The piece "The Beach Machine" was inspired by a dream that my mother had: My dad had ordered a "beach machine" in Australia. This thing was a huge piece of equipment that nobody really knew the use for. So my mother's worry in the dream was not only why on earth my father would buy something like that, but also how to move it to our home in Switzerland.
To me this story evoked a strange, Jules Verne-esque mood that I tried to put into music. The result is the piece you can hear on the album. It opens with an almost Bach-like chorale which already implies the mechanical pattern that the subsequent piece is built upon. The haunting, dissonant Alto melody then tries to complete the picture.
Funnily, my friend Daniel Durrer had an idea what this "beach machine" in my mother's dream could have been: The Dutch artist Theo Jansen makes these wonderful installations on the windy beaches of Holland. You can find information about his work online, here's an example video:
Another link that my dad made was to the 19th century "bathing machines"; small chariots that were pulled into the ocean in order to allow the prude Victorian-age upperclass folk to bathe out of the view of others.
