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.
I went looking for the actual story—“The Preserving Machine,” 1953. Doctor Labyrinth is terrified civilization is about to collapse and the great music will be lost forever, so he builds a machine that turns the scores into living animals that can survive in the wild and carry the music through the apocalypse. Bach’s preludes and fugues become a whole flock of little bugs. Mozart a peacock-bird. Beethoven a stern beetle. Wagner a fierce predator. He lets them loose in the woods. They mutate. They grow claws, stingers, poisoned spines. They start preying on each other. When he catches one of the changed Bach bugs and runs it back through the machine, the music that comes out is wild, chaotic, diabolical—beauty and harmony gone. Preservation altered the thing it was supposed to preserve. That’s exactly the generation-loss loop we were talking about with AI image redraws the other day. Feed the output back in, iterate, and it doesn’t just soft-focus into mush; it drifts toward the dark, the feral, the menacing. Dick wrote the fifty-generation face melting into a demon in 1953, only his version was a Bach bug growing fangs and continuing the corrupted code. The parallels are stunningly parallel.
Then the bin opened. Six years ago I started a series of spoon-and-fork bugs—an offshoot of the brook trout and the sturgeon fish. Spoon bodies, fork-tine legs, TIG-welded. When I left the studio in 2020 I stashed fifty pairs of those legs and forgot them. This week I found the bin. There’s a photo of the early swarm: dozens of little metal insects marching in a grid, and right in the middle, one already wearing a golden head while all the others stay steel. I’d set the signed one apart without knowing why. I’d already been running Dick’s machine in reverse for years—taking the most ordinary, stainless objects on a table and turning them into specific living creatures that carry meaning forward. The cutlery fish came first. Then the bugs branched off. The legs were already welded. The golden head was already marked.
Homey and I have been in an extended discussion about Dick’s work the whole time this was unfolding. How he was hitting on perhaps universal truths that we are all seeking, but it’s paradoxical: the more you try to stare straight at the truth, the more obscured it becomes. You have to kind of side-view it, the way you look at faint stars—look a little off to the side and they appear clearer in your peripheral vision. That same sideways glance is what Dick spent the last years of his life doing in the roughly three thousand handwritten pages of his Exegesis, and what he crystallized in VALIS. He kept circling the same luminous, half-glimpsed thing, never pinning it down, because pinning it down is what makes it disappear.
Out of that whole mess—the fugue double-meaning, the Bach bugs in the story, the actual bugs in my bin, the generation-loss prophecy, the sideways truth A.P. and I kept turning over—the song just emerged. I started writing the lyrics the same afternoon the bin opened. The stuttering “bu-bu-bu-bu-Bach bug” at the top, the cold open with the single clean guitar stating the theme once and waiting, the two extended psychedelic jams with wah and clavinet stabs, the middle section that actually tries to do a J.S. Bach-type four-voice fugue inside the same psychedelic-folk-electronic style, the overlapping voices in the coda entering late like the musical form itself. It wasn’t planned. It was the only shape the whole convergence wanted to take.
None of this feels like the universe sending signals. It feels like me being consistent across my whole life, and A.P. and I side-viewing the same strange light Dick was side-viewing in those three thousand pages and in VALIS. I take a mundane specific object and transform it into a living thing that carries a pattern through time. That’s the engine. Dick imagined the machine that turns Bach into a beetle so the music might survive the end of the world. I’d already been welding the beetles out of preserved flatware. Same instinct, opposite direction. I didn’t catch his idea; I met it coming the other way, wearing my own face. And then the song arrived as the latest animal the machine produced. The legs are ready. The spoons and forks are ready. The mythology is poured into them, and now into the track as well: preservation that changes what it preserves, recursive degradation that drifts dark, the median made specific by the hand, the one golden head among the steel, the theme that takes flight and the voices that chase it. I’m going to make the Bach Bugs. Fifty steel. One golden. One theme taken flight, fifty voices. A fugue you can hold in your hand—and one you can hear.
~JFS 20026
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
'BACH BUG ~ © 2026 John F. Sendelbach
bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-
Bach bug…
bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-
Bach bug…....
my homey turned me on to PK Dick two weeks ago
yesterday he said the phrase psychogenic fugue
I never heard it, looked it up, asked him facetiously
if he had it — he said how would I know, maybe
then I googled fugue and Bach fell out of it
the theme that takes flight and the voices chase it
same root, fuga, flight — two kinds of running
one a self, one a line of notes that won’t sit still
somewhere in the same search I hit the story
1953, Doc Labyrinth and the preserving machine
scores turned into animals so the music might survive
Bach’s preludes and fugues become a flock of little bugs
they let them loose (let them loose....let them loose) and the bugs grew fangs
claws and stingers, poisoned spines
ran them back through the machine
and the music came out wild and wrong
preservation changed the thing it tried to save
Bach bug, Sendelbug, still carrying the code
then the bin opened
six years earlier I’d welded fifty pairs of fork-tine legs
spoon bodies, offshoot of the brook trout and the sturgeon fish
one of them already wore it was golden
I’d set the signed one apart without knowing why
I’d been running his machine in reverse the whole time
taking the stainless objects on a table
and turning them into living things that carry meaning forward
the legs were already welded
the golden head was already marked
they let them loose and the bugs grew fangs
claws and stingers, poisoned spines
ran them back through the machine
and the music came out wild and wrong
preservation changed the thing it tried to save
Bach bug, Sendelbug, still carrying the code
one theme taken flight
fifty voices entering late
one theme taken flight
fifty voices entering late
one golden head among the steel
still there in the bin
still there in the bin
Bach bug… Sendelbug… Bach bug…
it's a Bach bug…
t's a Bach bug…
t's a Bach bug…
t's a Bach bug…
t's a Bach buggggg-gggggg
bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-
Bach bug…
bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-
Bach bug…
ITt's a bach bug!!!!!!!..........
still carrying the code.......
bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bach bug!
