The Moving Machine is the fifth episode of Solaria, the incremental composition project in which music, story, and the construction of an imaginary world proceed in parallel.
In the story, Anesh and the butterfly Ku leave the cave, jump aboard a moving workshop, and cross the night toward Yantra, the city of technique. 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 was released on May 20, 2026. Its process is documented week by week in episodes 4 through 12 of the Music Diary.
The Machine in the Story
After 04 - Song of Olivier, the story moves from the cave toward Theknus, the region of technique. A way was needed to carry Anesh and Ku to the great city, and that way became a machine: an automatic vehicle, a kind of mobile workshop that crosses the territory without a driver.
In the story the machine is called Nerek. Anesh encounters it along a service road, beneath the cave: it arrives clattering, slows to take a tight curve carved into the mountainside, but 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 aboard, not knowing where it is going (Chapter 10 - The Cave and Ku). Upon arrival in Yantra the city registers it as an autonomous mobile workshop vehicle, with driving unit: absent and directional behavior: unstable (Chapter 3 - The Vehicle Off the Books).
The piece tells this journey: the machine approaching and then moving away, the hypnotic motion of the ride and, in the middle, a moment in which Anesh seems to rise above that motion.
The Machine’s Numbers
The entire composition is built on the numbers of Solaria’s number system. The island counts in base seven, and its fundamental numbers are 2 and 5, whose sum is 7. For Lorenzo these are the numbers of music itself: continuing as in a Fibonacci series gives 2, 5, 7, 12, and 19 — that is, the seven notes of the scale, the twelve of the total chromatic, and the nineteen of microtonal systems (Lorenzo also plays a 19-tone guitar). The island’s geography follows the same pattern too, with five central regions and two symbolic regions at opposite ends.
From this the piece’s measurements follow:
- the central body is 77 measures long, preceded and followed by seven measures of introduction and coda;
- the introduction is at 77 beats per minute;
- the sections alternate between 7/8 and 5/8;
- the algorithmic guitar’s cells are groups of 2, 5, and 7 notes.
To write these numbers in base seven, Lorenzo also built a small app, which has since become the Solarian number converter. 77 was chosen because, flipping one of its two digits, it takes the shape of a butterfly, and because it can be written as 25 + 52, two mirror-image numbers that are in turn two butterflies. The same principle of symmetry governs the writing of Solaria’s numbers (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 sound alone would not have.
Harmonic Structure
The composition is a cycle of twelve chords, one for each of the twelve notes of the total chromatic, 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 sections in 7/8, the five black ones to those in 5/8. Each section thus has its own groove.
All the chords are linked 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 leader of the Southern League, the coalition Theknus belongs to, who in the story is Adru Kemet and whom Lorenzo also calls “the dictator” in the diary: an obsessive presence, binding everything, from which one cannot break free. In the piece it is played by two tracks, including an electric guitar treated with a sound resembling a hiss of steam, which enters every time the chord changes.
Alongside the D there is a second obsessive recurrence, carried by an acoustic guitar that plays only the 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, recounted in episode 5, was a week of false starts. The first development of the bass idea was very fusion and, after much work, didn’t convince: it had that sound of bass, drums, and guitar that everyone has, a timbral conformism. An acoustic translation of the same idea fared no better, nor did an improvisation over a bass synth backing with very complex chords. On the other hand, to enter the dimension of technique, Lorenzo had to engage with it in practice as well: a broken guitar mechanism forced him to work on truss rods, action, and strings, and at the same time he listened to interviews with guitarists like Matteo Mancuso, Jack Gardiner, and Josh Meader, transcribed a Mancuso solo, and discovered the world of amp simulators. Allowing himself the freedom to change direction, without falling in love with an idea, was the week’s most useful outcome.
From those attempts emerged the piece’s form, the overlapping of three layers that together form the machine:
- the body, that is, the industrial rhythm: the vehicle’s physical movement;
- the heart, an intervallic structure carried by acoustic sounds: the mechanical architecture;
- the mind, the electric guitar playing concatenated phrases like the gears of an engine: the software that drives the machine.
Later, when the piece seemed finished but monolithic, a narrative level was added to these three layers, carried by the voices and the piano (see below).
The Industrial Rhythm
The first rhythm was born with DrumCircle, an app for building complex rhythmic circles made by Lorenzo, based on combinations of 2, 5, and 7 (up to 7 + 7). Translated into industrial sounds and brought into Logic, it shaped the piece’s opening: the machine arriving and then departing. The departure is achieved 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, recounted in episode 6, was not easy: at several factories and scrap yards he was turned away; at one, the owner reluctantly let him in, after reading through all the safety regulations, and the recordings turned out unusable. At another factory, however, a worker simply put a hammer in his hand, without saying anything, and that’s where the piece’s sounds were born.
The samples were mapped onto the keyboard, first in Logic’s sampler and then in Drum Machine Designer, which allowed for better balance in the mix and different control over the groove. Two distinct grooves emerged, one for the 7/8 sections and one for the 5/8 sections.
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 in full, 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 live in full, start to finish, with the channels crossed in the stereo panorama and a lot of echo, and doubled by two electric guitars.
The bass was reinforced first with a distorted guitar, then with the piano. Muting the strings with cloth didn’t work; the right sound came from some erasers tied together and pressed against the strings of an upright piano. In the end the bass was recorded with a real instrument, borrowed from a friend, in a single take later cut and crossed between the two channels to achieve a stereo bass.
In the 7/8 sections two power chord tracks enter; in the 5/8 sections a pick-played guitar, also on two tracks. Throughout the piece, an electric guitar with ebow and bottleneck runs as well, especially important at the beginning, along with the voices.
The choice to use only acoustic sounds, sampled or played, has a reason within the world of Solaria: in Theknus the 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 fast technique, fitting for the region of technique. To prepare it, Lorenzo returned, after many years, to studying speed: 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, with ten minutes of practice a day, he reached playing sixteenth notes at 155 beats per minute.
The study revealed a difference in method. Technical guitarists have a visual approach to the fretboard and build phrases on the shapes of the notes, in a way similar to classical composition; Lorenzo is a jazz improviser, who thinks one note at a time following an inner song. The solo, once recorded, turned out predictable and boring, and was abandoned.
In its place came the cells of 2, 5, and 7 notes, which flow from low to high and answer each other across the two channels of the stereo panorama. They are the machine’s software: 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 Voices and the Piano
By the end of episode 8 the overall structure was visible, and for the first time listening brought pleasure and not just the satisfaction of well-done craftsmanship. Everything up to that point, however, was a sketch, to be redone from scratch once the role of each part was clarified.
Halfway through the work the piece functioned, but it was monolithic: it described only the machine, its hypnotic and repetitive motion. What was missing was the vitality that usually comes from interacting 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, Anesh and Ku, travel on the machine, and the piece needed to make room for them too. Lorenzo considers this dissatisfaction a good thing: it is what drives one to search, and composing, he says, is above all a way of finding oneself.
Lorenzo recorded his own voice and derived a three-voice texture from it, a kind of acoustic pad. At a certain point in the piece the voices enter together with the piano, and above them the five notes of the sigma chord. The machine does not stop: the rhythm keeps flowing as before, but something rises. It is a moment of elevation for Anesh, who for a stretch seems to stand above the repetitive motion of the journey, as if sensing something he could not yet put into words.
The final voices required fifteen tracks, five for each of the three voices, also needed to cover the breaths.
From Control to Life
Up to that point the acoustic guitar and voice had been sampled, so as to be able to decide quickly by moving notes in a MIDI file. The method was useful for composing, but it took away from the piece the humanity and imperfection of live performance. In episode 11 everything was re-recorded for real: the acoustic guitar, the complete tracks of the algorithmic guitar, the voices, the bass. The final session held about 130 tracks.
The mixing required deciding what to bring to 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 accumulate: here too one filters, and by choosing the planes one gives the composition its final shape.
The video is a multitrack piece: it shows the song from within the process, layer by layer, as the various guitars and parts become a single structure in motion.
Form
- Arrival of the machine: the industrial rhythm at 77 beats per minute, drawing near.
- First cycle of the twelve chords: the two grooves begin, in 7/8 and in 5/8, with the D at every chord change.
- Voices and piano: the voices and piano enter, with the sigma chord above them, while the machine keeps moving.
- The algorithmic flow: the cells of 2, 5, and 7 notes run through the second part.
- Closing: the piece cuts off at the 77th measure; a few measures in five quarters remain, introducing the next piece.
Musical Symbolism
| Musical element | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 2, 5, and 7 (meters, cells, rhythmic combinations) | Solaria’s number system |
| 77 measures, 77 beats per minute | the butterfly; 25 + 52, two mirror-image butterflies |
| twelve chords on twelve notes | the total chromatic |
| 7/8 and 5/8 | the white and black keys of the piano |
| the D at every chord change | the leader 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 machine’s software |
| only acoustic sounds | Theknus (in Axia the sounds will be digital) |
| voices and piano with the sigma chord | Anesh’s elevation |
Toward The Clock of Yantra
In the final weeks of work the story was already further along: Anesh and Ku arrive before the great gate of the city, on which there is a clock that measures the length of the day, the night, the months, the years, and even life itself. The measures in five quarters 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, each 84 minutes long, and the year of seven months of 52 days plus the solstice day (see Measurement of Time).
In the same phase, while playing in a trio, Lorenzo wrote the first part of a new, highly technical piece in just a few hours, intended for the events of Yantra: from this came the habit of working on two or three compositions at once, like a painter with several canvases open.
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 the factory, the guitar with paper, the 77 measures |
| 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 the erasers |
| 9 | feeling that something is missing | the voices, the monolithic piece, the search for a narrative dimension |
| 10 | before finishing, a new idea arrived | voices and piano, the ending, a new piece with the trio |
| 11 | from control to life | everything re-recorded live, ebow and bottleneck |
| 12 | inside the finished structure | the mixing and a visit to the session |