I began working on The Buchla Suite with my ensemble in 2020, during the lockdown. We began to explore the album Silver Apples of the Moon through repeated listening and different approaches to improvisation with the material, and free association. We sent the recordings back and forth between the different members of the ensemble, and worked together in small groups, in a rehearsal setting. This allowed the ensemble to engage in a collective compositional process. The act of composing The Buchla Suite as a live set, and an album which will be recorded at Deutschlandfunk – and will punctuate in a collaboration with Morton Subotnick (at Sinuston Festival) – that came later. Some of these snippets were produced at Alexander Frangenheim's studio boerne in Berlin.

Buchla Suite – Exploration I – Beginning was the first exploration. It’s based on an improvisation around the sonic material from the beginning of the Silver Apples of the Moon. Part I  has been changed, as far as the concert program is concerned, but I still like to show it as part of the documentation of the process. It shows the close connection of this material to Silver Apples.

Buchla Suite – Exploration II – The Song Of Wandering Aengus is a free association with the title Silver Apples of the Moon. In an interview with Morton Subotnick, I read that this line was taken from The Song of Wandering Angus, a poem by William Butler Yeats. As I understood from the interview, Subotnick's intended connection to Yeats is very “free,” so, I thought that I would do the same with the ensemble. Based on a prepared piano track that I composed one morning, we used the entirety of a Yeats poem for this free interpretation. To be completely honest, sonically, this piece might not have anything to do with Silver Apples of the Moon, but it was a part of the process. We were all "in it" while we were working on this, and I like it, because it really happened spontaneously. We recorded all of the parts one after the other, all of them were so called "first takes" (including the voice/text). It's one of those things that just happens and wasn't planned in any way. I'm not sure, yet, if this will ever be played live.

Buchla Suite – Exploration III – Improvisation is based on a piece improvised by our guitarist Peter Meyer. I sent him a snippet of Silver Apples of the Moon and asked him to record an improvisation in that mood: recreating the feel of the Buchla synthesizer. We used it as the basis for a studio session with Almut Kühne, Peter Ehwald and me on prepared piano – we overdubbed his recording as a live trio.