Back in my grad school days—I think it was my first year of doctoral studies at the University of Washington—I took a yearlong series of computer music courses along with the cohort of grad students who started with me that year. I never really jibed much with the genre because I don’t like writing code, so I couldn’t really create anything I deemed worthy of keeping, let alone playing for others.

My good friend Michael Rook, who already had a strong and uncompromising sense of compositional aesthetics and went on to become an excellent and equally uncompromising composer—managed to hack together some code that made the computer (I think it was a NeXT Cube) spit out a bunch of haywire clock-like attacks. I remember he called it “alarma,” or at least that was the name he gave the file it seemed quite fitting.

Michael and I slowly fell out of touch after he moved back to Germany, and I had hoped that I’d make it over to Düsseldorf, his home town, to visit him some day. That day never came; he died quite suddenly in early 2022. I thought maybe i’d eventually write some music in his memory, kind of a triptych or something like that, but that didn’t happen.

What happened instead was this piece. Somehow I happened upon a clock-like texture that I could make go haywire through various delay loops, kind of an updated “alarma” that Michael probably would have gotten a chuckle over.