Dreams are at once cringe-worthy, bizarre, and absurd, evoking both unease and fascination. Something that might feel cringe-worthy and yet be deeply loved—naturally, within my own cultural landscape—could be an Eastern-flavored wedding keyboard sound with pitch bends. My approach was to take that feeling and deliberately push it, merging it with a completely opposite universe: the music of J.S. Bach’s Partitas. Things that would not normally share the same environment coexist here—a world that could only exist in a dream.
In the first section, we encounter the invented instrument: a keyboard-accordion, where sounds are microtonally shifted in different ratios to emulate the wedding keyboard sound. After a while, we continue hearing that sound within the Bach universe. Part of the accordion material is layered with extremely slowed-down Bach Chaconne’sPartita D minor, representing the experience of time stretching in dreams: running but never moving, events unfolding in slow motion. On the bottom layer, a dense texture makes movement extremely difficult, yet the accordion finds channels to move freely and playfully within this condensed space.
At the heart of this dream universe, the accordion, nourished by Bach’s Chaconne, transforms into a Bach Sequencer. This is the absurdity of dreams: the rules of reality suddenly invert. Our instrument undergoes such a transformation that the same musical material is perceived in an entirely new form. The pitch classes of that sequencer are derived directly from the Chaconne, bars 1–49. The inner machine sounds create a rhythmic texture representing the inside of the sequencer, as if the player exists within it.
In the closing section, everything comes together: the microtonal keyboard accordion interacts with the electronic artifacts—ring modulations and other spectral transformations that emerge naturally from the stretching of the extremely slowed-down Chaconne. This evokes waking from a dream, trying to remember and explain what was happening inside.
All these processes create the universe of the piece. There is, in a sense, a single main theme: dreams. But when have our dreams ever had a single, consistent element? Rarely, if ever.