The Moving Machine is the fifth episode of Solaria, the incremental composition project in which music, narrative and the building of an imaginary world proceed in parallel.
In the narrative, Anesh and the butterfly Ku leave the cave, jump aboard a mobile workshop and travel through the night towards Yantra, the city of technics. Around them the machine becomes more than a vehicle: it is a mechanical body made of rhythm, repetition, tension and transformation.
The piece was composed between March and May 2026 and released on 20 May 2026. Its process is documented week by week in episodes 4 to 12 of the Music Diary.
The machine in the narrative
After 04 - Song of Olivier, the story moves from the cave towards Theknus, the region of technics. Anesh and Ku needed a way to reach the great city, and that way became a machine: an automatic vehicle, a kind of mobile workshop that crosses the land without a driver.
In the narrative the machine is called Nerek. Anesh meets it on a service road below the cave: it arrives clanking, slows down to take a tight bend cut into the side of the mountain, and does not stop. The side platform is free; Ku stirs in the basket, Anesh runs a few steps alongside the vehicle, grabs the edge and jumps on, without knowing where it is going (Chapter 10 - The Cave and Ku). When it reaches Yantra, the city logs it as autonomous mobile workshop vehicle, with driving unit: absent and directional behaviour: unstable (Chapter 3 - The Out-of-Register Vehicle).
The piece tells this journey: the machine approaching and then moving away, the hypnotic motion of the ride and, in the middle, the moment when Anesh understands the meaning of the journey he is making.
The numbers of the machine
The whole composition is built on the numbers of the number system of Solaria. The island counts in base seven, and its fundamental numbers are 2 and 5, whose sum is 7. For Lorenzo they are the numbers of music itself: continuing as in a Fibonacci series you get 2, 5, 7, 12 and 19, that is the seven notes of the scale, the twelve of the chromatic total and the nineteen of microtonal systems (Lorenzo also plays a 19-tone guitar). The geography of the island follows the same scheme too, with five central regions and two symbolic regions on opposite sides.
The measures of the piece derive from this:
- the main body is 77 bars long, preceded and followed by seven bars of intro and outro;
- the intro is at 77 beats per minute;
- the sections alternate between 7/8 and 5/8;
- the cells of the algorithmic guitar are groups of 2, 5 and 7 notes.
To write these numbers in base seven Lorenzo also made a small app, which has since become the Solarian number converter. The number 77 was chosen because, flipping one of the two digits, it takes the shape of a butterfly, and because it can be written as 25 + 52, two mirrored numbers that are in turn two butterflies. The same principle of symmetry governs the way the numbers of Solaria are written (see Writing System).
These constraints are not an ornament. Lorenzo describes them as a creative guide: having to build a machine for a technical nation, a coherent number system gives the composition a direction and an energy that sounds alone would not have.
Harmonic structure
The composition is a cycle of twelve chords, one for each of the twelve notes of the chromatic total, each built on a different note. The alternation between 7/8 and 5/8 is not regular, but follows the layout of the piano keyboard: the seven white notes correspond to the 7/8 sections, the five black ones to the 5/8 sections. Each section therefore has its own groove.
All the chords are connected by a single note, D, which opens and closes the cycle and returns at every chord change. In the world of Solaria, D represents the head of the Southern League, the coalition Theknus belongs to, who in the narrative is Adru Kemet and whom Lorenzo also calls “the dictator” in the diary: an obsessive presence that binds everything together and that you cannot get rid of. In the piece it is played by two tracks, one of them an electric guitar treated with a sound like a puff of steam, which comes in every time the chord changes.
Alongside D there is a second obsessive reminder, given to an acoustic guitar that plays only B. In the system of the twelve capitals, B is the note of Alma.
Three layers: body, heart and mind
The second week of work, told in episode 5, was a week of false starts. The first development of the bass idea was very fusion and, after a lot of work, it did not convince: it had that bass, drums and guitar sound that everybody has, a timbral conformism. An acoustic translation of the same idea fared no better, and neither did an improvisation over a synth bass with very complex chords. On the other hand, to enter the dimension of technique, Lorenzo had to deal with it in practice too: a broken tuning machine forced him to work on truss rod, action and strings, and at the same time he watched interviews with guitarists such as Matteo Mancuso, Jack Gardiner and Josh Meader, transcribed a Mancuso solo and discovered the world of amp modellers. Allowing himself the freedom to change direction, without falling in love with an idea, was the most useful result of the week.
Out of those attempts came the form of the piece, the superimposition of three layers that together make up the machine:
- the body, that is the industrial rhythm: the physical movement of the vehicle;
- the heart, an intervallic structure given to acoustic sounds: the mechanical architecture;
- the mind, the electric guitar playing phrases linked together like the gears of an engine: the software that drives the machine.
Later, when the piece seemed complete but monolithic, a narrative and symbolic level was added to these three, the dream section (see below).
The industrial rhythm
The first rhythm was born with DrumCircle, an app for building complex rhythm circles made by Lorenzo, on the combinations of 2, 5 and 7 (up to 7 + 7). Translated into industrial sounds and brought into Logic, it shaped the opening of the piece: the machine arriving and then leaving. The fading away is obtained with an automation that raises the reverb while lowering the volume.
The first metallic sounds were downloaded from the Internet, but Lorenzo wanted to record them for real. The search, told in episode 6, was not easy: in several factories and scrapyards he was sent away; in one the owner let him in reluctantly, after reading through all the safety rules, and the recordings turned out to be unusable. In another factory, instead, a worker simply put a hammer in his hand, without saying anything, and that is where the sounds of the piece were born.
The samples were mapped onto the keyboard, first in Logic’s sampler and then in Drum Machine Designer, which allowed a better balance in the mix and a different control over the groove. Two distinct grooves came out of it, one for the 7/8 sections and one for the 5/8 ones.
The acoustic layer
The heart of the machine is an acoustic guitar prepared with a sheet of paper between the strings. Since the structure is long and hard to keep in mind while playing it through, Lorenzo sampled that sound and loaded it into a sampler: this way he could compose note by note, copying, pasting and moving a single sound, with the flexibility of digital tools. Later the part was re-recorded in full, live, from beginning to end, with the channels crossed in the stereo image and plenty of echo, and doubled by two electric guitars.
The bass was reinforced first with a distorted guitar, then with the piano. Damping the strings with fabric did not work; the right sound came from a few erasers taped together and pressed onto the strings of an upright piano. In the end the bass was recorded with a real instrument, lent by a friend, in a single take later cut and crossed between the two channels to get a stereo bass.
In the 7/8 sections two tracks of power chords come in; in the 5/8 ones a picked guitar, also on two tracks. Running through the whole piece there are also an electric guitar with ebow and bottleneck, important above all at the beginning, and the voices.
The choice of using only acoustic sounds, sampled or played, has a reason in the world of Solaria: in Theknus sounds are acoustic, while in Axia they will be digital.
The algorithmic guitar
The third dimension was originally meant to be a distorted guitar solo showing a fast technique, fitting for the region of technics. To prepare it, Lorenzo went back to studying speed after many years: economy picking and Josh Meader’s technique, based on a legato on the last note of each string that gives the right hand time to move to the next string. In a few weeks, practising ten minutes a day, he got to playing sixteenth notes at 155 beats per minute.
The study brought out a difference in method. Technical guitarists have a visual approach to the fretboard and build their phrases on the shapes of the notes, much as in classical composition; Lorenzo is a jazz improviser, who thinks one note at a time following an inner song. Once recorded, the solo turned out predictable and boring, and was dropped.
In its place came the cells of 2, 5 and 7 notes, which flow from low to high and answer each other between the two channels of the stereo image. They are the software of the machine: a continuous flow that appears at the end of the first cycle of twelve chords and runs through the second part of the piece.
The dream section
At the end of episode 8 the overall structure was visible, and for the first time listening gave pleasure and not just the satisfaction of a well-made piece of craftsmanship. Everything up to that point, however, was a sketch, to be redone from scratch once the role of each part was clear.
Halfway through the work the piece worked, but it was monolithic: it described only the machine, its hypnotic and repetitive motion. It lacked the vitality that usually comes from interplay with other musicians and, above all, a narrative dimension. The piece had been built in separate parts, as in an architectural process that adds one object after another. But two living beings travel on the machine, Anesh and Ku, and the piece had to make room for them too. Lorenzo considers this dissatisfaction a good thing: it is what pushes you to search, and composing, he says, is above all a way of finding yourself.
Lorenzo recorded his own voice and made a three-voice texture out of it, a kind of acoustic pad. At the point where the voices come in, a suspended, dreamlike space opens up: Anesh enters into intuitive contact with Ku, as in a dream, in a wordless communication in which he understands the deeper meaning of the journey from the cave to Yantra and the mission he will have to accomplish. The moment is announced by the five notes of the sigma chord, placed above the voices, and accompanied by the piano and the theme of 04 - Song of Olivier. While the dream lasts, the flow of the algorithmic guitar stops; then it resumes.
The final voices needed fifteen tracks, five for each of the three voices, which were also necessary to cover the breaths.
From control to life
Up to that point acoustic guitar and voice had been sampled, so that decisions could be made quickly by moving notes in a MIDI file. The method was useful for composing, but it took away the humanity and imperfection of performance. In episode 11 everything was re-recorded for real: the acoustic guitar, the full tracks of the algorithmic guitar, the voices, the bass. The final session had about 130 tracks.
Mixing required deciding what to put in the foreground and what to leave in the background. Lorenzo describes it as the convergent phase of the creative process, after the divergent one in which ideas pile up: here too you filter, and by choosing the planes you give the composition its final form.
The video is a multitrack: it shows the piece from inside the process, layer after layer, as the different guitars and the different parts become a single structure in motion.
Form
- Arrival of the machine: the industrial rhythm at 77 beats per minute, approaching.
- First cycle of the twelve chords: the two grooves start, in 7/8 and in 5/8, with D at every chord change.
- The dream section: the voices, the piano and the sigma chord come in; the algorithmic guitar falls silent.
- The algorithmic flow: the cells of 2, 5 and 7 notes run through the second part.
- Ending: the piece is cut at bar 77; a few bars in five-four remain, introducing the next piece.
Musical symbolism
| Musical element | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 2, 5 and 7 (metres, cells, rhythmic combinations) | the number system of Solaria |
| 77 bars, 77 beats per minute | the butterfly; 25 + 52, two mirrored butterflies |
| twelve chords on twelve notes | the chromatic total |
| 7/8 and 5/8 | the white and black keys of the piano |
| D at every chord change | the head of the Southern League |
| metallic sounds recorded in a factory | the body of the machine |
| guitar prepared with paper | the heart, the mechanical architecture |
| cells of the algorithmic guitar | the mind, the software of the machine |
| acoustic sounds only | Theknus (in Axia sounds will be digital) |
| sigma chord above the voices | the contact between Anesh and Ku, the mission |
Towards The Clock of Yantra
In the last weeks of work the narrative has already moved on: Anesh and Ku arrive before the great gate of the city, on which there is a clock that measures the length of the day, of the night, of months, of years and even of life. The bars in five-four that close The Moving Machine introduce the next piece, The Clock of Yantra, dedicated to the Clock Tower of Yantra.
During the composition the first prototype of the Solarian clock was also born, with its 14 hours, seven of day and seven of night, of 84 minutes each, and the year of seven months of 52 days plus the day of the solstice (see Measurement of Time).
In the same phase, playing in a trio, Lorenzo wrote in a few hours the first part of a new, very technical piece, meant for the events of Yantra: this is where the habit of working on two or three compositions at the same time came from, like a painter with several canvases open.
The diary episodes
| Episode | Title | Content |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | the moving machine | the idea of the machine, the first rhythm on 2 and 5 |
| 5 | changing direction | technique, amp modelling, the three layers |
| 6 | building the machine | sounds recorded in a factory, the guitar with paper, the 77 bars |
| 7 | building the rhythm | the grooves, white and black keys, the study of speed |
| 8 | connecting the dots | the cells of 2, 5 and 7 notes, the D, the piano with erasers |
| 9 | feeling that something is missing | the voices, the monolithic piece, the idea of the dream |
| 10 | before finishing, a new idea arrived | the dream section, the ending, a new piece with the trio |
| 11 | from control to life | everything re-recorded for real, ebow and bottleneck |
| 12 | inside the finished structure | the mix and a tour of the session |