'bach menagerie

John F. Sendelbach ~ Shelburne Falls, MA

I couldn't spell menagerie in the sixth grade. It's the word that knocked me out of the spelling bee. I learned to spell it that day — but it took me about fifty years to build one. I didn't know that's what I was doing. Nobody does, at the time. You just make the next thing that's alive in front of you, and if you're the same person your whole life, the things pile up into a shape you can't see until you turn around. I've turned around. Here's the shape. It starts on a beach in the Adirondacks, up at the north end of Piseco Lake, where we vacationed. I'm about ten, and I build a turtle out of wet sand and rake rings into the beach around it. I didn't know then that I was siting a sculpture in its setting, or that a Zen garden in Kyoto had been doing the same thing with raked gravel for five hundred years — I'd learn that much later, in grad school, and love it, and recognize it, because I'd already done it as a kid. That's the whole story in one move: I keep walking into rooms that turn out to be furnished with my own furniture.

WONDERBUNS (LEANER TRADING PAPER)

WONDERBUNS (LEANER TRADING PAPER) ©2026 John F Sendelbach

LET'S GO QUAKERS!

Second of the four, and the only girl they had  

Three brothers and a quiet house and a little-deaf old dad  

A grandmother with the hearing aids, the silence in the walls—  

And a girl who learned to raise a noise above it all

On a Quaker field in autumn she would spell the good news loud  

The plainest, quietest people, and she cheered ’em to the crowd  

Q-U-A-K-E-R-S, she’d throw it to the sky—  

A loud girl for the silent folk, and nobody knew why

THE REVERSE MACHINE Finding the Mind by Letting It Mutate: Discovery, Selection, Preservation, and the Ethics of Revisability

The story does not begin at the beginning. It starts with the wreckage: a bent fork, a blown-out photograph, a phrase stuck in the throat, an old song dragged into a new room by musicians who were not even alive when it was written. This is the reverse machine—an engine built from leftovers, running backward through time with sparks in its teeth. You find a surviving signal in the debris: a melody, a shape, a scrap of steel, a fact, a question that will not quit. Then you pull on it. What was this before it got here? Who carried it? What got lost in transit? What was added by accident, hunger, fear, bad lighting, bad memory, or the desperate need to make a pattern out of the weather? The world is full of hard, indifferent material—photos, tools, bodies, records, light—but nobody gets the whole picture. We grab details and turn them into stories, sculptures, decisions, private religions, or bad late-night theories. A warm flare in an old photograph can become a whole new work, sure, but it is not a telegram from God just because it hit you at the right hour. The mind is a wild pattern-eating animal: once something gets under its skin, it sees that thing everywhere, stacking coincidences like poker chips and calling the pile destiny. Memory is no clean vault either; every time you open it, you put your hands on the evidence. So look hard, then look again. Let other people tell you what you missed. Check the facts when facts are on the line. Keep the signal, but don’t worship the static. ~ JFS  (longer monologue follows the paper...all the way down ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓)

THE REVERSE MACHINE

Finding the Mind by Letting It Mutate

Discovery, Selection, Preservation, and the Ethics of Revisability

John F. Sendelbach August 2026

Abstract

The Reverse Machine proposes a disciplined account of how a person can encounter, select, interpret, and transform patterns without mistaking artistic or personal significance for verified fact. Its central claim is limited: the world contains structures, constraints, relations, and affordances that no individual observer invents. Yet the strength of a discovery claim varies by domain. Mathematics offers the strongest candidate for mind-independent necessity; music, art, and material practice involve real constraints intertwined with historical construction; personal life offers evidence and recurrence but requires the greatest interpretive humility.

The essay develops a four-stage grammar: presence → selection → interpretation → transformation. A difference may be present before attention notices it; selection foregrounds it; interpretation assigns it a role; transformation carries that role into theory, action, song, sculpture, or shared culture. Selection is indispensable, but it is not proof. The reverse machine is therefore not a device for extracting hidden truths. It is a recursive practice through which objects, photographs, memories, archives, musical forms, and machine-generated hypotheses are brought into relation, challenged, transformed, and tested.

Generative AI appears here as expanded hypothesis bandwidth rather than epistemic authority. It can help compare, reframe, and articulate possibilities, but it can also amplify false synthesis, confirmation loops, and persuasive nonsense. The essay proposes a four-part filter—calibration, function, care, and revisability—to distinguish a meaningful connection from a claim that has earned stronger provisional status.

A case study follows an archival photograph of metal insects, a machine-mediated noticing of one apparently golden head, the song Bach Bug, and fifty pairs of unfinished fork-tine legs awaiting new sculptural form. The argument does not seek to eliminate uncertainty. It seeks to keep uncertainty productive: to make transformation accountable, preserve enough signal for continuity, and leave every map open to correction.

FISHBIKE (Albert’s Lightning Drops) ©2026 John F. Sendelbach

In Basel, 1938, Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD-25: one small experimental compound among a long series of ergot derivatives. Five years later, on April 16, 1943, he accidentally encountered its extraordinary effects. On April 19, he deliberately took 250 micrograms and bicycled home through a radically altered world—the event later remembered as Bicycle Day. Fishbike turns that history into an underwater fable. Hofmann becomes **Albert Gills**; LSD becomes a bottle of lightning drops; and Fishbike—the woman on the impossible bicycle—rings her bell beside him as the molecule passes from medicine to secret control program, from countercultural explosion to prohibition, mythology, and its quiet reappearance in research. The title and refrain draw on Irina Dunn’s 1970 feminist line, later widely associated with Gloria Steinem: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Woman need a man like fish need bicycle. The trip continues.

THE VIDEO HAS TWO VERSIONS BACK TO BACK

FISHBIKE (Albert’s Lightning Drops)  

©2026 John F. Sendelbach

hold on tight.hold on tight.

pedal fish lady pedal fish lady pedal fish lady pedal fish lady

Albert Gills late shift rye-sea violet glow fungal castles black roots

Twenty-five lightning drops bottle marked shelved away

Nothing here says Albert Gills Maybe useful some far day

Five years gone laboratory breathing lamps school of silver stars

floor turns tide wall turns window window opens into Mars

Albert Gills on bicycle wobbling through cobalt night

Fishbike rings her handlebar bell Albert baby hold on tight

Fishbike Fishbike bicycle free

no captain owns the open tide no net owns the sea

Woman need a man like fish need bicycle

Fishbike make impossible look beautiful mythical

EVERGREEN OSCILLATION ~ ©2026 John F Sendelbach

EVERGREEN OSCILLATION  ~ ©2026 John F Sendelbach

possibility / gravity / reality / eternity / velocity / intensity / serenity

run, run, run — imagination been running

she found herself, caught in an existential dilemma

self-transcendence: a self-surrender of her to another

autonomy: the merger of her with the other

joint identity: the barrier of her from her lover

he found himself, stuck with this existential solution —

idealization, reinforced by public opinion

sincere devotion, his soul's submission

glorious passion — he held on tightly to his intuition

dispatch from the flow state, in which a month becomes a discography

It starts with a spoon, but we'll get to the spoon.

First it starts like everything stupid and holy starts: by accident, on a Tuesday, with no plan and no dignity. I had these lyrics — twenty-five years old, scraps, the kind of thing that lives in a drawer and occasionally taps on the glass — and I fed them into Suno the way you'd feed a quarter into one of those grocery-store horse rides, expecting nothing, expecting a wheezy carnival loop, expecting to laugh. And the free version gave me exactly that. Fine. Cute. A novelty.

MASON & THE STARS ~ © 2026 John F. Sendelbach

MASON & THE STARS
© 2026 John F. Sendelbach

Years ago I worked for an astronomer — built a landscape for him, up on a hard, rocky ridge at the top of the world, all open sky and stone. There was a pond down the low side, and a patio to set right against the water (which is about the most technical thing a builder can be handed, because water does not forgive). There was a tower with a roof that opened to the heavens, a collection of gems and specimens fallen from the sky, and a black snake that would appear now and then in the warm rocks like the spirit of the place come to check the work.

At some point he looked at the stonework and did a rare thing: instead of handing me a picture, he handed me a rule. Turn this stone, then the next one from it, then the next — each by the same odd angle, zero, thirty-three, sixty-six, and on around — and let the sequence run. It was a deliberately increment, a near-eleven-fold turn that reaches for the full circle and misses by a whisker, the kind of geometry an astronomer sees and a practical hand almost never does. And I understood the mission: that the sequence was the work. Fudge a single stone to make it “look better,” and every step a person took afterward would pass over the exact place the rule broke. So I laid it true, permanent, into the ground — a small human copy of the same turning that governs galaxies.

We worked that hard design out together, an astronomer and a mason— just two people trying to make something that would hold. Then the years came full, and the rivers ran, and we drifted the way people do. Life so wide on each side there wasn’t room to keep the other in view. This song is the answer to that. Because the stones never drifted. They’re still up there, still turning, still holding the rule exactly as it was formed — and if you listen, they’re still quietly singing it. The song is me finally hearing that, across all the years, and singing back: I never forgot. The thing we made is holding. The turning still turns.

Rendered with AI, brain steered...

BACH'S BUGS ~ © 2026 John F. Sendelbach

Homey turned me on to Philip K. Dick a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday he tells me about psychogenic fugue. I’d never heard of it. I looked it up, learned what it was—this rare dissociative state where someone just walks away, sometimes for days, with total amnesia for who they are, then comes to somewhere else with no memory of the flight. I facetiously asked him if he had it. He ironically answered with the actual true interpretation of the condition: “How would I know? Maybe.”  Then I looked up the word “fugue” itself. Turns out J.S. Bach made fugues popular—the musical form where a theme takes flight and other voices chase it, overlapping, each entering with the same line at different times. Same root, fuga, flight. Two completely different kinds of running sharing one spelling. Somewhere in that same search I hit the Dick connection: he’d taken Bach’s work, run the scores through a machine, and converted them into an animal story about saving the world. Wtf. That was the moment the whole thing started stacking. 

From My Mind to Here (The Whole Trip) © 2026 John F. Sendelbach

FROM MY MIND TO HERE (THE WHOLE TRIP)
Halfway From the Ground: A Series in Reverse

© John F. Sendelbach · 2026

TRACKLIST

00:00 Finding My Mind 

06:00 In Under My Head 

11:33 The Rug That Stays 

16:28 Looking for George

21:44 My Balls 

26:28 The Good Sheet 

31:21 Roots Get the Cookie 

35:50 The Neck Is Melting 

42:55 I Can Smell the Stars 

47:57 Take the Rainbow Back 

54:28 Paper or Plastic 

59:36 From My Mind to Here (The Whole Trip)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPYj_ZmZzJ4

THE FLO STATE bonus track for finding my mind JFS 2026

The Reverse Process

After a long, tricky chapter, the creative spark came back hard — and became a run of AI-built concept albums. I work from an "upside-down pyramid": start with a base of raw material or a single idea, build the album's architecture and full tracklist BEFORE writing a line, then generate the songs last. I dial in lyrics and a musical style box with AI, hand it to Suno to render, and steer through re-rolls until each track hits. Once it clicked, it became a flow state — sometimes two words were enough for the whole system to understand the assignment. That's how the concept trilogy (Sixty Square Sphere, Domes All the Way Up, The City of Record), the twelve-song Halfway From the Ground, and the standalone Fistful of Change and Bach's Bugs came to be, with a Buckminster Fuller record now rendered and more in the wings. I supply the framework and the taste; the machine supplies the render. The work is the negotiation between them.

DOMES ALL THE WAY UP A Rock Opera in Three Movements ©2026 John F. Sendelbach

DOMES ALL THE WAY UP

A Rock Opera in Three Movements · the second panel of a trilogy with 60 Square Sphere and The City of Record

©2026 John F. Sendelbach

The Trilogy

60 Square Sphere · Domes All The Way Up · The City of Record

A coherent philosophical trilogy rendered as three interlocking concept albums: creation, knowing, and power. John F. Sendelbach's triptych takes one precise distinction and rotates it through three registers. Formal membership in a solution set is observer-independent once the rules are fixed; material realization is a separate historical act of selection, fabrication, and maintenance. The work terminates; the generative procedure does not. That spine-phrase and the paired stamps "Still There / Temporarily Elsewhere" run through all three panels like a shared ledger. First panel — the ontology of the unbuilt. 60 Square Sphere begins in the hands: thirty years of geodesic construction, and the discovery that a finite expansion rule generates an indefinitely extensible family of determined-but-unrealized configurations. Thirty openings are polite but insufficient; ninety self-obstruct; sixty is judged enough under explicit criteria. The Borough of Before dramatizes the gap between formal availability and material realization — and refuses to collapse it, leaving open whether formal membership already constitutes a mode of existence while insisting the distinction itself is exact. Second panel — the epistemology of the edge. Domes All The Way Up turns the same distinction from making to knowing. Maybe Beeches and Poppy Crevasse walk a gallery of painted skies — Rowbotham's canal, Teed's inside-out sphere, Ada Ledger's turtles, Quixote's refusal to learn, and the Oxford footpath where Tolkien answers Lewis. There is no last dome, no bottom turtle, no final Actually. The regress is not a trap but the condition of flight: sub-creation redeems the painting of skies at the lip of the Don't-Know. The falling becomes flying; an answer would end the maker. Third panel — the politics of the filter. The City of Record asks who decides which formally available things get realized, maintained, and recorded — and which get stamped ELSEWHERE. Vane the Archivist is no cartoon villain; he is the decent person who mistakes the map for the territory. At 03:17:42 the coordinate system inverts: nothing is created or destroyed, it only changes place. Then comes the hard turn the whole trilogy was built to reach — possibility is not maintenance. A door technically open is not a door gained. Recognition is where the work begins, not where it ends. The three albums share more than a closing line. Motifs, characters, and procedural logic cross-pollinate, and each is explicitly AI-rendered under human direction — naming the instrument because the method enacts the thesis: the compositions were formally available in the regime the maker set; the AI supplied realization the way a session band realizes a chart. The songs remain portable. That is not defensive; it is the trilogy demonstrating itself. It establishes that, inside a sufficiently specified system, "not yet discovered" is not the same as "not determined," that the seeking has no floor and this is mercy, and that the gap between the admissible and the maintained is the space where care and justice actually live. The beautiful unfinished world is the only true one. Still there. Temporarily elsewhere. The work terminates for the night; the procedure does not.

Artist’s Statement

This album is the middle panel of a trilogy, and like the other two it turns a single distinction toward a different question.

60 Square Sphere began with my hands — thirty years of building geodesic structures until a consequence hidden in the geometry became visible: that a finite rule generates an endless family of determined-but-unbuilt configurations, and that discovering such a configuration is a different act from creating it. That album asked what kind of reality the unbuilt thing possesses. Domes All The Way Up takes the same distinction and turns it from making toward knowing. Not: is the unbuilt real? But: can we ever reach the bottom of the real at all — and what happens to us at the wall of what we can personally verify?

SIXTY SQUARE SPHERE

SIXTY SQUARE SPHERE Tales from the Borough of Before · A Song Cycle in Two Acts

 the first panel of a trilogy with Domes All The Way Up and The City of Record

 ©2026 John F. Sendelbach

ARTIST'S STATEMENT: SIXTY SQUARE SPHERE

This cycle did not begin as music. It began thirty years ago, with my hands. For three decades I have built geodesic structures—cutting members, bolting joints, learning by failure and repetition the exact grammar of how struts and faces resolve into closed, standing form. That long apprenticeship was not, I now understand, only the building of objects. It was the building of a regime—a constraint system learned so deeply that its rules lived in the hand before they were ever stated as rules. And within the last year, from inside that regime, a consequence became visible that had been waiting there the whole time: that the expansion of a polyhedron’s edges has no natural end. Every completed edge is another candidate opening. The procedure does not contain its own stop. I did not invent this. I discovered it—which, as this cycle will insist, is a different act.

Then, separately, along a different line of thought entirely, I found myself turning over the old question of parallel worlds—of variations that might “exist somewhere somehow.” I worked it back and forth until, one day, the obvious struck: the two things were the same thing. A finite rule generating an endless family of determined-but-unbuilt configurations is the possibility-space structure, rebuilt in steel. The metaphysics I had been chasing in the abstract, I had been holding in my hands for thirty years. This album is what happened when I overlaid the one onto the other and pulled the result up into the register of the song cycles that raised me—the ones that hide a rigorous architecture under a surface that rewards decoding but never demands it.