The Secret Life of Ones and Zeroes has been 20 years in the making. It began as an improvised keyboard solo recorded onto an old cassette in 1999.

Other sections of the piece, including the opening movement, came from multi-track digital home recordings made between 1999 and 2001 on a Boss BR-8 (the zip-disk version). These tracks, comprised of voice, percussion, and electronic effects, were recorded during the sessions for my second album Other Elements on the same recording unit used to make that album and the live EP I recorded with Eric Hensel in 1999.

Finally toward the end of the piece there is a double tracked backwards guitar section recorded during the sessions for my two newest albums, Between the Droughts and the Floods and The Future's as Bright as a Dying Star, both of which were released in 2019.

Several sections of the keyboard solo were further treated and manipulated, while others were left as originally recorded, including my favorite passage, the high pitched Theremin-like section just before the guitar section.

A Curve in Z Flat was inspired by the horror of the video footage of hospitals full of Covid-19 patients dying on ventilators in Italy in 2020, which is why the piece is full of the sounds of heavy and labored breathing.

The title is a play on words referencing both "flattening the curve" and the atonality of the music.