Company, a Record Label and eventually a Broadcast Network.
There are contributor titles, leadership succession, Crew Shares and shared listening bonuses. At the late end sits the Grandmaster Relay, which allows a Grandmaster Relic to operate through a separate Resonance path associated with the Crew’s progression.
In other words, I eventually built a clan system that requires signal routing. Given the rest of the project, this was probably inevitable.
Discord became infrastructure
The earliest playable Reverie Field lived inside Telegram. For a while Telegram was essentially the client, the identity layer and the community around the game.
Today Reverie Field has its own web application, email/password accounts, Google authentication and an Android version. Telegram still participates in parts of the surrounding infrastructure, but Discord has become the more interesting social extension.
Linking a Discord account allows the game to identify the player, bring them into the Field Assembly and synchronise eligible achievement credentials. Crew membership can grant access to a private Crew room. Achievement events, market sales, offers and Auction activity can appear in dedicated feeds, while Crew-specific events can travel to the appropriate private space.
The bot handling all of this has accumulated its own practical concerns. It reuses connections, handles outbound pacing and respects Discord and Telegram rate limits, because batch crafting taught me that social APIs become unhappy when a game suddenly tries to tell them several hundred exciting things during the same millisecond.
The result feels much more interesting than treating Discord as a button labelled COMMUNITY in the footer. The goal is for the Field Assembly to become another surface of the same world.
Looking through the door before creating an account
I have always been reluctant to turn Reverie Field into a conventional game landing page.
The opening still relies mostly on atmosphere: the illustration, the title, the invitation to ENTER THE FIELD, and only then the account screen. A wall of feature icons and language about “discovering an immersive universe” would feel completely alien to the project.
The older flow did have one obvious weakness. The opening image suggested a living place, then immediately asked the visitor for an email address. There was no evidence yet that anything behind the door was actually moving.
That is why the current login contains a small Observation Window. Opening it reveals fragments of real current state: a Live Signal from an Expedition, an actual Sonic Relic, a recent Route, current listening activity or an active Crew.
It functions less like a demo and more like looking through a window into a room before entering it. The important part is that the information comes from the actual game. The Field continues doing things while the visitor is still outside.
Technically the window is deliberately quiet as well. The live state is requested only when somebody actually opens it, so the login page does not sit there continuously polling the Field for information nobody has asked to see.
I like that balance. The visitor receives evidence that something is happening without the entrance becoming either a conventional marketing page or another permanently active subsystem.
Letting objects leave the game
The same idea eventually led to Field Archive Prints.
For a long time some of the nicest objects in Reverie Field were visible only to people already inside Reverie Field. Relics, completed routes, developed accounts and Crew identities could be meaningful to players and almost completely opaque everywhere else.
Archive Prints allow real game state to become shareable objects: Operator cards, Relic cards, Crew cards and Expedition completion cards. They are generated when the player asks for them and use the actual object or account data rather than a generic marketing template.
Of course this has a marketing purpose. A game whose interesting objects can travel naturally through Discord, Instagram or anywhere else has a much healthier discovery loop than one whose only shareable object is a store URL.
I also like the feature on a more literal level. An archive ought to produce artefacts. A Relic can leave the application still looking like a Relic. A completed Expedition can become something a person keeps. A Crew can acquire an identity beyond its internal database row.
The Field has become a little more porous.
Ask the Field exists because I lost control of the documentation
By 2025 the game was complicated enough that I finally created a proper Wiki. That felt like the responsible solution.
Then Reverie Field continued to grow.
Eventually “read the Wiki” began to sound suspiciously like an employer explaining that everything you need is somewhere in SharePoint.
Ask the Field came from that problem. It is accessible around the public entry point and from inside the player Profile, and it can search the documentation in response to normal questions. A player no longer needs to remember whether some particular interaction is hidden in the Relic guide, Farm guide, Economy section, Secret Phrase guide, Grandmaster documentation or a paragraph I last edited six months ago.
This became a considerably more convincing use of generative AI for the project. Instead of using an expensive language model to congratulate someone for hearing a tram, it can explain why replacing one Relic reset the stability timer of an eleven-piece Referral build.
That seems like progress.
The strange career of the Reverie Field economy
The economic layer deserves its own history because its trajectory has been very different from the rest of the project.
Early Reverie Field was genuinely crypto-oriented. There was nothing ironic about it at the time. I experimented with Attention Mining through Koii, Proof of Listening, wallets, token rewards, NFTs, liquidity, on-chain burns and the idea of eventually building a larger native economy around the project. Some of the old roadmaps are quite ambitious when read now.
They are also extremely funny when read now.
This was not my first encounter with that world. Earlier Catch The Record projects had already gone much further into tokenomics, NFT staking, vesting, Solana and attempts to imagine audio-related economies around blockchain infrastructure. At one point I even wrote that crypto being at the bottom of the market made it the ideal moment to build.
History is a very effective co-author.
I do not regret experimenting with it. That period forced me into areas of programming I probably would never have touched otherwise. I learned some Rust and JavaScript, worked with wallets and transactions, thought much more seriously about signing, identity and distributed state, and discovered how quickly technical mistakes become emotionally significant once somebody believes a database value represents money.
Koii in particular was interesting because there really was a technical culture around it. The Tasks system — small distributed workloads that could run across user nodes — was a genuinely interesting playground. Reverie Field Compute came from that environment, and for a while the project had a real audience around the Testnet and later Mainnet ecosystem.
The difficulty came from the relationship between that technical curiosity and the financial story built around it. After several years of watching crypto markets, NFT games, play-to-earn systems, token communities and increasingly elaborate economic promises develop, peak and collapse, I became much less comfortable with letting real money sit anywhere near the balancing decisions of a game I was personally changing every week.
Once a game object acquires meaningful external monetary value, somebody eventually begins treating it as money. People speculate, arrive at different moments, understand risk differently and sometimes spend considerably more than the designer imagined anybody would. Suddenly a balance patch that should have been an ordinary design decision affects something a player may have bought with money they could not comfortably lose.
I had no desire to wake up one morning and discover that somebody’s grocery budget had somehow become correlated with my Legendary Relic drop table.
The broader crypto-gaming era did little to make me more optimistic. Projects varied enormously and there were sincere teams, clever engineers and genuinely interesting technologies throughout it, but the genre developed an almost artistic ability to converge on familiar endings. The financial incentive gradually became more important than the game, the community started speaking like shareholders, liquidity became the actual content, announcements acquired the tone of constitutional documents, and eventually attention moved somewhere else.
Over time the question that interested me changed. I had started by wondering whether listening could produce measurable or tokenised value. The much more interesting question turned out to be whether listening itself could build a persistent world. The second question had considerably more room inside it.
That shift ended up changing the entire direction of Reverie Field.
Keeping the mechanics and making fun of the religion
Walking away from the financial ambition did not make all of the mechanics developed around that period useless.
Visible balances are useful. Transaction histories are useful. Scarcity curves can produce interesting decisions. Two reserves influencing an exchange rate remain mathematically interesting after nobody calls the result financial liberation. Even staking, stripped of investment language, is simply a game mechanic in which a player commits a resource for some period of time and receives something in return.
Games have been doing stranger things for decades.
The economic machinery therefore survived, although its social status inside the project changed quite dramatically. It became part of the toy rather than a promise about the future.
The current SONO section still borrows ideas I found useful around crypto-adjacent systems - visible balances, public histories, scarcity, exchange pressure and auditable transactions - while SONO, WOS and GAS Coins function as game resources. Once that distinction became clear, I also felt much less obligation to treat the old terminology with respect.
This is how GAS Coins happened.
GAS stands for Gear Acquisition Syndrome, a condition anyone involved in professional audio will recognise immediately. You own enough microphones until another microphone appears, at which point the philosophical meaning of “enough” becomes unexpectedly complicated.
GAS Coins pay for studio operations, upgrades and various internal costs. There is no blockchain gas involved. The only gas being modelled is the belief that perhaps another recorder, microphone preamp or slightly unusual dynamic microphone will finally bring spiritual completeness.
Experience suggests otherwise, but the game is happy to model the condition.
The exchange followed the same trajectory.
Reverie Field still contains a dynamic SONO/WOS exchange room with two reserves, changing prices, pool positions and a transaction fee. Earlier versions of the project would naturally have described something like this as a DEX.
By 2026 that sounded far too serious for what had become a rather elaborate in-game toy, and there was also an obvious acronym sitting directly in front of me.
The SONO Exchange became SEX.
As a result, perfectly legitimate pieces of UI can now explain that a Store price is SEX-linked, display the current SEX rate, or inform the player that a Fragment conversion changed because of SEX.
There is still a 0.3% exchange fee and fairly earnest mathematics underneath it, which only improves the joke.
SONO and WOS stayed, although their role changed
SONO and WOS remain deeply embedded in Reverie Field. They move through listening-related systems, Relics, Learn, Secret Phrases, Seasons, Farms, the Store, the market and the pool. They have sources, sinks, ledgers and exchange relationships.
Current gameplay is off-chain. Progress does not require a wallet, NFT ownership or blockchain transactions. SONO and WOS are persistent studio currencies inside Reverie Field, which means they can be balanced as parts of a game rather than treated as tiny accidental securities.
I find something liberating in keeping the complicated pretend economy after removing the possibility that somebody might decide it is their retirement portfolio.
The old blockchain world is still visible in the source code, which I find strangely charming. There are Koii and Solana imports, an old Mainnet RPC configuration, wallet-related variables and pieces of token-minting code from earlier generations of the project. Some functions are commented out and sit tens of thousands of lines away from the systems that replaced them.
Software develops geology surprisingly quickly. You can scroll far enough through app.py and eventually reach the layer where somebody sincerely believed that a field-recording RPG required a Solana-compatible mint authority.
That somebody was me.
I could clean all of it out, and eventually I probably will, but there is something appropriate about leaving a few fossils for a while.
The project has tree rings.
Then the infrastructure outgrew Heroku
The largest change of the last year is mostly invisible from inside the game.
Reverie Field grew on Heroku, and for a long time that was exactly the right environment. It allowed something that began as a tiny personal experiment to keep expanding without requiring me to become an infrastructure engineer on day one.
Eventually the shape of the project changed. There was a production game and a test environment, MySQL, Redis, normal background work, an especially heavy referral-processing lane, a Discord/Telegram bot, authentication, a growing asset archive, queues, health checks and increasingly complicated relationships between services.
At that point the hosting architecture needed to acknowledge what the application had become.
During the recent migration the full game stack moved to AWS: production, test/staging, Redis, workers, the bot, asset storage, public routing, container images, secrets and monitoring. The radio deliberately remained on AzuraCast/Asura Hosting because the broadcast is a separate service with a separate purpose.
Current Reverie Field therefore has two large technical domains. One is responsible for carrying sound continuously. The other is responsible for remembering what people do while listening.
The production architecture looks approximately like this:
PLAYER
│
┌─────────────────┴─────────────────┐
│ │
▼ ▼
AUDIO SYSTEM GAME SYSTEM
│ │
Asura Hosting Route 53
│ │
AzuraCast ACM
│ │
Liquidsoap ▼
│ Application Load Balancer
Icecast │
│ ▼
/radio.mp3 ECS Fargate
│ reverie-web service
│ │
│ ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐
│ │ │ │
│ ▼ ▼ ▼
│ ElastiCache AWS RDS Redis queues
│ Redis / Valkey MySQL │
│ │ │ ┌──────┴──────┐
│ │ │ ▼ ▼
│ │ │ main worker referral worker
│ │ │ │ │
│ └───────┬───────┘ └──────┬──────┘
│ │ │
│ │ ▼
│ │ ECS Service Connect
│ │ │
│ │ ▼
│ │ internal bot
│ │ ECS service
│ │ │ │
│ │ ▼ ▼
│ │ Discord Telegram
│ │
▼ ▼
Web / Android game state
MEDIA AND STATIC ARCHIVE
private AWS S3
│
▼
CloudFront
│
▼
maps / images / audio / relic media /
Expedition material / other heavy assets
OPERATIONS
ECR Secrets Manager CloudWatch
│ │ │
└────────────────► ECS ◄────────────────┘
separate AWS test environmentThe public sono-game.com endpoint resolves through Route 53 and reaches an Application Load Balancer. The main application runs in containerised ECS/Fargate tasks. Persistent MySQL lives in RDS, while ElastiCache carries the Redis/Valkey runtime layer. Background work has separate main and referral worker services, and the Discord/Telegram bot runs as another internal ECS service.
Large media lives in private S3 and is delivered through CloudFront. Container images are stored in ECR, secrets are managed through Secrets Manager, and CloudWatch provides the system with proper logs and operational telemetry.
Written like that, it sounds like a relatively conventional internet service.
The absurd part is that I built it because I wanted people to hear some frogs.
Redis, RDS and the art of remembering the correct things
Redis turned out to be one of the more delicate pieces of the migration because over the years it had quietly become much more than a cache.
It carries active listening sessions, leases, locks, rate limits, anti-abuse state, temporary counters, short-lived caches, background queues, processing state and worker heartbeats. All of this is ephemeral by design, but ephemeral data can still matter enormously while it exists. Replacing Redis in the middle of active listening sessions without preserving TTLs would mean moving players into a slightly different universe halfway through their afternoon.
The cutover therefore carried runtime state into ElastiCache rather than simply starting empty.
The separation between Redis and RDS is now fairly clean conceptually:
FAST / TEMPORARY DURABLE / HISTORICAL
Redis / Valkey RDS
│ │
session heartbeat session settlement
active leases listening history
locks account progression
rate limits Relics
caches currencies
queues Crews
temporary counters marketsRedis remembers what is happening now. RDS remembers what the game has decided happened.
That distinction sounds obvious when stated in one sentence. It took quite a lot of development to arrive there.
RDS now contains the history that matters: accounts, listening, Points, currencies, Relics, crafting, Expeditions, Farms, Secret Phrases, Seasons, achievements, Crews, markets and a steadily growing record of everything an operator has done.
I have become increasingly conservative about persistence as the game has matured. If somebody can spend several hours working toward something, the system should still be capable of explaining what happened after an application restart, a Redis problem or an inconvenient network event.
Ideally it should also explain it without me opening MySQL at two in the morning and conducting forensic accounting.
That last objective remains a work in progress.
Getting media out of the application server
The easiest part of the AWS migration to justify was media delivery.
Reverie Field has become extremely asset-heavy. There are splash images, Relic illustrations, memory audio, Expedition artwork, Expedition recordings, maps, Farm music, UI backgrounds, bot images and a large historical layer of files from earlier versions of the project. Some of those older assets have survived more hosting migrations than several startups.
Having the Flask application deliver all of this would be a remarkably inefficient use of its attention.
Heavy assets therefore live in private S3 and are distributed through CloudFront. Newer systems can use CDN URLs directly, while compatibility layers resolve older historical references so the entire database does not need to be violently rewritten every time the storage architecture improves.
The division of responsibility is pleasantly boring: the game backend handles game logic, CloudFront handles media, and AzuraCast handles the broadcast.
Boring divisions of responsibility become extremely attractive once a project has spent long enough doing everything everywhere.
Background jobs became actual background jobs
Another lesson acquired gradually is that Discord should have very little influence over whether an important gameplay transaction succeeds. The same applies to Telegram or any external HTTP service that may occasionally decide the appropriate response to your critical request is a tasteful 502.
Current Reverie Field commits authoritative gameplay first. Listening settlements, market operations, spending, reward state and attempts are resolved inside the main application. Once that state is durable, secondary consequences can travel outward through Redis queues.
A Discord achievement post can wait. A Telegram notification can wait. Referral fanout can wait. A player’s actual reward should not depend on whether a social API is having an exciting afternoon.
The worker takes a job into a processing list before performing the external action. Failed jobs receive bounded retries; persistent failures move into a dead-letter list instead of vanishing. Heavy Referral propagation also has its own worker lane so a large network does not block ordinary notifications.
The bot itself is an internal ECS service with its own container, health, logs and outbound pacing. The application and workers reach it through the AWS service network, after which it deals with Discord and Telegram.
The flow is deliberately simple:
GAME EVENT
│
▼
AUTHORITATIVE COMMIT
│
▼
Redis background job
│
▼
AWS worker
│
▼
internal bot service
│
┌───────┴────────┐
▼ ▼
Discord TelegramThe earliest Reverie Field code would absolutely have called an external webhook in the middle of something economically important and then reacted with genuine surprise when the internet behaved like the internet.
The current version has developed some manners.
Staging, cutover and discovering that boring is good
Another relatively recent luxury is a proper test environment.
The AWS migration was built around a separate staging setup where login, listening, Redis state, Relics, crafting, Store flows, Farms, Expeditions, Discord OAuth, bot notifications, worker retries and Android WebView behaviour could be tested against the new infrastructure before production moved.
Having both a real AWS production environment and a real AWS test environment is an extraordinarily mundane achievement. It took years to deserve that sentence.
The eventual cutover was intentionally uneventful. Durable state was snapshotted, writes on the old environment were controlled, active settlements and queues were accounted for, Redis state was transferred with its TTLs, and the AWS bot, workers and web services were brought online and checked. Only then did Route 53 move production traffic, with the old Heroku environment temporarily available as a rollback path.
After stability was confirmed, the old production footing could finally be shut down.
I strongly recommend boring infrastructure migrations. Reverie Field produces more than enough drama through normal gameplay.
The Field has its own room tone now
Moving into this architecture also changed the way I observe the project itself.
There are now application task restarts, CPU and memory usage, RDS connections, Redis memory, queue depth, worker heartbeat age, dead-letter counts, load-balancer latency, 5xx responses and bot rate limits to watch. CloudWatch gives the machine a set of vital signs.
For years I mostly diagnosed Reverie Field in the same way I diagnose audio equipment: stare at it for long enough, listen for something strange and gradually develop the conviction that one particular bearing probably sounds wrong.
This method scales surprisingly well.
It should probably not be the only monitoring strategy for a production service.
The Field now has a room tone of its own.
How this all happened
Looking back, the development history has a strange internal logic.
In 2023, I had a large field-recording archive and built a continuous online radio for it. The recordings played, people listened and the project already fulfilled its original purpose. This would have been an entirely respectable place to stop.
In 2024, I wondered what would happen if listening generated progression. The Telegram Mini App appeared, followed by Points, Levels and Sonic Relics. In the old blog post I compared the format to Hamster and joked that my business model was essentially that you definitely would not make a cent by playing.
In retrospect, this may have become one of the most durable economic principles in the entire project.
The same period was also when the crypto side became much more serious. Koii Attention Mining, Proof of Listening, wallet integration, SONO, WOS, the SONO Portal, on-chain burns and the possibility of a larger token economy were all genuine parts of the experiment. For a brief period the project had the confidence of a small central bank operated by a field recordist.
During 2025, the game systems began talking to each other much more aggressively. Expeditions expanded, Daily and Learn grew, the economy became deeper, and the Koii integration developed to the point of Mainnet wallets, token-related systems, governance ideas and Reverie Field Compute. It was a real technical experiment, and I have no interest in retroactively pretending that the entire thing was satire.
I was interested in it, built it and learned an enormous amount from it. Then my opinion changed. That seems to me a perfectly healthy outcome of an experiment.
By 2026, Reverie Farm had turned Expeditions into persistent territory. Sonic Relics had become a full build ecosystem. Active Resonance became the main loadout, crafting and trading expanded, auctions arrived, Secret Phrases developed into a serious progression route, Seasons grew, the Achievement Archive became enormous, Discord connected directly to game identity, Crews appeared and Grandmaster systems began reaching into almost every corner of the account.
The entrance to the game gained an Observation Window showing live Field state. Archive Prints allowed real objects to travel outside the client. Ask the Field appeared because documentation had become its own navigational problem. The production infrastructure moved completely to AWS, and the old crypto ambitions gradually turned into a mixture of useful economic design and jokes about the culture they came from.
This also describes the current development phase fairly well. I am obviously still adding things - there appears to be no reliable treatment for that - but a much larger part of the work now goes into making what already exists faster, clearer, safer and more connected. Performance, recovery, interfaces, infrastructure, sharing and the relationships between systems increasingly matter more than adding another isolated tab simply because I thought of one.
That is probably what growing up looks like for software.
The funny part is that the radio actually has listeners
Everything described above can make it easy to forget that Radio Reverie Field is an actual radio station rather than a decorative soundtrack attached to a game.
People connect to it directly.
Looking at current AzuraCast statistics, many recent days sit somewhere around 90–120 unique listeners during all this beta-alpha-sigma-gamma-period, and the longer listener-history view has accumulated more than 28,000 listener hours.
These are modest numbers if you approach them with internet-platform expectations. They become much stranger when translated back into the activity itself: people have voluntarily spent more than 28 thousand hours connected to a stream of field recordings I made.
I still find that difficult to process.
The geographical listener map is especially satisfying. There is something beautifully absurd about standing somewhere locally with a recorder, bringing a piece of that place home, adding it to the archive, and eventually seeing that somebody on the other side of the world is quietly connected to it.
I once spent quite a lot of time thinking about how a token might prove that attention had value. It turns out that somebody simply choosing to stay and listen is already a fairly convincing proof.
Some of you already here almost 2 years. That's insane for me. Are you normal? Don't answer…. I'm not too…
Where does the game actually begin?
I used to have a much cleaner answer to this.
The radio was the source and the game was the layer around it. After several years those boundaries have become difficult to identify.
A two-hour recording can be an Expedition. The Expedition creates a route. The route reveals a map. The map creates a Farm. The Farm changes account progression. That progression can modify a Relic build, and the Relic may also contain a Memory Word required by a phrase whose completion changes another system entirely.
A Sonic Relic is simultaneously equipment, collectible object, economic asset and container for memory. A Crew behaves like a guild, borrows its hierarchy from production sound and eventually acquires dedicated signal routing. Discord begins outside the application and then becomes partially governed by the account inside it. The Wiki is technically documentation, although Ask the Field has turned navigation of that documentation into something almost indistinguishable from another game interface.
Even infrastructure becomes difficult to separate conceptually. CloudFront obviously belongs to the hosting stack, although a large part of the visual identity of Reverie Field would feel substantially worse if those assets arrived slowly. Somewhere in the middle of all this there is also SEX, which functions simultaneously as an economy mechanic and a record of my deteriorating respect for crypto terminology.
And the same ambiguity now exists between “the soundtrack” and everything around it. A piece of music may contain a field recording, pass through a forty-year-old tape machine, return to the digital domain and later play alongside a completely different live radio recording made years later. The source material, the score and the environment increasingly share the same archive and the same signal chain. In practice, I am not always interested in deciding where one category ends and another begins.
I no longer find the exact boundary particularly important. There is simply a Field with systems operating at different distances from the original recordings. At one end, you press Play and hear another place. At the other, you optimise a Grandmaster Relic routed through a Crew Relay while maintaining a stable eleven-piece Referral configuration and preserving a Secret Phrase build inside a Fader Bank.
Both paths somehow began in the same collection of WAV files, tapes, microphones and machines.
I find that very funny.
Why I am still doing it
This part of the project has changed much less than everything around it.
Field recording is a strange activity because much of it involves preserving things nobody has specifically requested.
You can spend an hour standing somewhere where, by ordinary standards, nothing happened. Then you return home with a huge recording containing wind, traffic several streets away, somebody make some noises, a bird, a refrigerator compressor through a wall, an aircraft so distant that it has almost become part of the weather, and the exact acoustic character of a day that has already disappeared.
Perhaps that file becomes commercially useful. Perhaps it never does. I care about the distinction less than I used to.
The same thing turned out to be true of the music. There are pieces in Reverie Field that passed through years of being unfinished, forgotten, rediscovered, re-recorded, played through tape, dismantled and rebuilt before they finally found a place where they made sense. For a long time I evaluated a lot of this work through the question of whether anybody else needed it. It is a remarkably effective way to make almost any private creative practice feel pointless.
Eventually I became more comfortable with the idea that some things may be worth making because I need to make them. Perhaps somebody else eventually finds them and connects with them; that is wonderful when it happens. But requiring an imagined future audience to authorise every experiment in advance seems like a fairly efficient way of never developing a personal language.
What I wanted from Reverie Field was somewhere these recordings and this music could accumulate meaning without relying entirely on whether another sound designer eventually needed them underneath an image, whether a label wanted a particular track, or whether any individual experiment could justify the machine used to create it.
That does not require pretending every ordinary soundscape is profound. I am quite suspicious of the tendency to surround very simple things with enormous artistic statements. A suburban street does not require six pages of grant language explaining the political significance of the microphone pointing toward it.
Sometimes the world simply sounds good :3 Sometimes a tape machine does something beautiful to a synthesizer :3 Sometimes a thirty-year-old sampler produces exactly the texture a modern plug-in did not ;3 Sometimes all of it sounds completely ordinary, and ten years later the ordinary version is exactly what turns out to have disappeared <3
For me, that is enough.
Reverie Field has become an absurdly elaborate machine built around a very modest desire: to make somebody stay with these sounds a little longer, and to give the archive a structure in which those encounters can leave traces.
Some of those traces become Sonic Relics, phrases, maps or achievements. Others remain inside the long history of an account or become part of a Crew full of people I have never met. Some exist briefly in Redis before expiring, while others become MySQL rows that I sincerely hope survive substantially longer. A few are still buried in pieces of blockchain code that I have not yet had the heart to delete; others have become a pretend financial system called SEX or are denominated in Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
Some survive as old cassettes in a drawer.
Some live inside a Deluge project I will rediscover in three years and wonder why I never finished. Why I never finished?
Some exist as one strangely good overload on a Boss mixer. (Like a Boss…baduumtss)
And a great many of them remain exactly what they were at the beginning: sound moving through a microphone, a tape head, a sampler, a radio stream or somebody’s headphones.
That is still what everything else is built around.
Welcome back to the Field
The radio is still running, and the recordings are still real. There are now around fifty pieces of original music living among them, with more gradually entering the archive. Around all of this there is an Android application, a persistent RPG, player Crews, an auction house, an illustrated archive, a private AWS network, several background workers and a fake economy with significantly more responsible monetary policy than some real ones.
You can also, after several years of economic experimentation, still not make a cent from listening to my radio.
Some business models take time to mature.
ENTER THE FIELD ASSEMBLY
Headphones are recommended.
Understanding the entire economy before pressing Play is optional.