A brutally dense and systematic virtuoso piano work. A single piece of palindromic two-voice counterpoint gets slower and slower by factors of 2 before speeding up in the same way. In 4/4 at quarter-note=72 the material goes in a cycle of being 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 bars long. As this base counterpoint gets slower, more and more iterations of this same material are nested inside the larger structure, eventually reaching maximum playable density. “Matryoshki” is the name for traditional eastern European nesting dolls, of which I was reminded by this process. The “Blue Vase” is a delicate theme that emerges as a natural byproduct of the aforementioned musical structure. It is a reference to Philip K. Dick’s novel “Flow my tears, the policeman said,” which also features a largely inconsequential Blue Vase coming into being as a byproduct of the main storyline, but at the end of the epilogue is referenced as the only person or thing in the story that was ever genuinely loved or cherished. This piece is featured on the 2023 Centrediscs album of my work “Unfinished Business.” It was performed for the first time during sessions for the album and represented a compositional breakthrough for me when I finished it in 2018. At the time I had not written anything like it before, and I have not truly written anything like it since.