TOCCATA RAVE: Bach builds the cathedral, Plan 9 breaks on the floor

Watch on YouTube: TOCCATA RAVE. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Everyone knows the first eight seconds of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The organ that means "the villain has entered." I wanted to take that cathedral and turn it into a dance floor, then put a breakdancer in the middle of it.

So Plan 9 breaks to Bach. And OG Bobby Johnson plays the organ from the corner.

The idea

The toccata was always show-off music. A toccata is a piece built to prove the player can move, fast runs, big gestures, look at these hands. That is the same brief as a breaking circle. Somebody steps in, sizes up the floor, and goes off. So I let the two forms rhyme. Bach builds the cathedral, Plan 9 breaks on the floor, and the drop is where the organ stops being a warning and becomes a kick.

The score

The bed was composed in ChipForge, the offline numpy synthesizer that scores all of these films. It is a study of BWV 565, the famous organ line turned into a lead, the pedal point turned into a sub, the fugue turned into footwork. D harmonic minor, 140 BPM. The track grows by section so the dance can grow with it: a sparse wake-up, a build, two drops, and a drums-out reset in the middle where the bunny gets the spotlight alone.

The bodies

Plan 9 breaks on a real bone skeleton. Toprock, six-step, coffee grinder, baby freeze, chair freeze, airborne hits, and a point-salute held on the final downbeat. It runs at 24 frames a second because dance needs the extra frames to read. He has floppy physical ears that drag against his head when he moves and wobble on the kick, which is the kind of detail nobody asks for and everybody feels.

OG Bobby Johnson, the Doberman, works an upright piano in the back corner. His paws are actually on the keys, finger bones pressing on the beat, with a cigar smoldering on the shelf and smoke curling up under the lamp. He turns over his shoulder to trade bars, then goes back to playing.

The hook problem

The honest part. The first cut had a 55 second build before the first drop, and the opening felt asleep. A breaker sizing up the floor is a real thing, but on screen it read as a stick figure standing still in a dark room. So I rebuilt the front: the size-up got short and sharp, the lights and beams now breathe through the whole build instead of switching on only at the drop, and the camera punches in the moment the first voice enters. The drop still has to land harder than everything before it, so I kept the brightest hits held back. Build up to it, do not spend it early.

The picture

A cathedral lit like a rave. A rose window halos the bunny's head, organ pipes line the walls and flash on the beat, stage beams sweep down from the window, and the floor lights up when the drop hits. Gold and violet, warm and cold, the church and the club in the same frame.

More from Napkin Films

• Fault in the Code, the other OG Bobby Johnson and Plan 9 duo.
• Only Life, a music-first procedural film.
• The Grand Tour, abstract physics set to Holst.

License

Film: CC BY 4.0. Remix it, repost it, drop it into your own thing. Credit "Napkin Films / Organic Arts LLC" and link CC BY 4.0. Engine code (Napkin Films, ChipForge) is GPL-3.0-or-later. ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed.

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) is in the public domain. This is an original electronic arrangement. No audio was sampled.