As I was formulating the entire work, the first and most obvious choice to me was to simply start messing with that circular progression used in the Aria. This is also the movement that introduces the use of the piano which was somewhat improvised. I’ll come back to that part, the improvisation in a moment – I just want to address on formal element that I carried over from the Aria. Each of the movements are variations on the previous movement and the general form of pretty chordal progressions to distortion and dissonance is how the Aria ends. I like the idea that each variation changes in some manner from the previous movement rather than variations based on a single musical idea.
Back to the piano improvisation as I want to speak to an element of the creative process. As I was completing the album, I found myself contemplating my interactions with my various ideas and the end result. I have had this interaction between composition and improvisation that is not a usual part of my creative output, meaning they don’t often directly mix into an end result. While the end result here is a fairly coherent piano part plus a few extra (HELM) synth elements, a movement like this one is more improvisatory to my ears than something specifically planned out. To be clear, it was planned out, to some extent, but with room for improvisation, the the progressions were certainly chosen on the fly.