I sometimes wish to be able to transcribe directly
the ideas in my head onto the recording medium.
Edgard Varese had much the same attitude, as shown here:

"I find myself frustrated at every moment by the poverty of the means of expression at my disposal. I myself would like, for expressing my personal conceptions, a completely new means of expression. A sound machine (and not a machine for reproducing sounds). What I compose, whatever my message is, would then be transmitted to my listener without being altered by interpretation..."

[Edgard Varese, c. 1933, in The Recording Angel, Evan Eisenberg, 1987]

This "sound machine" that Varese desired is obviously the forerunner to the modern synthesiser. Eisenberg asserts that a musical laboratory, also envisioned by Varese, was fully available only in 1977 at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM. However, Varese was given an early Ampex tape machine in the early fifties, and he began splicing (by hand) the tape portions of his piece Deserts, for winds, piano, percussion, and tape. Eisenberg further asserts that although Ussachevsky and Stockhausen had been producing electronic music experiments at this time...

...Varese, by contrast, had been making electronic music in his head for half a century; the moment the tools were put in his hands he knew what to do with them. Deserts expresses all the emptiness of those fifty years of history in a language exploding with their fullness... Stockhausen's Gesang der Junglinge of 1956 was perhaps the first worthy successor of Deserts, and Morton Subotnick's The Wild Bull of 1971... perhaps the most popular...

I think perhaps that quite a few composers at this point would love to be able to put the ideas in her or his head directly onto a recording medium. I have evidence that Frank Zappa was interested in this, but Zappa also chose not to devote himself entirely to this, as some musicians (including Todd Rundgren) also wanted to do -- Zappa wanted to be able to do the live show, and thus chose to limit himself with the capabilities of the live rock band. Although he did take those recordings and add many overdubs in the studio to produce a different kind of musical experience than the live, he was not performing musical alchemy. I think that Frank was a wonderful artist and was not restrained by the limited musical outlooks that too many modern pop artists have adopted. This process (or non-process) of musical creation may have been a refreshing change in pop music in the last 20 years or so, but it is hardly something new or unusual.

It is a fundamental practice of artists in many of the Eastern countries. The fact that principles of Zen, meditation and the like have slowly been trickling in to the West has become more evident as musicians like Kate Bush, Steve Reich and David Sylvian get recognition and understanding. Even so, I would contend that the only means of "Alchemy" as I would term it, would be through improvisation. This, of course, could be argued (probably without any decipherable outcome). While I'm way out here on a limb, I would liken The Phoenix Bird composition to a Claude Debussy piece rather than to a John Cage piece. That is, like Debussy, I will be using the sounds like a palette. (There is a nice explanation of this idea in Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugene Herrigel). These are ideas that both Debussy and Cage explored. They did not see limitations in their work. This is the feeling that I want to emulate: The artist's total indifference to the ideas of limitation in their composition.