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In The World Between Worlds, my goal was to apply my spectral attitude to the traditional aesthetic principles of Japanese music, the latter as manifested in the fusion of Zen and electronic music by Jōji Yuasa. Yuasa’s last “pure electronic” work, Eye on Genesis for UPIC (Neuma, 1996) was my main reference, followed by Grisey’s Jour, contre-jour (1978) for his ecological approach to interval and timbre, as well as the primordial overtones of both works. Volume is used as a physical, not just musical sensation, and non-linear time is explored through the expansion and contraction of the soprano’s breath. I produced the electronic parts in Ableton with a combination of pitch bending, phasing, timbral processing, and interference beats. Within this musical context, I expressed a personal cosmology with respect to my study of Western and Eastern philosophies. The latter influence prevails here, with its traditional expression in Chinese and Japanese landscape painting and literature being the other key influences. I also write haiku poetry and am working on a project with renga poetry. The “nature mode” of renga, a topological unity of inner and outer landscapes, provided the remaining reference point. Within the dramatic context of the opera, the tragic hero walks alone through an empty town in the rain and comes to a tunnel. Accompanied by a chorus of male ghosts, the Soprano—transcending and generating femininity and masculinity throughout Act I—wordlessly reveals her power to shape the landscape. Through this felt expansion and contraction of Time comes his recognition of the vast extensions of everything: “Summer grasses / All that remains of great soldiers’ imperial dreams…” as wrote Bashō in Narrow Road to the Interior.